Essence of NK Score

Have you ever bought a game labeled "Overwhelmingly Positive" only to find it didn't suit you at all?

Steam's standard rating system is great, but it has a major flaw. It "treats all votes equally". A vote from someone who played for only 1 hour on release day and shouted "Best!" and a vote from someone who played for 300 hours and lamented "End content is empty" are counted as the same "1 vote".

We at NK Labs developed our own reliability index "NK Score" to challenge this "equality trap".

1. Flaw of Existing System: Lack of Freshness and Depth

The value of information is never uniform. In games, especially, the following two axes are directly linked to reliability.

Depth of Information (Playtime): Do you know the essential flaws and charms beyond the hurdle of feeling "interesting"?
Freshness of Information (Update Status): An evaluation of "full of bugs" from 3 years ago may not apply to the current patched version.

A simple average ignoring these is easily distorted by past glory or excessive excitement (or controversy) immediately after release.

2. NK Solution: Engineered "Weights"

At the core of the NK Score is the following weighted average formula.

S = (Σ Ri・Wi) / Σ Wi

S: Final NK Score
Ri: Individual evaluation score
Wi: Reliability weight (based on playtime and freshness)

3. Specific Weighting Logic

A. Weighting of "Depth" by Playtime

0-2 hours: Weight 0.5x
2-50 hours: Weight 1.0x
100+ hours: Weight 5.0x (Voice of "Master")

B. Weighting of "Present" by Freshness

Last 3 months: Weight 3.0x
Over 1 year ago: Weight 0.2x

Conclusion: What We Provide is "Truth"

NK Score is not just a numbers game. It is the most honest answer to the question "Should I start this game now?", removing the noise of "past excitement" and "shallow impressions".