Help & FAQ

Why does a game say "score pending"?

Games need a minimum number of reviews before their scores will be calculated, to prevent oddball scores (such as a perfect 100 from a single, positive review) which would mess up leaderboards and overall ratings. In beta testing this is set to five reviews, but this will be raised once everything settles and the site is more populated.

Why can't I review X game?

Currently, you can only review games that we have in our database. We're adding new titles daily, prioritizing upcoming and recent releases, as well as adding notable games from the past few years.

However, there will always be games that someone wants to review that we perhaps wouldn't typically add, such as very old titles or low-profile amateur/indie titles, dozens of which are released every single day.

There's no perfect way to deal with this issue — either we let users review any title and automagically add it to our database if it doesn't exist yet (which can lead to troll/fake games), or offer a form for users to request particular games be added (which leads to a huge workload for our staff). It's something we're keeping a close eye on and currently having internal discussions about.

Special note to publishers: We'll explain about adding your library to our database a little further down this FAQ.

Where did the name SnipCritic come from?

Critic has long been synonymous with reviews and ratings, and similar to other aggregators — MetaCritic and OpenCritic — we wanted to feature it in our name for clarity and peer association.

The Snip comes from one of our unique features, that of limiting reviews to 1,000 characters. We wanted our user reviews to be concise snippets which other people could quickly read through for impressions about the game they were looking up.

I think something broke! Was X a bug? Why isn't Y working properly?

We're currently in beta. SnipCritic is still very much in development, just like an early access title — we wanted to give serious gamers like you the chance to dive into the website as soon as possible, to see what you like (and don't!), as part of our goal to continually improve the site. If you find a weird bug, please tweet @snipcritic or email [email protected] — thank you!

Why are only some parts of the website translated?

While we've built the initial framework to offer multiple languages, hiring translators for each sentence/string is very expensive. We won't be looking at offering other languages until the site is fully launched (and our sentences are finalized) and starting to generate enough income to cover the costs of professional translation. For now, treat the multilingual versions of the site as an extra bonus, but please don't rely on them completely.

Our plans with internationalization will ultimately offer to detect and show reviews in your chosen language — so if you're browsing the Spanish version of SnipCritic, you should (generally) only see Spanish reviews. This is a long-term goal and may change, or not happen at all, depending on user feedback.

I'm a developer or publisher — can SnipCritic help me?

Absolutely! We're building tools that allow pub/dev accounts to manage titles that they represent, including adding titles directly to our database (general metadata, artwork, etc.) and handling whether each title is visible to the public or not (so that you can get set up in advance of a title announcement).

Our longer-term goals for pub/dev accounts include offering rich metrics for your catalog, so that you can get a deeper understanding of how, when and why your titles are receiving their feedback, as well as promotional tools to help advertise your titles across the site. We'll have more details to share later.

Please use our company application to sign up as a developer or publisher. We'll verify and onboard you as soon as we can.

What are the highest scoring games ever?