What is OpenCritic?
OpenCritic is a review aggregator for video games. We gather game reviews from across the internet and bundle them together on a single game page. By bringing in several different critics and publications, we hope that consumers can get a more complete picture when deciding whether or not a game is worth their time or money.
Why did you make OpenCritic?
We initially set out to aggregate all pre-release coverage about a game, and let gamers subscribe to the games they were looking forward to. And all of that would culminate in the review day experience, where we would try to "immortalize the game." The more we looked at the review aggregation piece, in particular, the more we felt like this was a big opportunity to do a lot of good for both gamers, game developers, and the gaming press.
What makes OpenCritic unique?
- Transparency. No hidden weightings. No black-box processes. All standards and calculations are publicly verifiable.
- Customization. Gamers can create their own personal score by customizing which publications they trust. And critics can submit edits to both their score and quote at any time.
- More than a number. We aggregate all reviews, not just numerical ones. We also want to show the human side behind the review and score, with our first step being to display the author.
- Gamers first. We are committed to continuing development in the review aggregation space and want to engage the gaming community to decide which features to build next
How does OpenCritic work?
For each publication, we have three pieces of technology: an
initializer that spiders across a publication and collects all their historic reviews, a
listener that checks for new reviews every 10-25 minutes and alerts us when it finds one, and a
snippeter that extracts the information we display on OpenCritic (such as date, author, score, etc.). So the initializer builds our historic record, the listener alerts us when there's a new review, and the snippeter prepares the review for display. One last manual check, and then the review goes live!
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