Moon Studios Lead Thomas Mahler Launches Aggregator Site to Challenge Gaming Press

Thomas Mahler, the creative force behind the acclaimed Ori series and the recent early-access title No Rest for the Wicked, has officially launched a new review-aggregation website, VideoGamesCritic. The platform positions itself as an alternative to industry staples like Metacritic and OpenCritic, aiming to provide what Mahler describes as “the one source of truth for gamers.”

At the heart of the site’s methodology is a distinct distrust of professional game journalism. VideoGamesCritic utilizes a weighted algorithm that assigns two-thirds of a game’s final score to player reviews sourced from Steam, while relegating professional critic scores to the remaining third. According to Mahler, the primary failure of existing aggregators is that they reflect “how the press felt about a game, not how players did.”

A Controversial History

The launch arrives amid a complicated relationship between Mahler and the media. Last year, the developer made headlines after lamenting what he characterized as the “dangerous cruelty” of Steam reviews, suggesting that review-bombing could lead to his studio’s bankruptcy. These comments faced significant pushback, particularly as the alleged “review bombing” of No Rest for the Wicked was widely viewed by observers as mild feedback on early-access updates. Following those events, Mahler drew further scrutiny for his combative tone toward the press and public remarks that were criticized as transphobic.

Now, by placing the majority of his site’s weight on the very Steam ecosystem he previously deemed an existential threat, Mahler appears to have recalibrated his focus, prioritizing user consensus over professional critical analysis.

Rethinking Review Aggregation

Beyond criticizing the press, VideoGamesCritic aims to solve the issue of static scores. Mahler highlights that traditional aggregators often fail to account for how games improve over time—citing No Man’s Sky as a prime example of a game that is vastly different today than it was at launch. To reflect this, his algorithm gives higher priority to more recent Steam reviews, attempting to provide a living, breathing metric of a game’s current quality.

The site also attempts to mitigate the influence of “review bombers” and non-purchasers through complex filters:

• Playtime Weighting: Reviews from users with fewer than 10 hours of playtime are downweighted.
• Key Activation Bias: The site de-emphasizes reviews from users who obtained the game via a Steam key, ostensibly to filter out those who may have received the product for promotional purposes.
• Algorithmic Transparency: Mahler claims the system is purely mathematical and objective, though critics argue that the weighting criteria themselves are inherently biased reflections of his own philosophy on what constitutes a “correct” review.

Reviewing the Reviewers

Perhaps the most contentious feature is the site’s attempt to “review the reviewers.” VideoGamesCritic assigns a “trust score” to outlets and creators by measuring how closely their past reviews align with subsequent player satisfaction.

This approach assigns numerical scores to publications that do not use them—such as Kotaku—by analyzing their historical calls on whether to “buy” or “skip” a game. For Mahler, this is a tool for accountability, allowing users to see which outlets “consistently call games the way players see them.”

Critics of the project suggest that this reduces the purpose of criticism to mere predictive accuracy—treating a review as a consumer-guide forecast rather than a subjective, thoughtful analysis of the medium. Regardless of one’s stance on the necessity of such a platform, the site serves as a manifestation of the ongoing friction between developers and the gaming press, formalizing a desire to strip away the “subjective” layer of critical discourse in favor of a math-driven, user-centric landscape.