Methodology
How a game gets its score.
Every number on this site comes from the same formula, applied the same way to every game. No sponsored placements, no thumb on the scale. Here's exactly what goes into it.
The formula
A Scouted Score blends three things: what critics thought, what players think, and how much game you actually get.
Critic score60%
The professional review consensus, on a 0–100 scale. It carries the most weight because it reflects many independent judgments rather than one.
Player rating30%
The share of Steam user reviews that are positive. Critics play a game once on a deadline; players live with it. This is the counterweight.
Hours of content10%
How much total content a game actually offers: a typical playthrough plus the optional side content most first-time players will see. Most of this comes from HowLongToBeat; where that data is missing or thin, it's set from reviews and community consensus. Length isn't quality, so it's deliberately the smallest slice and it stops counting past a cap. It's there to reward substance, not padding.
60 + 30 + 10 = 100
Why player sentiment counts
Critics play a game once, usually on a deadline and often on hardware set up for the job. Players buy it, install it on their own machine, and live with it. When a game ships broken on PC, leans on predatory monetization, or ignores accessibility, that lands in player reviews long before it shows up in a review score, if it ever does at all.
Scouted counts that, deliberately. Sentiment like this isn't review bombing; it's honest criticism of the product people actually paid for, and professional reviews tend to set it aside for reasons that have little to do with the person buying the game. Two releases with the same content and the same design don't deserve the same score if one of them was unplayable for most of its buyers for two weeks.
Scored vs. awaiting a score
Not every game can be scored the day it launches. Scouted tracks two states so a thin early sample never gets dressed up as a verdict.
85
A real number
The game has a critic consensus and enough player data to stand behind. This is what appears in the rankings, and it's the only number Scouted presents as final.
TBD
Not yet
Missing a critic score, too few player reviews, or not out yet. Scouted tracks a provisional read internally so a game isn't invisible, but it shows as TBD rather than a confident number it hasn't earned.
What the tiers mean
The color of a score tells you where a game lands at a glance.
93
Gem · 90+
Rare. Critics and players both loved it, and there's real substance behind it. A few a year, if that.
85
Excellent · 80–89
Confidently worth your time. Buy it if the genre is your thing.
74
Good · 70–79
Solid with caveats. Usually worth it on sale or if the premise grabs you.
64
Mixed · 60–69
Real problems alongside real ideas. For the curious and the patient.
48
Weak · 59 and below
Didn't come together. Listed for completeness, not as a recommendation.
Why the gem? A 90 isn't just a bit better than an 88. It's the point where critical acclaim, player sentiment, and substance all line up at once, which almost never happens. Most years produce only a handful.
Re-releases, expansions, and Early Access
Not every release is a straightforward new game. Here's how each kind is handled.
- Early Access. An unfinished game usually can't be judged as a finished one, so most EA titles wait for 1.0 before they're scored. It does happen, but only when reception is broad and consistent enough to mean something.
- Ports and remasters. Scored, so you can tell whether the new version is any good, but kept out of the official rankings. A 2026 port of a 2015 game isn't competing with this year's new releases.
- Remakes. Treated as new releases. A remake is new work, so it's ranked alongside everything else rather than lumped in with ports and remasters.
- DLC and expansions. Scored and ranked like any other release. In practice it's rare for one to land high enough to compete with full games, but nothing stops it.
You can filter ports, remasters, and Early Access in or out on the Rankings page. By default they're hidden, so what you see is this year's new releases.
Where the data comes from
- Critic scores — aggregated professional review data.
- Player ratings — Steam user reviews, all-time.
- Length — HowLongToBeat community submissions, filled in with reviews and community consensus where HowLongToBeat is thin or missing.
- Release dates, platforms, prices, artwork — storefronts and games databases, checked by hand.
The release list itself is curated manually. Every entry is matched and reviewed by a person, which is why the catalog is deliberate rather than exhaustive.
The honest limitations
- Console-exclusive games lean harder on their critic score, because there's no Steam user data to act as a counterweight.
- Player scores can occasionally be distorted by organized review bombing over things genuinely unrelated to the game, which is a different animal from the honest criticism described above.
- Length data is crowd-sourced and thin for new or niche releases, which is where reviews and community consensus fill the gap.
- A single number can't capture whether a game is for you. It's a starting point, not a verdict.
Scores are recalculated as new data lands, so a game's number can move, most often in the first few weeks after release.