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 two things: what critics thought and what players think.
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, and because it stays comparable from one game to the next.
Player rating40%
The share of Steam user reviews that are positive. Critics play a game once on a deadline; players live with it, so this is the counterweight. Its pull scales with how many reviews stand behind it: a game earns the full 40% once it clears roughly 1,500 reviews, while thinner samples lean closer to the critic score until the numbers catch up. A rave from forty buyers shouldn't move a score the way a rave from forty thousand does.
60 + 40 = 100
One more rule, worth stating plainly: a game that's free to keep gets a flat three-point bump, capped so nothing climbs past 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 score to build on, and a player rating adds to it when there's enough review volume to trust. This is what appears in the rankings, and it's the only number Scouted presents as final.
TBD
Not yet
No critic score yet, or not out yet. A game can be scored the moment critics weigh in, even before players do, so what holds a title at TBD is the missing critic consensus. 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
Good to Great · 80–89
Reliably worth your time. A safe buy if the genre is your thing.
74
Mixed · 70–79
Real strengths and real caveats, in roughly equal measure. Worth it on sale, or if the premise grabs you.
64
Weak · 60–69
The problems outweigh the good ideas. For the curious and the patient, usually only on a discount.
48
Doggie Doo Doo · 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. Used for the length filter and shown on cards.
- 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.
- A game with only a handful of player reviews leans heavily on its critic score until more reviews arrive, so a strong indie's player voice can be quiet in its first weeks. That's deliberate: it keeps a tiny, self-selected sample from swinging the number before it's earned.
- 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.