Metacritic May Be Stealing Review Score Data From OpenCritic

Metacritic, the industry standard aggregator of review scores for video games appears to be “sourcing” data from OpenCritic. For those not in the know, OpenCritic is a new alternative to Metacritic, offering transparency to review aggregation demanded by gamers in the wake of ethical violations by the games press. OpenCritic does not weight reviews from larger publications or provide their voice with undue influence over other publications.

Metacritic is operated without any sort of transparency whatsoever, and behaves as a gatekeeper of the gaming press by refusing to aggregate scores from “non-mainstream” publications like our own, effectively making established sites the de facto tastemakers in the game industry even when their voices do not echo those of the gaming public at large.

OpenCritic uses an automated system that picks up review scores from a variety of partnered websites (including Gameranx) without publishers like ourselves having to feed the data into their system by hand, making it much more efficient than Metacritic.

Today, OpenCritic released a statement revealing that Metacritic cribbed its review data and provided evidence for it. Metacritic did not provide OpenCritic with credit or license its API and databases. According to OpenCritic, the organization makes slight changes to linked review URLs using a system it refers to as “horsemen,” which it uses to protect its data. OpenCritic wrote:

For example, with PCGamer’s Blood and Wine review, we added a redundant slash after pcgamer.com. With Twinfinite’s review, we capitalized the “W” and “B” in the review URL.

We can’t detail every example as it would giveaway our tells, but these two are notable: Metacritic’s Blood and Wine page currently has these exact horsemen listed, leading us to believe that they may be sourcing reviews from OpenCritic. We’ve included an archive.org link and screenshots below.

These changes don’t interfere with the user experience and are unique to OpenCritic. We checked to make sure that these links did not appear on popular websites such as Neogaf and reddit. We also feel confident in claiming that we listed these URLs first. As with most games, OpenCritic was faster: in this case, our reviews were up three hours faster.

Now you might be thinking “wow, that’s weird? Why did you build the horsemen system?” But there is historical precedent: old cartographers would add small fake places to maps and phone books would add fake phone number listings. These are simple techniques that aggregators leverage to protect their data.

We strongly believe that OpenCritic is the best review aggregator. We’re the only aggregator that correctly credits authors in addition to publications. We’re the only aggregator that lets users pick-and-choose their trusted publications. And unlike Metacritic, all of our scores are presented as simple averages with no hidden weightings, using data that can be verified by the public.

As we announced last January, our API alpha is in full swing and will soon shift into beta. We hope that Metacritic and others will consider joining our beta and licensing our API.

Given the evidence, we hope that more and more gamers will start to use OpenCritic as go-to site for review aggregation instead of rewarding a site that has long behaved like a gatekeeper for both game developers and gaming publications alike.