How it works

A verdict on Crit comes from two things: the Steam reviews a game has collected, and the price it is selling at right now. Nothing else feeds it.

Which reviews count

All of the public reviews Steam exposes for a game. Not a curated sample, and not only the ones marked helpful.

From that full record, Crit separates the signal: what players consistently praise, what they consistently complain about, and how much of the complaining is about the game itself rather than about a bad week it has since moved past.

How to read the score

The score reflects two things at once: how positive the reviews are, and how many of them there are. A handful of glowing reviews does not outrank thousands of mixed ones, because a handful is not yet evidence.

That has a consequence worth knowing when you read a page. A game with a short review history sits closer to the middle than its raw percentage suggests, and it moves as real reviews accumulate. A game with a long history is being reported, not estimated.

Scores run from 0 to 100 and map directly onto the grade shown beside them.

What is deliberately left out

Critic scores. Critic scales and player scales are not comparable. Critics cluster toward the middle while Steam ratings skew high, so blending the two shifts every score without adding information. Metacritic is shown on a game page where it exists, but it is not an input to the verdict.

Anything commercial. Price, discount depth, and whether a link earns anything have no effect on a score or a ranking. See affiliate disclosure.

Editorial judgment. No score is adjusted by hand, and no game is promoted or buried on request.

When Crit declines to answer

A game with too little review history does not get a confident verdict, and the curated lists apply their own thresholds for the same reason. Below a certain amount of evidence, "hidden gem" and "nobody has played it" are indistinguishable, and Crit will not guess between them.

Silence is a real answer. If Crit cannot tell you whether a game is worth buying, the useful thing is to say so.

Prices

Prices come from Steam and are re-checked continuously. Crit reports what a game costs and whether that is a genuine discount against its own price history. It does not claim to have found the best price anywhere, because it watches one store.

Corrections

Scoring is deterministic. The same reviews always produce the same verdict, so a result that looks wrong can be traced back to the data behind it. If one does, tell us.