About CriticDB (CDB)

CriticDB was launched in 2025 as a project for a team of gaming industry veterans to build more than just an aggregator site, but a website to find new games you might have missed, or an outlet that you wouldn't have known about otherwise.

We aim to put new game review scores in front of you, but also new games, letting you explore more of a wide world of games that has grown exponentially over the last few years.

From AAA to indies, huge site to smaller independent publications – you're going to find it all here.

We believe that there is room for aggregators to do more to help the games industry that we love, for gamers, media, creators, and developers. We want it to be a platform for everyone.

We believe discovery is a major issue in the industry right now, and helping people find the games they want to play through the many many games that release, and hope to address this via a number of ideas that we have.

By partnering, and working with people in all segments of the industry we believe that we can serve not only as a superior aggregator that doesn't prioritize certain outlets, but one that becomes an indispensable tool.

Have Questions, or want to learn more? Read the FAQ

At the core of CriticDB, we want games to get discovered. We're all fervent believers that Indie Games are critical to the growth of this industry, and that many players overlook indies compared to the latest AAA games.

With similar games listed on every game page, and the ability for gamers to link more games to each other – we're aiming to have more games found, letting you jump from game to game as you discover a genre or title that you love.

That doesn't stop at games, though – we also want you to find Outlets you want to follow, and authors whose reviews you feel closely aligned with. The Games Industry is big, and we don't believe that any one outlet is "best" - but that there's a wide range of incredible voices to follow.

There is such a wide array of gaming outlets, it's always going to be hard when it comes to inclusion. When we launched in January 2025, we decided to start with over 75 different outlets to aggregate reviews from, to ensure that as we built out the game catalog that it would be well-populated.

The mission for CriticDB is to add more outlets, using a specific set of criteria to ensure that not only do we have sites with strong review policies, but also a following and readership that will help the games they review reach audiences.

It's not a perfect science but see what we look for in the FAQ.

CRITICDB Review Scoring is simple: it's a pure average of the scores that are attached to reviews. We don't weight scores based on outlets or if they're Top Voices, we simply just average them out.

That said, a game must have at-minimum 5 separate review scores to get a CriticDB score and badge. This ensures that a proper level of reviews are included in the score, and it's not just one or two dictating the scoring.

There's a significant number of games that release every month, and behind them are amazing PR people that our team has had the pleasure of working with over the years.

One of the things we wanted to do, was work with these individuals to ensure that we're not missing out on games that should be listed in our database, and linked to other games.

In doing so, we can ensure that game pages are 100% accurate in their information, but also if one happens to get missed – we'll make sure it gets added to get it in front of new gamers.

This is especially helpful for the indies that many outlets take the time to cover, which we'll make sure have pages for when reviews start dropping.

This may be a cause of concern for some, but we want to point out that there is no financial incentive for doing this – we simply want to ensure that games get discovered. After all, many of us have found absolute gems that we otherwise would have missed before!

We find immense value in critic reviews – after all, one of our co-founders owns TechRaptor. Despite generally being a loss-leader for outlets to publish reviews, they are CRITICAL to getting the word out about new games.

User Reviews have problems – especially when it comes to review bombing.

Which is why we'll do it differently, with these guard rails in place:

• Only Pro Members ($5/mo) can post User Reviews
• There will be NO Aggregated Score
• Minimum 100 words required to publish a User Review
• We'll moderate User Reviews – if you're found to be review bombing, we'll ban your account and remove your reviews.

User reviews have value, and we felt that ignoring the community element of publishing your own reviews to share with your inner circle, would be missing an opportunity for games to get even more love.