Frequently Asked Questions
Below, you'll find Frequently Asked Questions about CriticDB.
General Questions
We work closely with publishers and creators around the industry to aggregate their reviews. Unlike the AI crawlers that are scraping content for their own uses, our crawler scrapes only the necessary data to list your reviews with a backlink back to the full review for those that want to read it.
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.
There's also a level of frustration with other platforms, through numerous discussions, that we feel we can address and build on to create a strong platform for everyone involved in Gaming.
You can read our About Us to know more about our team and people, but for over a decade members of the team have been running TechRaptor, a gaming website.
During that time frame, Rutledge Daugette served as the Chief Operations Officer of OpenCritic, and Andrew Otten was involved in helping with the editorial side.
Beyond that, members in our staff have worked at a variety of sites, and know many industry figures. These relationships have allowed us to have numerous meetings pre-launch to get an understanding of current challenges that CriticDB can help tackle.
Our Founder's unique perspective from the Outlet side led to many of the Outlet-focused features, and improvements to things like Applications and Author Verification.
CriticDB will look to a few main sources for funding over time. The goal is to get the site off the ground, build a community around it and grow to a point we're monetized in in a few ways:
- Membership
- PR Accounts
- Advertising (Banner/Direct, 60-90 days after launch)
- Retail Partnerships
Ideally, in the long term we can really focus on membership for revenue growth. Advertising can be annoying and intrusive and we'll do as much as we can to limit the impact – but we'd like to earn money to bring additional people on-board to help us expand what we're doing.
We're going about this a different way than the ones that came before.
Our goal with this project isn't money. We genuinely just wanted to build something that would resonate with gamers, media, developers, and PR. A platform for all.
CriticDB will launch with zero banner/programmatic advertising for (at least) 3-6 months.
Our hope? We'll grow membership, and longer-term sponsored (clearly disclosed) ad slots to companies looking to promote their game.
If you love games, and want to find new games to play that you might have missed otherwise - bookmark CriticDB and join what we aim to make a positive and thriving community.
Readers & Members:
The biggest way to help us grow, is to use the platform (as a free or paid member) and create lists, link games together, and explore our pages.
Talk about us on social media, link to our pages, and generally help us get our name out there. When reviews drop, share our #'s and links!
Outlets:
Write a blogpost about us – talk about our vision, what we're building, and anything else you think is important. If you've been added, or get added – write about being included on CriticDB!
Interview Requests – Rutledge is happy to talk about our vision, whether via e-mail or on a video call/podcast. Just reach out: [email protected]
In the traditional games media sense, we won't be creating the news, reviews, or guides that you see on many of the Outlets we aggregate.
We plan to, down the line, create more industry-focused articles and resources. We'd also love to leverage our first-party data (anonymized) to create interesting articles too.
As we scale, we'll have traffic data, review counts, average review scores and more that we can analyze. As data nerds, we think that could be pretty interesting to analyze and write about!
If we grow enough that we can expand? Potentially, we don't want to rule anything out that our community may ask for. To start, fully focused on previews, reviews, and awards aggregation.
We'll also aim to bring on Social Media/Community Managers to help us spread the word about the platform.
Scoring Questions
CriticDB aggregates review scores from around the web, and then we do a pure average of the collection – we don't weigh any outlets higher than others.
After we've collected more than 5 different reviews, the page will display the aggregate score.
You'll notice that we don't say if a game is Good, OK, Bad, etc – we feel that offering players the score and letting them decide what it means made more sense.
For one gamer, a 70 may be a "don't play" but for another a "70" doesn't necessitate skipping a title. We shouldn't be the judge of that.
Ideally, these would fall under previews, but we understand some sites do score these.
We'll aggregate these as reviews, since they're labeled as such – but in many cases we'll make an effort (after discussing with the site) to exclude these from crawling and request they be published as Previews on CDB.
Outlet Questions
This isn't an exact science, but here's what we'll be looking for:
Strong Publishing Standards
- We expect there to be a robust Ethics/Editorial Policy, as well as a review policy.
- Any history of repeat plagiarism will immediately disqualify an Outlet or Creator.
- Any use of AI for Reviews will disqualify an outlet from being considered.
Consistent Reviews
We want to make sure we aggregate as many reviews as possible, so ideally your outlet has published 15-30 reviews per month averaged over the last 12 months.
Social Presence
While social presence isn't a clear indication of "trustworthiness" we'll assess the size and use of your social platforms to help us make decisions.
Web Traffic / Views
- Using tools like SISTRIX, SimilarWeb, and more – we'll assess the size of your outlet. We don't have a specific number, however:
- Web Publishers – between 100,000 and 300,000 as a minimum is a good guide.
- YouTube/Creators - Between 10,000 and 30,000 subscribers as a minimum.
This is not a hard rule, if we encounter smaller outlets doing great work, we'll explore aggregating them too.
The goal is not to exclude people, but there's 2 main reasons we have these requirements:
- We'll ingest well-established sites who've done the work to grow, built a brand presence, and in doing so will have a robust review policy. Having every possible publisher on the platform, without some level of criteria for inclusion ultimately won't lead to solid data and metrics around review scores for people to utilize. In addition, with the ability for Outlet Editors to see PR information, having this established presence lowers the risk that the information is abused.
- There's a never-ending number of Outlets, and ingesting them all would require a tremendous amount of resources. The goal is to scale from 75-200 as quickly as we can, but we're building custom scrapers for EACH site we ingest so that their teams don't have to manually upload reviews.
We totally get this can be frustrating but we'd like to iterate a few things alongside the above:
- We want smaller outlets on the platform. I'll change the wording in the FAQ, but if you're 100-150,000/mo and consistently drop reviews, we'll review applications. This doesn't Have to be a hard number.
- The goal of CDB is to help Outlets connect to PR and Gamers. This very much remains the goal, and it's not one that's easy to accomplish, or quick. I'm confident we'll find ways to highly smaller sites, but there does have to be some limit.
- Suggestions from PR and Dev go a long way in our book - if they love working with you, and say as much, that says a lot about the quality of your site. (That said, we maintain the right to remove a site if we believe is abusing developers, players or others, or is in other ways acting maliciously.)
- We will happily take feedback, but bear in mind this is 100% funded by us, and we're a small team who's doing everything we can to make this a strong platform. We're not miracle workers that can fix Google.
Join our Discord to ask any other questions you may have, too!
Visit the form here, and we'll review and assess your Outlet for inclusion.
Please note that we're expecting HEAVY application volume during the launch period, so it may take us weeks or months to get back to you as we work to ingest outlets.
Step 1: Create an account, if accepted, this will become your "Editor" account that can manage the Outlet.
After that, you'll be able to check the status of your Outlet's application in our backend, with the following steps:
- Application Received
- Application Under Review
- Application Approved/Denied
- Building Scraper
- Scraper Completed & Tested
- Outlet Ingest Complete
We will e-mail you directly to inform you of status changes.
While you still will need to be reviewed by the team, one factor that can speed up the application process is an XML dump of your reviews.
This will make the ingestion of your reviews significantly faster, and we'll prioritize scraping/collection of an Outlet's reviews if an XML file is provided.
Absolutely, having grown a website/brand ourselves we get that you're focused on growing. As you do, please take the time to re-apply and include details about that in your application!
Note: Please don't re-apply immediately after rejection, we'll keep track of applications by outlet. You're not going to have grown or improved editorial policies immediately after rejection.
There are a few situations where an Outlet may be removed from our database or set to "Archived" where we'll maintain existing reviews but not any new reviews.
- Removal – Outlet using AI for reviews or Spamming/Scraping Reviews.
- Removal – Outlet found to be breaching editorial policies or engaging in a level of misleading practices for reviews or content.
- Removal – We're told by PR that an Outlet has been verbally abusive towards members of their team. This is unacceptable, PR should be treated kindly regardless of if you don't get a code.
- Archive – Outlet has been sold - can be reassessed after a period of transition.
- Archive – Outlet has been shut down – reviews kept; no new ones added.
- Archive – Outlet hasn't published a review in 6-12 months. We'll remove any editors and keep all reviews live.
To report an outlet for any of these issues, please reach out via our Contact Us page.
If you're a publisher on the platform, reach out to [email protected] to get this information. We want to make sure our crawler can grab your reviews!
Note: To be crawled you either need a dedicated Game Reviews page, or a Game Review Sitemap. If either of these aren't possible, please let us know and we can work on building some custom crawling functions.
Author Questions
In order to prevent the CriticDB Team from being a bottleneck – we've built functionality into Outlets that will allow your Editor(s) to verify you.
To get verified, simply give your Editor the e-mail you'd like to use with your account – in the backend they can send you a one-click verification to your e-mail, that will allow you to verify your Author Account. This will merge any user account you've already created, too.
Unfortunately, for Authors to have a Reviewer Profile on CriticDB, there need to be Reviews or Previews tied to them.
This is by design, as we scrape Outlets to be included, we automatically create Author Profiles that can be claimed, and tie their reviews to it.
Our goal is to get as many Authors on the platform as possible, please give us time!
PR & Outlet Features
To facilitate outreach, Free PR Accounts will be able to see the following:
- Outlet Name/URL/Socials
- News / Review / Editor-In-Chief Emails
- Headquarters Location (for regional requests)
When we launch Paid PR Accounts, they'll be able to:
- Access Outlet Review Data
- Sort by Platform/Genre
- Sort by Score
- Sort by Game
- (Author-Only) See Authors interested in Mock Reviews
Only verified Editors who are tied to Outlets will have access to backend PR information.
While we wish we could give every Author this detail, the cyber risk exponentially rises with the number of Authors on the platform, and we need to protect PR as much as we will protect Outlets.
Ethical Questions
This is a fair question – much of our team works for and runs TechRaptor, as one of our Co-Founders also owns that site.
TechRaptor will get no special treatment on review aggregation – there's no weighting to any of TechRaptor's scores, listings, or anything else. In addition, we take our criteria seriously – there's no favoritism in who we do/don't add to the site.
As an additional note – with the launch of Paid PR Accounts, we do take money from PR. This is not pay-for-play on CriticDB or TechRaptor, this is a service we provide that gives them access to review/Outlet data to speed up their outreach and discovery of Outlets. This has zero bearing on what games are on CDB or TechRaptor.
Our team is funding the launch of CriticDB, and the site is wholly owned by that team. Beyond that, we're launching user membership and PR accounts that will have subscriptions associated with them, and we'll explore advertising once we're at a size that it makes sense, but our goal is for ads to be as minimal as possible to preserve user experience.
We have no plans to sell, and similar to TechRaptor, Rutledge and the team want to build something that will stick around for a long time to come.
If they had any hand in how reviews here worked, absolutely!
The main goal of working closer with PR, is enhancing discovery. With the rate of games being released, there's almost no way to keep up with every new release, and one of our goals of our organization is to get more games and developers discovered.
The hardest part of building a database of games...is building the pages. Asking PR's to help us build the database as they add new games to their clientele, means we'll have a larger database to give you to explore!
With the inclusion of PR Accounts, our goal is help connect PR/Devs with reviewers for their games. If our vision of helping Outlets get noticed goes the way we hope, it means we'll be able to see more reviews of a wider variety of games in the long term.
If connecting gamers to games is our goal, then making sure that PR and Reviewers can better find each other means we'll have so much more to offer our users in the long-term.
Business & Partnerships
We're partnered with IGDB for the initial data for game pages, and then we layer our own pieces, such as Similar Games on top of that data.
We're absolutely interested in discussing potential advertising partnerships.
If you're a website that's interested in some partnerships with our data – we'd love to chat!
Contact us: partnership[at]criticdb.com
Absolutely, we're launching that in Q2 2025. Reach out to us via [email protected] to start talking!
No, we're actively avoiding selling data to 3rd parties. Any API partnerships will be focused on surfacing review data for gamers/users, not selling user or outlet data.
The data provided to PR is focused on helping them sort through Outlets.
No user-specific data is available in the API, or in reporting. There will be some limited data around Wishlist and Favorite numbers, but it will only be aggregated and anonymized data.