Simon Barker

Digital Analyst (Data/SEO/PPC). Editor of @ZathUK tech blog. Likes technology, gaming, photography, space, lifestyle design, health & fitness, #TeamDDPYoga.

[Starlink @Starlink]

Views from of one of the first 26 Starlink V3 satellites successfully deployed to orbit by Starship

Thanks for the ride, @SpaceX!

[SpaceX @SpaceX]

Splashdown confirmed. Congratulations to the entire SpaceX team on the first orbital flight of Starship!

[SpaceX @SpaceX]

Watch Starship Flight 14 https://t.co/uQKQvgbrch

[SpaceX @SpaceX]

Go for propellant load. Teams will soon begin loading Starship with ~12 million pounds of liquid oxygen and liquid methane. Targeting launch for 7:48 a.m. CT

[thomasmahler @thomasmahler]

It's been a few weeks since https://t.co/JolbgwKsO7 went live, so here's what it actually does now, and why I think it's a better tool than what we've had:

Metacritic and OpenCritic do one thing well: They tell you what critics thought in launch week.

That doesn't really make a to of sense in modern times anymore. Games change, so the score should too.

So VideoGamesCritic treats a rating as a living thing:

• The VGC Score updates as the game does. 120k+ patches classified, and reviews written after a real patch count the most. No Man's Sky launched at 48 with players. It sits at 82 today. Cyberpunk went from 72 to 85. Meaning, you see how good a game is now, not how the game at launch was that you can't even play anymore.

• Players hold at least two thirds of the verdict, by rule. Press informs the score, it can't outvote the people who bought the game. Nearly 2.5 million player reviews weighed, and not equally: Refund-Window Drive-Bys and Review Bombs count less.

• Every game shows the gap between critics and players, and which outlets called it right. Launch vs now, critics vs players, and a month-by-month timeline with every patch marked.

• The reviewers get reviewed too. 1,070 outlets and creators rated on how well their scores track what players ended up thinking, across 465,000+ press reviews.

• Best Deals across Steam, PlayStation Store, Nintendo eShop and Xbox Store sorted by the games rating

• Developer and publisher boards and a luminaries section that features everyone who shaped gaming

• Estimated Steam sales for every game

• Everything is a published formula over public data. No editorial thumb on the scale, no numbers and /methodology shows the whole recipe.

• There's a public JSON API, and a living VGC Seal of Quality developers can put on their store page that updates with the number.

14,628 games tracked so far, and counting.

If that sounds useful, have a look, and tell me what's missing! 👍❤️

https://t.co/KnlmQ9OaCL

[Simon Barker @SimonBarker]

@airiesummer @NVIDIAGFN Hope you feel better soon! 🙂🎮

[SpaceX @SpaceX]

Launch rehearsal complete ahead of Starship Flight 14

[thomasmahler @thomasmahler]

Hey folks,

I'm currently spending the last day of my boys summer vacation with them, but I put in a bit of work on https://t.co/JolbgwKsO7 because I got flooded with requests.

A bunch of you asked for "SteamCharts and SteamDB stuff" on https://t.co/JolbgwKsO7, so that stuff is live now.

Every game page now has History tabs: concurrent players, VGC Score over time, price history, and review volume.

New /players board: What's being played right now, 24h peaks, and who's rising or falling week over week. This is all based on Steam data right now, but I have some ideas to expand this.

Studios board: I always wanted to know which studios produce the highest quality output with no stinkers. Still wrangling through the data and it's clearly WIP, but already really interesting to browse through!

Hall of Fame with Game of the Year Awards: Very interesting to see the GOTY wins because it's solely based on actual player data!

Release calendar for announced games in 'On the Radar', so you can quickly check which games will be out soon.

Deals board: I already bought 4 games based on suggestions this damn thing made, so be careful, it's addictive because it shows you which highest rated games are currently on sale.

The game pages now list completion times, screenshots and trailers.

Search that finishes your query, so it's easier to find stuff.

And it's a lot faster now. Some pages used to take 10 seconds to load, my bad.

Again, ultimately I'd want VGC to just be an incredibly helpful tool for gamers that ideally helps them find games they otherwise wouldn't have paid attention to 👍

And since the database is constantly growing, we can do some REALLY interesting queries soon.

ENJOY! ❤️

https://t.co/JolbgwKsO7

[thomasmahler @thomasmahler]

Hey folks,

I'm launching a website today: https://t.co/JolbgwKsO7

It started as a little database I built for myself. I use Metacritic and OpenCritic a lot and they're clearly useful, but to me as a designer the user experience always felt a bit lacking.

Then the thing kept growing, and at some point I realized it had become genuinely useful for any gamer, not just me. So here it is, for everyone.

My main problem with the existing aggregators: Their scores tell you how the press felt about a game, not how players did.

That made sense 20 years ago. I cared a lot what GameSpot gave a game back then. But today we can actually measure how players felt, and to me that will always matter more than how the press did. On https://t.co/JolbgwKsO7, players hold at least two-thirds of every score, by rule. Press still counts, it just can't outvote the people who bought the game.

The other big problem: Those sites rate a game once, at launch, and then never really touch it again.

But that's not how games work anymore. A game can launch rough and get patched shortly after, but on Metacritic and OpenCritic it carries that scarlet letter forever.

No Man's Sky is the obvious example: Famously rocky launch, and Hello Games has spent the years since relentlessly improving it. Its Metacritic score has never moved. On https://t.co/JolbgwKsO7 it launched at 50 and sits at 82 today, because scores here are LIVE: launch-era reviews fade out over time, and reviews written after a significant patch count the most. When player sentiment changes, the number changes. Simple.

And since press does still count, I ended up reviewing the reviewers too. Every outlet and creator gets a trust score based on one question: When they reviewed a game, did players end up agreeing? You can see who consistently calls games the way players see them, and who doesn't. Again, simple and fair.

And everything is transparent. Every game page shows exactly how its score was computed, and the full methodology is public. No editorial opinion, no magic number.

Anyway, I hope you get a kick out of it! Even just as a way to see the best games on each platform, find something you missed, or browse a site that isn't wallpapered in ads, I think it's already pretty useful.

Enjoy!👍❤️

[SpaceX @SpaceX]

Full duration 33-engine static fire with the Super Heavy booster preparing for Flight 14

[SpaceX @SpaceX]

SpaceX engineers spent several days inspecting Ship 40 in the waters off Christmas Island. They collected heatshield samples and gained vital insight into how the vehicle handled reentry with improvements now planned on future vehicles

[Synth Potato🥔 @SynthPotato]

Every single thing The Witcher 3: Remastered is adding and changing, completely for free on September 29:

- Upgraded Visuals
- Enhanced combat
- New adaptive camera in combat
- Improved traversal & movement
- New Witcher signs FX
- Revamped horse handling
- Enhanced monster behaviors
- Skill tree revamp
- Transmog
- Expanded Photo mode
- New finishers
- Cross platform mod uspport
- Immersive meditation
- Refined animations
- New quest tracking
- UI improvements
- Looting rework
- Refreshed motion blur
- New Accessibility features
- Upgraded textures
- Foliage shading rework
- Tutorial modernization
- HDR improvements
- GTAO
- Improved menu navigation
- Ray Tracing improvements
- Global lighting rework
- New shading model
- Subsurface Scattering
- New tone mapper
- PS5 Pro enhancement support
- Xbox Play anywhere support
- Nintendo Switch 2 version and exclusive features
- Nvidia DLSS 4.5
- FSR 4
- XESS 2.0
- Path Tracing on PC
- Ray Reconstruction on PC
- Raytraced hair
- Native DX12
- Heart of Stone and Blood & Wine are now free for all base Witcher 3 owners

Genuinely hard to believe. CD Projekt Red doing this, with a brand new expansion coming out next year and then Witcher 4 the year after that. There's nobody that does it like these guys.

[CD PROJEKT RED IR @CDPROJEKTRED_IR]

We are pleased to announce The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt — Remastered is launching on September 29, 2026. 🗓️ Remastered will be available on PC, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series X|S — plus, for the first time, a native version of the game will be released on Nintendo Switch 2 🔥

[SpaceX @SpaceX]

After approx. 24 days at sea, the SpaceX Recovery team successfully guided Starship to a location just off the coast of Christmas Island. A team of SpaceX engineers is on their way to conduct additional analysis on the vehicle in calmer waters before attempting to return it to Starbase

[SpaceX @SpaceX]

Splashdown confirmed! Congratulations to the entire SpaceX team on the 13th flight test of Starship!

[SpaceX @SpaceX]

Liftoff of Starship!

[SpaceX @SpaceX]

Watch Starship's thirteenth flight test https://t.co/qkYYJiX24h

[Adam Vjestica @ItsMrProducts]

Music industry: “We know streaming is popular, but you can still buy a CD or even a vinyl if you like.”

Film industry: “We know streaming is popular, but you can still buy a DVD, Blu-ray or 4K Blu-ray if you like.”

Print industry: “We know ebooks are popular, but you can still buy a paperback or hardback copy if you like.”

Video game industry: “We know you like digital games, so that’s all you get from 2028.”

[Simon Barker @SimonBarker]

@AmazonMGMStudio The only answer is Stargate (the already established TV canon universe)

I've just signed up MGM+ today start a new rewatch of the whole Stargate franchise! 👍

#stargate #SaveStargate

[Every ᐰtlantis Frame in Order #SaveStargate @EverySGAFrame]

I love the #Stargate Atlantis theme song
#SaveStargate #SaveTheGate