Where critics and players disagree
1,006 games with both a critic aggregate and a player score, plotted against each other. Neither number is ours. Critics score a game at launch on a review build; players score it over years, through every patch, price change and outage. The gap between the two is the interesting part, and it is usually a story about what happened after release.
Across 1006 games with both a critic aggregate and a player score, 440 sit in Agreed classics, and 322 land within five points of each other. Critics are most generous relative to players on NBA 2K18, 87 against 30. Players are most generous relative to critics on Five Nights at Freddy's 4, 93 against 51. Both numbers come from Steam and neither is ours.
Generated from the current data. Recomputed 2 September 2026.
1,006 of 1,006 games shown · 22 most notable labelled
- Mobile
- Multi-platform
- Nintendo
- PC
- PlayStation
- Xbox
Every point links to that game's full entry. The same data as a table sits below, which is also what screen readers and answer engines read.
How positions are decided
No paid placement, no favouritism, live third-party data
- Placed by the published method, not by us. Every coordinate is computed from the axis definitions and weights printed on this site. Nobody moves a point. See the axes.
- Nothing here is paid for. No sponsored placements, no promoted slots, no arrangement of any kind affects a position. If that ever changes it will be labelled and sit outside the ranking.
- No favouritism, including our own. The 16 games we have written full reviews of are scored by exactly the same formula as the other 1,510, from the same third-party inputs, and they land where it puts them. Our own opinion of a game does not enter its coordinates.
- A position is not an endorsement. It says how a game was received and what it costs, not that we recommend it. Where we do recommend something, it carries a written review with a name on it.
- Fetched from live third-party data. Player sentiment from Steam, critic aggregates as published on store pages, prices checked hourly, attention from Wikipedia. Each figure carries its source and the date it was read, and we do not adjust any of them.
Biggest disagreements
Sorted by the gap between the two scores. A positive gap means critics rated it higher than players did.
| Game | Critics | Players | Gap | Who liked it more |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| NBA 2K18 | 87 | 30 | +57 | Critics |
| Five Nights at Freddy's 4 | 51 | 93 | -42 | Players |
| Postal 2 | 59 | 97 | -38 | Players |
| Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell: Double Agent | 80 | 43 | +37 | Critics |
| NBA 2K19 | 76 | 40 | +36 | Critics |
| POSTAL | 56 | 92 | -36 | Players |
| NBA 2K17 | 90 | 55 | +35 | Critics |
| Tekken 8 | 91 | 56 | +35 | Critics |
| Five Nights at Freddy's 2 | 62 | 94 | -32 | Players |
| Dino D-Day | 53 | 84 | -31 | Players |
| Sid Meier's Civilization VII | 79 | 48 | +31 | Critics |
| Skater XL - The Ultimate Skateboarding Game | 56 | 86 | -30 | Players |
Methodology
X, player sentiment. The share of Steam reviews marked positive, pulled toward the catalogue average in proportion to how few reviews stand behind it. A game with 200 reviews moves a long way toward the average; one with 200,000 barely moves at all. Without this a title sitting at 100 percent on nine reviews outranks Half-Life 2 at 98 percent on 278,000. Specifically, the percentage of Steam user reviews marked positive, read from Steam's public reviews API with the sample size recorded alongside it.
Y, critic aggregate. The Metacritic score as published by Steam on its own store page. Steam is a consenting first-party source with a date attached, which Metacritic itself is not: it has no public API and blocks automated collection. The score is for the PC version and can lag the Metacritic site by a few points.
Why the axes are not comparable. They are not the same measurement and the map does not pretend they are. A critic aggregate is a weighted average of a few dozen scored reviews written at launch. A player percentage is a yes or no vote from up to a million people over several years. A game sitting off the diagonal is not evidence that anyone was wrong. It usually means the game changed, or that what critics reward and what players tolerate are different things.
Coverage. Only games with both numbers appear, which in practice means PC releases. Console and Nintendo exclusives are absent, not unpopular.
The value map at The GamingPickz Grid uses our own review scores and our own price tracking instead.