One of the more curious things regarding the games industry is the practice of embargoes, and more specifically, review embargoes.

Typically, you don’t hear of when a game’s review embargo is going to expire – it’s kept quiet and you only see it mentioned here or there. Now, a newer review aggregate site, OpenCritic, have announced they’ll be posting review embargo times for games they aggregate.

So what does this mean for the games industry, and for you – the gamer? Well, more transparency, and hopefully less of a race towards being “first” on getting a review published. OpenCritic is testing various theories that have been commonplace in gaming communities, like review copy stock, time publication receives a review copy, time spent with review in relation to the score of the game, and so on.

You may be wondering how OpenCritic is making this possible? They’ve gotten the cooperation of over 10 publications (who are being kept anonymous for their protection), who are all providing OpenCritic with embargo agreements. So far, OpenCritic has made a note in saying that it seems publications are getting review copies at the same time.

The first two games to have their review embargo times published on the site are Assassin’s Creed: Syndicate (featured above) and Halo 5: Guardians.

It’s worth mentioning that we’re included in OpenCritic’s aggregate – so you should definitely check them out, as they’re looking to set better standards for the games industry (by doing things like having no hidden weightings, allowing gamers to customize which outlets they trust, and by aggregating all reviews, not just numerical ones).