OpenCritic

OpenCritic launched in 2015 as a direct response to what its founders saw as the opacity of existing review aggregators. Matthew Enthoven, Charles Green, and Richard Triggs built the site around a simple premise: publish the methodology, avoid secret weighting, and let readers see exactly how a final number was reached. Every critic score, whether expressed as a letter grade, a five-star rating, a ten-point scale, or a percentage, gets converted to a common 0 to 100 range and then averaged. No outlet gets more influence than any other.

The site's main output is the Critic Score, a single figure that summarizes the critical consensus on a game. Alongside it sits the Top Critic Average, which isolates scores from a curated list of outlets the site considers the most rigorous, and a Critics Recommend percentage that shows what share of reviewers gave a positive verdict. Scores fall into four bands: Mighty, Strong, Fair, and Weak. OpenCritic also labels reviews that were published without a score or before a game's final build, a practice that predates similar disclosures at competing aggregators.

Funding comes from advertising and a Patreon page where supporters contribute from one dollar a month. The Patreon has historically brought in a few hundred dollars monthly, a figure that underscores how little corporate money sits behind the operation. In recent years OpenCritic became affiliated with Valnet, the Montreal-based media company that owns Screen Rant, TheGamer, and Game Rant. That relationship has drawn questions, since Valnet outlets are themselves among the publications whose reviews OpenCritic aggregates.

The audience skews toward dedicated players who want a fast read on critical reception before buying or pre-ordering, along with journalists and developers who track how their work is received. Metacritic remains the bigger name in aggregation, but OpenCritic's unweighted math and public methodology have made it a frequent reference point in games media and a standard citation in review discussions. [edit]