Ori, No Rest for the Wicked Director Damns Press Reviews With ‘Player-First’ Scoring Site

Thomas Mahler, CEO at Moon Studios and the creative director of the Ori series and the recently delayed (1.0 launch of) No Rest for the Wicked, has gone on something of a warpath against the traditional press-backed review ecosystem. He has revealed an all-new platform that he created to better reflect player sentiment around the general gaming market.

In his words, press scores ‘can’t outvote the people who bought the game’, and the aggregation on the platform more heavily favours user reviews over critic reviews, which flies in the face of other, bigger sites.

He pointed out a few glaring holes in how reviews are handled these days, and hopes that VideoGamesCritic.com will fix them all.

Mahler Under Fire For VideoGamesCritic Reveal

Mahler’s new website doesn’t just aggregate reviews and scores from across the wider community; it reviews the reviewers. Each outlet gets a score and is jammed into a list that ranks them against player sentiment. If they regularly dip below (or above) the scores that players give a game, they fall further down the ranking – simple.

It reminds me of that classic Simpsons bit: ‘Who will police the police?’ I don’t know, Coast Guard? Thomas Mahler is the Coast Guard.

What hurt my feelings in particular is that Insider Gaming isn’t listed on the site, despite having published stacks of reviews of late.

But anyway, personal emotions aside.

Mahler stressed his main issue with how aggregate sites work today:

My main problem with the existing aggregators: Their scores tell you how the press felt about a game, not how players did.

That made sense 20 years ago. I cared a lot what GameSpot gave a game back then. But today we can actually measure how players felt, and to me that will always matter more than how the press did. On (VideoGamesCritic), players hold at least two-thirds of every score, by rule. Press still counts, it just can’t outvote the people who bought the game.

He then explained a secondary issue, and that’s that most outlets will review a game once when it comes out and then never look back. That’s rather unfair and tarring every site with the same brush. At Insider Gaming, we’ve started reviewing games a few months after launch, particularly if they focus on a live-service operating model, to see if they’re still worth it down the line.

For instance, I reviewed ARC Raiders six months after launch, and it earned a lower score than it did when it came out.

I also recently reviewed STALKER 2 on PlayStation 5 and STALKER 2’s Cost of Hope expansion, diving into the game again and again after my original review surfaced for the game in 2024.

That’s where I agree with Mahler; the number attributed to a game at launch might not be indicative of how it plays years later, but the user review scores often climb as improvements come in and new ratings are left. That makes sense, right?

Mahler insists he harbors no ill will against more traditional outlets, and says that VideoGamesCritic works through fairness, mathematics, and sensible algorithms:

Since press does still count, I ended up reviewing the reviewers too. Every outlet and creator gets a trust score based on one question: When they reviewed a game, did players end up agreeing?

You can see who consistently calls games the way players see them, and who doesn’t. Again, simple and fair. And everything is transparent.

Every game page shows exactly how its score was computed, and the full methodology is public. No editorial opinion, no magic number.

Unfortunately, he decided to preface the site with the rather ambitious tagline: ‘The one source of truth for gamers.’

Welp, that’s a big f*** you to the masses of outlets backed by legitimate gamers who post honest, in-depth reviews of games. Like my super-sized review for The Blood of Dawnwalker, which dropped earlier this week. I’ve done critical reviews in the past as well, such as for The Midnight Walkers, which received a 2 out of 10.

Admittedly, Mahler has a pretty rocky past when it comes to community sentiment. He once found himself in hot water after making some tricky comments about games including trans characters, and slamming the notion of review bombing. Funnily enough, it’s the community he’s talking about that has the power to drag down review scores by carrying out bombing on the platforms he’s combating.

He even went into a Discord server to ask users to leave positive reviews because this review bombing was threatening the future of their studio. But it’s fine; those user reviews can outweigh press scores on VideoGamesCritic.

When did you last see traditional media outlets deliberately crashing review scores because they disagreed with something in a game?

Do you think Thomas Mahler’s site is a good idea? Let us know your thoughts on the Insider Gaming Discord server.

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