OpenCritic was developed to avoid some of the controversies that Metacritic has gained in the video game industry.

The site was designed to make the nature of review aggregation clear, opting for a simple arithmetic mean, in contrast to the hidden weights used by Metacritic.

In October 2017, OpenCritic announced that monetization information would be added to game pages, citing the prevalence of loot boxes in modern releases.

[10] The GOG store front added OpenCritic statistics alongside critic reviews in December 2022.

[12] OpenCritic collects links to external websites for video game reviews, providing a landing page for the reader.