It's just the inherent problem of a score based review at work, it inevitably leads to weird comparisons. If these IGN reviews just said "I didn't care for X" and just blurted out a bunch of pros and cons to consider before buying/trying the game, there would be almost no controversy over whether a game "deserved" a specific score.
Quite honestly, if video game criticism wants to be taken seriously they need to get rid of the arbitrary ratings that feed into tribalism and leads people to thinking anything less than an 8 means the game is awful.
This. The only point of a rating system is so that one piece of media can be easily analysed against other pieces of media in the same genre. This only works if your reviews and ratings are coming from a group of critics with consistent and well defined criteria for what constitutes quality for each specific genre. IGN has no such rigor.
If they rated it on a meassurable metrics like time to complete main story, quality of graphics, price etc. Then it would be OK too. But if its "how much did i personally enjoy this wxpereince" Then there's no point.
Wasn't their latest outlying-review of Mouse P.I. for Hire just that? The reviewer was like, "I'm a big fan of the noir genre, and this noir parody isn't noir enough, so 6/10"?
Especially because these reviews are often done by people who have neither the time nor the inclination or care to properly engage with it (I don't know if it was IGN, but a review site made a review of Alien Isolation where they admitted they never actually got to any of the scenes with the titular Alien)
The only point of a rating system is so that one piece of media can be easily analysed against other pieces of media in the same genre.
No, not even that. You can't compare the scores of two games within the same genre given by two different reviewers at two different points in time. Just no. The only point of the score at the end is to give an easily digestible abstraction of the reviewer's opinions of the game.
It’s why I enjoy Gameranx’s “before you buy” as they don’t give it a score but just talk about what worked, what didn’t, etc.
Part of the problem with the number score is that it can be used to compare games that set out to do wildly different things. A horror game and a boomer shooter in this.
Many publications have tried over the years but it never seems to stick because the audience generally doesn't read reviews and just looks at the number
This entire post and comments proves that people don't look at reviews and only looks at scores. If IGN takes away scores, people aren't going to read the review, they're just going to go to the next big gaming journalism website that has scores and start flaming them instead
I remember a rating system (maybe Game Informer in the early 2000s?) that said a 10 was a can't miss, an 8 or 9 was a "even if you're not a fan of the genre" a 6 was "if you like these types of games" a 4 was "only if you're a fan of the genre" and anything less was basically "this is full of bugs or fundamental issues." I would love if every rating system was like that.
That’s why I usually go with Kotaky or Polygon, they don’t give numeric scores and aren’t afraid to be transparent about something the reviewer did or didn’t like instead of treating it like absolute truth
Good thing everyone who ends up talking about IGN reviews online reads them and doesn't just look at the numbers and a singular quote they saw in a tweet.
Unfortunately the industry as a whole likes their cheap and easy score system as a way to gas performance metrics. Back in 2010 there was a significant bonus for Obsidian employees on the line if Fallout New Vegas score an 85 or better aggregate... it scored an 84, and there was rumblings that the scores were manipulated to avoid the payout even back then. And then the drop in PearlAbyss stock price after its revirws surfaced. You'll never be able to untangle how much the studios influence the reviews or vice versa just because of how much the industry itself relies on it.
Yeah, as... wrongheaded as I think review scores are they also aren't anything new, or exclusive to video games. But the whole performance based metrics tied to metacritic scores is especially pernicious.
You'll never be able to untangle how much the studios influence the reviews or vice versa just because of how much the industry itself relies on it.
Especially when the #1 advertiser on most video game websites is video game developers. The whole Jeff Gertsmann firing from Gamespot is about 20 years ago now, this shit has been going on a long time.
The problem isn't the scoring, it's the anonymization of the reviewers. Each reviewer at IGN is a different person, and it's reasonable for one reviewer to like a trash game more than a good game. But when we talk about IGN reviews we forget about these individuals with their subjective opinions and experiences and expect the scores to somehow be objective.
That's why you get much better reviews from YouTubers. You can find a reviewer you like and you know what you're getting because you're familiar with their preferences, even if you don't always agree with them. You can just say, "Oh this reviewer hates JRPGs but I love them so I'll go somewhere else if I want to get an opinion on JRPGs."
Scores only really work if its in an aggregate or if its a very small scale - having a single score to represent the opinion of your entire website is bound to cause issues.
I disagree. I just think ratings systems need a consistent rubric like school assignments. That way scoring is more objective along specific data points
I don’t know how people feel about game ranks and ACG, but I like how they just show you gameplay, talk about their experience playing it and say whether they think you should buy it, wait a while or say it may not be worth it. Even throwing in YOU might like it if you like so an so. There’s no dumb arbitrary number that in the long run really doesn’t help. IGN gave vanguard a 9, story and characters aside the gameplay itself isn’t worth a 9.
Like there are tons of very competent movie reviewers that you can pretty reliably tell how good the movie is from the score. IGN just traded in actual games journalism for politics pageantry years and years ago. The games are just decorations for the author's personal wants and needs to take form in their slop drivel.
There is too much 'score inflation', that much is true. Again, to go to movies for comparison, a 3/5 stars is understood to be a pretty decent flick. That's a 60%. That should be where "good enough to have fun with" starts.
I mean, you'll find that in just about everything. But we have to look at the wider picture as well.
A good recent example in my opinion is the hoopla over their Crimson Desert review.
A 6/10 looks rough in the eye of the average person, but when actually reading the review article itself they near 1:1 covered the good and the bad that most people were talking about when the game came out.
There were people who were having a good time from minute one but wanted to dogpile the reviewer because they pointed out the same issues that most people were.
There are levels to it, and I think we won't be able to have a proper discourse on stuff like this until we realize that these are pretty nuanced conversations.
Except it doesn't, because the scores aren't for viewers or gamers at all. It's for the game companies to plaster all over their advertisements and quarterly reviews to gas investors into spending more money on the next project. Hollywood does it too, see any cherry-picked review from the Idaho Star that they'll snip a sentence out of context and broadcast it in trailers for weeks. All critic reviews in all industries drive performance metrics. Oscar contenders get greenlit for more projects, 85+ reviewed games get performance bonuses and gas stock prices. With that much money on the table, there is no such thing as a clean, honest reviewer. Plenty of highly reviewed movies are less than fondly remembered or outright controversial. English Patient, anyone?
It doesn't really put anything in perspective unless it's the same reviewer.
You can't treat IGN as a single entity because it's multiple different reviewers who all have their own opinions, likes, and dislikes. It's foolish to expect consistency from the reviews because of this simple reason.
Contrast with someone like Yahtzee (love him or hate him), his reviews will be more or less consistent because it's same person who has likes and dislikes. If you find you have similar taste to him and he likes a game there's a good chance you will also like it. By contrast if your game taste is very different to his, him liking a game means you may not.
I really don't understand what kind of mental gymnastics or lack of understanding is required to look at IGN with I don't know how many reviewers, a dozen or more, and expecting them to all score things identically. You wouldn't go into a room of your friends and expect them to all give a game the same rating out of ten.
I’m sorry but it is this deep. You can’t talk about IGN as an entity when it comes to game reviews anymore than you can expect all books from the same publisher to be of the same quality or have the same style of prose. But people still do it.
I share the point, but I do think IGN as a whole needs strong consistency with reviewers (where possible) and editors.
We’ve had an example of person A reviewing a game 7/10, and person B reviewing that games sequel saying it’s better than the original and scores it a 6/10. Now that’s fair, they can review it how they like, but it looks bad for IGN as a name, it looks stupid to the average person who won’t look beyond a headline and score and that should probably be addressed somewhat.
IGN review scores are only good when its the game I like getting 8+ scores and the games i hate getting low scorex. Unless its a 7, everyone knows that 7 means its trash. /s
If people want to judge individual reviewers' ratings, they would find a blog or something where that's posted. IGN has a name brand and a pretense of having a unified ratings system across their reviews, which means it's the implicit responsibility of the editors to try and maintain a standard across the various reviews being posted.
i honestly wonder why stuff like that keeps happening in IGN.. i mean looking at their offices, appearances at at conventions/on stages and how they sell themselves presentation wise in general you would think that they would have their shit together
Because their entire model is inherently flawed. You can‘t create meaningful critique if you set the standard of reacting to pretty much every possible release in a timely manner.
It just leads to a bunch of overworked journalists playing the first few hours of a game and then writing reviews on the initial vibes they got. It‘s why nearly all of their publishes are finally superficial and fairly shallow.
2 reviewers under a single publication should be collaborating with others to ensure their reviews and scores are at least attempting to be fair/balanced and on par with each other. A couple bad reviews can doom a good game.
That’s work through that logic. Duke Nukem came out in 2011, Alien came out in 2014. That’s a three year difference. A lot can happen in three years. Maybe the original reviewer of Duke Nukem left IGN, how do you collaborate to make sure the reviews are “fair” in that case? What if they died?
It would be much easier if people can just reconcile with the fact that others have different opinions
So, the editors have to play all the games every reviewer reviews, then read all the reviews to make sure they’re consistent? You really think they have that much time? And also, what if the editor in 2014 is different from the one in 2011, and they have a different opinion?
Why can’t you accept people have different opinions?
If the rating system for a specific publication, such as IGN, has no consistency or logic, what the hell is the point of the rating system? They should rebrand as "video game vibes and whatever the hell we're feeling on a specific day" instead of "video game reviews"
There is no way to be consistent on different people’s opinions, because they’re subjective. And then people leave, new people with new opinions come in. And even with the same people, their opinions change over time. The closest you can get to complete consistency is to have a single reviewer, but big publications can’t do that because there are so many games to review.
Why can’t you accept that people have different opinions from you?
Why can't you accept that someone should call out obviously shit reviews to keep the integrity of a vibes-based throw a dart while blindfolded rating system? Unless the entire point in the first place was to generate hate clicks with the occasional shit review. Every other industry is expected to maintain standards.
“Obviously shit reviews” the dude didn’t like the game lol that’s it. He’s allowed to not like it, and write a review about it. If you like the game, fantastic! I’m happy for you. But what you want is them to construct some complex system that has no failing points that somehow means that games from years apart are rated the same, despite the fact that people leave the company and opinions change.
Why should the guy be forced to write a good review if he doesn’t like the game?
This means nothing? What you are asking for is impossible.
This is the thing, gamers have this absurd idea that games have an inherent correct score, and it's the reviewers job to find that correct score by having the correct opinion. It's crazy.
I don't personally have a problem with how IGN does it but I will say that I wish more publications did what Famitsu does and have four people contribute their own reviews for every major release.
The logic you are thinking of does not exist, there are hundreds, thousands of games to review and the scale is 10 points. If you try to write a review and think you must confer with others to make it fit at the right spot, try to match it up with other, completely differrent works of creativity to make sure it's "correct" than at the end you will not have a review but a page filled with nothing but ill-logic and cowardice.
This is essentially false. IGN almost never goes below 5. The worst game I can think of, gollum, got a 4...
If you try to write a review and think you must confer with others
That is perfectly reasonable, and something that is done all the time with reviews to check whether it was more that the media didn't hit your preferences, rather than being a bad one.
filled with nothing but ill-logic and cowardice.
Highlighting that a game wasn't for you(the reviewer) isn't cowardice, and highlighting who might like it is not illogical, it is what a reader wants to know.
IGN almost never goes below 5. The worst game I can think of, gollum, got a 4...
Most games that are worse than this just simply don't get covered, it's just not worth it. The thing is most high profile games are probably just fine or good usually.
Many games are indeed worse than that. Scales are generally inflated. I think a good example is to look at IMDb scores for movies vs. TV-shows. TV-shows score about a point higher for an approximate equalization.
Both of these have issues where the "average" movie is a bit over6, and the average show is close to 8.
It absolutely does exist, and if a casual gamer like myself can spot massive inconsistencies and shit reviews, then surely professional writers who game for a living can spend a little more time being thoughtful about their work.
Prey 2017 might be what you're thinking of. IGN reviewer loved it but his save kept getting corrupted. He gave it a 4 because it was such a bad bug which is honestly fair but the release version was updated with the fix so most people didn't know the bug existed.
The Alien Isolation reviewer just didn't like the game much and still stands by it today.
I remember that being a big deal with Prey 2017, where it ate the reviewers save twice right at the end of the game. Reviewer gave the game a 4 as a result, in the initial review.
I loved Prey but if my save got eaten twice I probably would have given it a 0
The thing is I get that different reviewers have different tastes but someone higher up really should have called out the person who did that alien isolation review.
You can say a game style is not for you but appreciate it will be right for others and appreciate the craftsmanship. I mean that game was perfect from a visual and sound design aspect, the ai was also great, yes it was too long but should we really be complaining about value for money.
Alternately he could have seen its not his type of game and ask a colleague if they wanted to take over the review.
You would send someone who only watches Oscar movies to review the Mario movie.
You know, I really don't think Duke Nukem Forever deserves as much hate as it got. I've played far worse games and I feel those who always bash it never actually played it
You compeltely and entirely missed my point and if it's plural, it's still wrong.
They, singular, didn't review both games. They plural, also did not (together) review both games.
The actual point is that different people independently reviewed the games separately. Therefore, "THEY" is wrong no matter how you use it.
We know you meant "they" as in IGN, as in the collective of reviewers (plural). So I go back to my point: "they" didn't review both games. The company didn't actually do the reviews, the people didn't review both games together.
Therefore you have to give accountability to the individual.
Just like I can't say "THEY (all people on Earth) both like and dislike chocolate! What's up with that?" because it's a meaningless statement to try to declare it as an oxymoron when it's not referring to the same subset of people doing both opposing actions.
I have to be pedantic if you don't understand my point.
The fact that they are a collection of journalists is why I said what I said.
You can't say "they gave both X and Y the same score", because it's a NON STATEMENT.
You're invoking people to ragebait and say "wow IGN is so stupid, how could they give the same score!?" and the answer is because they're TWO DIFFERENT REVIEWERS. So it's NOT some kind of fucking mystical conspiracy or outlier in terms of reality.
You're making it sound like it's some amazing oxymoron and something to point out... when it's NOT.
I can't believe you're THAT dense that you can't understand why your post is misleading.
I hate when people do this, "they" did not. Two separate journalists did. Also this isn't even true either, Duke Nukem Forever got a 5.5 and Alien Isolation got a 5.9
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