Video Game Reviewers

Introduction

When I look at game reviews on Metacritic or OpenCritic I always see video game reviewers that I know nothing about and I wonder about them. These reviews can dominate the conversation around a game, yet the publications behind them are often unknown. This doesn’t stop people from having some very strong opinions about the nature of their bias. I gathered data on 2,449 of these reviewers to find out more about them.

Combining data from MobyGame’s list of critics and Metacritic I collected the year these publications started and ended, their average review score, what kind of games they review, their country of origin, and how many reviews they have published.

Specifics About The Data For People That Care About That

MobyGames relies on volunteers who are willing to brave their arcane editing system and hidden rules to add reviews, which means that publications that more people are interested in are more likely to be well maintained and reasonably complete. MobyGame’s page about their own metascore system says publications should “have a large body of work”, “be well written and of reasonable length”, “published at or close to the release date of the game being reviewed”, and “aesthetically pleasing and professional”. There are definitely some outlets that don’t meet those requirements. Metacritic seems to use scrapers to add reviews automatically and say that they use “quality, well-written reviews that are well regarded in the industry or among their peers.”. While both include non-English reviewers they are probably underrepresented, especially those in Japanese. I have used whichever reports the higher number of reviews for a publication. Metacritic only has reviews going back to the late 90s, while MobyGames spans the history of games.

The starting and ending years are not necessarily for the publications themselves, just the reviews. For example, some newspapers have reviewed video games for a few years before stopping. MobyGames has a lot of incomplete information, including hundreds of publications with a single recorded review. I have cut many outlets that I couldn’t find information on and tried to expand the recorded years using the Wayback Machine when possible.

Metacritic keeps track of the average score of outlets that they have reviews for, and I have included as many as I could. Unfortunately there is no list of game reviewing publications on their site [during the final editing process I actually came across this list of current outlets that are included] so I looked through the list of reviewers for hundreds of games released over decades and within many genres. I’m confident I have more than 90% of Metacritic’s average scores recorded. This was tricky sometimes as MobyGames and Metacritic sometimes have an outlet that the other doesn’t, or they split or merge outlets differently.

I have recorded the “focus” of as many of these outlets as I could. This can be the platform they reviewed games for or the genre they were about. There were a lot of ways I could have gone about this, but I combined any form of personal computer as just “PC”. All phones and PDAs became “mobile”. I did not include “consoles but not PC” or “consoles but not handhelds” as a focus, mostly because it was very difficult to determine. Some were recorded as having two foci. For example, a publication might be about Apple software which reviewed both Macintosh (PC) and iOS (mobile) games. There were also several mobile+handheld and PC+Xbox publications.

MobyGames has a country listed with each critic. I don’t know how exactly they determine this, especially with some basically anonymous blog-type websites, but I trusted these to be accurate.

I did not include any reviewers who focused on retrospective reviews of older games, homebrew games, or shareware.

Average Scores

Metacritic averages all of a publication’s scores and 468 of those averages are included in this study. There’s an infographic later that shows who has the highest and lowest averages.

The average of average scores is 74.21, and the most common average is 75.

I often see people accuse reviewers who only deal with Nintendo, Sega, PlayStation, or Xbox of being biased, of inflating their scores out of fear of not being sent review codes in the future. Here we can see that all of them have below average scores compared to the overall average.

I expected mobile game reviewers to be a bit more generous, but not PC game reviewers. Outlets that only deal with PlayStation games are exceptionally harsh. Or maybe mobile and PC games are the best and console games are bad.

While I recorded a number of reviewers as being focused on other things, there were only a handful of each with an average score on Metacritic, so their averages don’t  mean a whole lot. Don’t take these too seriously, but here they are:

Reviewers And Foci

Speaking of a gaming reviewer’s focus, most don’t have one, but the PC easily has the largest share. While PC-centric reviewers have been around for longer than Nintendo-centric reviewers, PCs are also ubiquitous around the world while console hardware makers only officially sell their products in a select group of countries. As far as hardware focused publications go, we mostly have a graph of how long each has been or was around, but the majority of publications are multiplatform.

You may be thinking that there were definitely more reviewers focused on some of these subjects: and you’re probably right! Duo World Magazine and Turbo Force Magazine, for example, aren’t included on MobyGames and covered the Turbografx. I didn’t try to research every video game magazine, website, blog, and YouTube channel with video game reviews that has ever existed.

This graph shows the relative number of gaming reviewers focused on different types of hardware over time.

Those first two in 1977 are Creative Computing and The Space Gamer.

While Nintendo Power started in 1988 it didn’t start doing reviews until 1989. You may also wonder how there can be mobile reviewers in 1989. Pocket Magazine started out being dedicated to handhelds while Macworld was about Macintosh games. They both added mobile games to their coverage later on. I was not able to check and keep track of how every publication changed their focus over time.

The Switch seems to have attracted a number of new publications focused on Nintendo after losing several during the Wii U and 3DS era. Mobile gaming’s share of dedicated publications has fallen quite a bit in recent years.

Number Of Reviewers

There are a few caveats with this data, and please remember that a publication may still be in business even if it stops reviewing video games. I’ve noticed a fair number of websites that started out as general gaming websites with news, previews, reviews, and articles have cut everything but their news over time.

2023 obviously sticks out as seeing a whole lot of publications ceasing to review games, and there don’t seem to be many new reviewers in 2024, but it’s probably not as dire as it looks. Reviews are not necessarily added on MobyGames right after they are published so some lag time is to be expected, and some of this data was collected before 2024 ended. While I double-checked a lot of outlets that had their last year listed as 2020 or later I didn’t check them all, and it’s not always easy to tell when the most recent published review was.

Still, after decades of growth things started changing in the late aughts and it seems as though the number of professional outlets reviewing video games is falling a bit. This is past the era where most review outlets were magazines, so it’s not because of the general transition to websites.

Do hardware-focused publications tend to last longer? No, they generally don’t last as long as the overall average. Xbox publications beat the overall average but don’t last quite quite as long as multiplatform outlets. Nintendo’s consoles haven’t always been big successes, so I understand outlets closing during the GameCube or Wii U eras. There were few magazines about Sega during the Saturn’s lifetime, and while there were quite a few about the Dreamcast those only had a few years to live.

Reviewers By Country

The English-speaking world and Europe dominate the publications included, but it’s nice to see 50 countries represented. Japan is definitely under counted here, there were likely more than 10 magazines reviewing games there before the 90s.

I’ve combined two completely different things in this graph because the average number of active reviewing years is based on very little data for some of these countries and probably doesn’t really mean much. I don’t know why the Dominican Republic number disappeared, but it’s 6 years.

I’ve only averaged scores for countries with at least four publication averages and the highest is only 7.33 higher than the lowest. Russia and Sweden are the harshest overall critics, while Germany, Spain, and Greece are the most generous.

Here is how represented the 10 most common countries are among several foci.

The United State’s size makes it the most common for most of these, but there’s some fun things to find in here. I was surprised that Atari and Sega had more UK publications dedicated to them than anywhere else. Germany loves adventure games, Poland prefers PC.

Notable Reviewers

The 10 Reviewers With The Most Reviews

Gameplay (Benelux/Belgium) – 15,683 reviews. Not to be confused with Croatian magazine GamePlay, Danish website gameplay, or Ukrainian website Gameplay. Have you ever heard of Gameplay? I sure haven’t. Despite having more recorded reviews than any other outlet Metacritic does not keep track of it. There is no English Wikipedia page for it—though the Croatian magazine of almost the same name does.

Their website, which doesn’t support a secure connection, is pcgameplay.com, but they cover all platforms. For some reason I can’t fathom there is very little actual text on their site, it’s mostly images that contain text. They seem to be primarily a magazine which has been running since 1994. Their total number of recorded reviews on MobyGames has gone up by 250 since January.

IGN (United States) – 15,512 reviews. This is the big one everyone thinks of first when it comes to video game reviews. It seems like at least once a year there’s a controversy over what they score something. IGN has a fairly extensive Wikipedia page, though I still don’t really understand how an N64 website and magazine became the juggernaut IGN is today.

IGN is based in the United States but has satellite versions in several other countries and regions, which sometimes run their own reviews and sometimes translate the American version. Many only existed for a few years. It seems rather arbitrary which are included on Metacritic, here’s a list:

Jeuxvideo.com (France) – 14,384 reviews. Yes, the name translates to “Video Games”. Well-known enough to have an English Wikipedia page.

4Players.de / 4P: Das Spielemagazin (Germany) – 12,684 reviews. 4Players also has an English Wikipedia page. This seems to be the youngest among the top 10, being launched in 2000. It almost closed in 2021. Despite Spielemagazin translating to “game magazine” I can’t find any evidence it ever published a physical magazine.

GameSpot (United States) – 12,510 reviews. GameSpot sits beside IGN as one of the giants of English-language video game reviews. Home of perhaps the most infamous video game review of all time: Jeff Gerstmann’s review of Kane & Lynch: Dead Men, which led to him being fired and forming Giant Bomb. It was bought by Fandom in 2022.

Multiplayer.it (Italy) – 8,081 reviews. Though MobyGame’s earliest reviews are from 2003 the Italian Wikipedia article about it says it launched in 1999. The only thing slightly interesting on their Italian Wikipedia page is that they used to have a cosplay section and it originally only featured women.

Game Informer (United States) – 7,565 reviews. Running for 34 years this magazine was attached to FuncoLand and later GameStop. Despite being among the 10 most subscribed to magazines in the United States (at least in the ’10s), Game Informer was abruptly cancelled in 2024 after 368 issues and the website’s contents made unviewable. This was one of the last active video game magazines, and Game Informer had made a name for itself as a quality publication.

Gaming Age (United States) – 6,943 reviews. Gaming Age sure isn’t talked about much in comparison to the number of reviews it has published. There is no Wikipedia entry. It was founded in 1997 and all I can find on its history is this video of Greg Sewart (formerly of Electronic Gaming Monthly) talking to Sam Kennedy about co-founding the site.

GameZone (United States) – 6,576 reviews. Another website without a Wikipedia entry. While the site is still up it doesn’t seem to have been updated since 2021. They still have the Wii U in their top navigation bar. Bizarrely, their Twitter/X has over 150,000 followers and only stopped posting in January of 2024.

Computer and Video Games (United Kingdom) – 6,555 reviews. CVG started as a magazine (the first dedicated to console video games) all the way back in 1981 and ran until October 2004 when it fully became a website. In 2015 the website was closed and now redirects to GamesRadar+, which is a sort of merger of Future-owned properties. It started the earliest and was the longest running among this top 10. It is the video game publication that has reviewed games for the second longest amount of time, behind only PC Magazine, which has been running for 43 years and its reviews are severely undercounted, so it may belong on this list.

The Longest Running Reviewers

I sure hope this is accurate, I already made a few corrections from MobyGame’s data.

PC Magazine: 1982-present, 43 years

Famitsu: 1986-present, 39 years (and 207 recorded reviews??)

The Games Machine: 1988-present, 37 years

Computer and Video Games: 1981-2015, 35 years

neXGam: 1990-present, 35 years

Game Informer: 1991-2024, 34 years

Hobby Consolas: 1991-present, 34 years

PC Games: 1992-present, 33 years

Svet kompjutera: 1992-present, 33 years

Highest And Lowest Average Review Scores

Some of these publications are obscure websites and 11 of the 19 no longer exist. For publications that are magazines I have used the first issue’s cover instead of a logo, and they are all on the low score side. Something to keep in mind is that Metacritic has few reviews from before 2000, so some long running outlets only have their newer reviews included.

We saw earlier that mobile-focused publications gave out high average scores, and here AppAdvice is with the highest average score. Meanwhile the low score column has Nintendo, Xbox, and PC-focused reviewers.

Gamereactor and IGN both have many international versions, and in this case one of them has among the highest review scores.

I’ve never seen any of these top 9 being called out for being overly positive. Likewise, none of the bottom 10 has a reputation of being a tough scorer. While Edge Magazine is known for its low scores 66 didn’t quite make the cutoff. Nintendo Life also has a 66 average and if anything has a reputation as a high scorer.

A few of the most generous scorers were omitted because they just didn’t have many recorded reviews: Metro Montreal (20 reviews, 85 average), The Indie Informer (50 reviews, 83 average), Pocket-lint.com (53 reviews, 83 average), GamePro Australia (77 reviews, 83 average), Voxel (78 reviews, 83 average), and just missing the list was NPR (48 reviews, 82 average).

Some more prominent reviewers and their average score: Official U.S. PlayStation Magazine (66), The Jimquisition (66), Eurogamer (67), Nintendo Power (69), GameSpot (69), Pocket Gamer UK (69), Electronic Gaming Monthly (69), GamesRadar+ (70), GameSpy (71), PSM (71), IGN (71), Giant Bomb (71), 4Players.de / 4P: Das Spielemagazin (72), NintendoWorldReport (72), PC Gamer (72), Destructoid (72), Computer and Video Games (73), Hardcore Gamer Magazine (73), Jeuxvideo.com (74), Siliconera (74), XboxEra (74), RPG Site (74), Multiplayer.it (74), Game Informer (75), COGConnected (75), ZTGD (75), DualShockers (75), The Escapist (75), Video Games Chronicle (75), PC Magazine (75), GamePro (76), God is a Geek (76), Electric Playground (76), Gaming Nexus (77), Attack of the Fanboy (78), Easy Allies (78), Digital Chumps (79), RPGFan (80), GameFan (82).

More Reviewers I Want To Talk About

While IGN has had a total 24 national/regional versions including the original, there were a few others that stood out as having quite a few, too. Gamereactor has had 11 versions, and Eurogamer has had 12.

Some of these reviewers have such generic names that it makes it much more difficult to search for information about them. Videogamer.com, Gamers, Gamers.at, Home PC, PC Games, PC Jeux, VideoGame, Gameplay, PC Player, PLAY, PlayStation Plus, PlayStation Trophies, Power Play, Gamer.no, Gamer.nl, I don’t get why you’d name yourself any of these!

You may have noticed CaroleQuintaine.com‘s rather plain logo on the list of highest average scorers. She is included as a critic on MobyGames, Metacritic, and OpenCritic. She has 229k subscribers on YouTube and really the only thing I can see that sets her apart is having a website where she posts her YouTube videos. I’m not making any comment on the quality of her reviews (I don’t speak her language), but it stuck out to me because there are so many people reviewing new games on YouTube but only a handful are included on these lists.

Cublikefoot isn’t included on Metacritic, but she made it onto OpenCritic and MobyGames with 20k YouTube subscribers. A few months ago she privated all of her review videos.

NUON-dome is about the very short-lived Nuon and has been running since 1999. It’s still being updated.

LDS Gamers is for Mormon gamers.

8Bit/Digi is focused on the San Francisco Bay Area.

eShopperReviews has over 3,000 reviews of eShop games and is made by one person.

Nindie Spotlight is seemingly also by one person and has over 4,000 reviews of Switch games.

Looking through that list of currently included Metacritic reviewers, I came across Loot Level Chill. They’re new, their first review is from January 30, too late to be included in this study. But less than a month after launching they’ve managed to be included on Metacritic.

Sources

MobyGame’s list of critics and the many pages within

Metacritic’s many game review pages

Retromags provided the magazine covers