A cleaner game-score aggregator than most, now owned by a company whose own outlets it counts.
What it's really for A video-game score aggregator; it averages approved critics rather than playing the games itself.
What our grade covers The grade on this page is about its Top Critic Average of game reviews, not everything the site does.
High Scoring Confidence Checked against primary sources. We are confident in the facts and the grade here.
- Operating since
- 2015 (11 years) · source
- What it costs you
- Free to read The reviews are free to read.
- How they make money
- It makes money from on-site advertising (now sold across owner Valnet's network) plus affiliate commissions on links to game retailers, with historic Patreon support.
- What they do
- OpenCritic aggregates professional video-game review scores from approved outlets and computes a transparent average (Top Critic Average, % of critics recommending, and Mighty/Strong/Fair/Weak tiers) for each game.
- What to watch for
- It scores games by averaging other publications' critic opinions, not by independently testing games itself, so the rating only reflects the outlets it chooses to include and inherits any bias in those reviews.
- Composite score
- 2.80 / 5.00 → grade C+
How the grade was reached
Does the site take money from the very entities it ranks? Pay-for-placement, vendor-funded data, and affiliate commissions all pull this down. The less the ranking can be bought, the higher the score.
What is the ranking actually built on? Hands-on testing scores highest, then verified first-hand reviews, then opinion or popularity surveys and self-reported figures, then pay-to-rank, which scores lowest.
Is the methodology published, specific, and reproducible? Can a reader see how a given rank was reached, or is it a black box?
Are commercial relationships, sponsorships, and affiliate arrangements disclosed clearly and near the rankings themselves, rather than buried?
How hard is it to game? Controls against fake reviews, solicited reviews, and vendor gaming raise this; an open box anyone can stuff lowers it.
Evidence
- OpenCritic began development in 2014 and formally launched on September 30, 2015, with reviews from 75 publications; it was developed by Matthew Enthoven, Charles Green, Richard Triggs, and Aaron Rutledge, and on July 31, 2024, media company Valnet acquired OpenCritic. The site initially launched ad-free using Patreon, but since incorporated an ad-revenue supported model in addition to Patreon, and uses a simple arithmetic mean to calculate scores rather than Metacritic's opaque weighted system. Source: Wikipedia — OpenCritic →
- OpenCritic's published scoring: the Top Critic Average is the simple average of all numeric reviews from top critics normalized to 0–100, and the Mighty/Strong/Fair/Weak rating is percentile-based — Mighty = top 10% of game ratings, Strong = next 30%, Fair = 30th–60th percentile, Weak = bottom 30% — making the methodology explicit and reproducible. Source: OpenCritic — Important Updates to OpenCritic's Scoring Algorithm →
- Partner page states: 'OpenCritic partnered with GamesPlanet to power their Critics section on game detail pages... OpenCritic also provides affiliate links to GamesPlanet product pages.' The broader partners page says OpenCritic 'works with a variety of retail and industry partners' (Epic Games Store, GOG, Humble Bundle, GamesPlanet), tying revenue to game sales on the products it scores. Source: OpenCritic — Featured Partners (GamesPlanet) →