I've not been able to agree with many of their reviews in quite a while. Not that I disregard reviews simply because they differ from my opinions, but I've found plenty of other sites that offer what I believe to be better reviews, even when I don't agree on specific points of praise/criticism. For example, a number of IGN's reviews for JRPGs read like poorly written rants on the genre itself rather than an in-depth critique of this individual game.

Some of the staff that I liked is also long gone, including Steve Butts, David Smith, Hilary Goldstein and Craig Harris.

@Jethrol: Interesting.

@Hade: I'm not sure about a couple of those premises, but it sounds reasonable so I guess you have me.

@povuholo: Too true. Winner: good uses of (bad) inside jokes

@wingus: I agree that they have changed. I do happen to like their new style just as well myself, however.



Yes, I know this is somewhat different, but to me this sort of sounds like "doctors make money by prescribing drugs, therefore they are biased, so I'm going to go to the guy who doesn't have a degree in medicine, like a homeopathic doctor."

Every review, news, video game sites is bribed in some ways. Reviews from these sites are too important for big publisher to just let them give [censored] reviews about Halo reach and call of duty. These sites can make a difference between a total flop and a marketing sucess. Fallout desersed it's GOTY in 2008 because activision didn't anticipated the succes of CoD4. Oblivion didn't had any competion back in the time.

I have reached a certain point with these sites after Halo reach had so many god reviews. Yeah, $God$ "reviews", not good review.

I suspect the reason IGN show the bigihtest aspects of the game and advertise it, the review itself is a form of advertisemant and influences some peoples desicions, is for the hope they can get to do it again with the next game coming from a certain company. Buddying up with as many companies as possible is a good way to get recognised and all they really need to do is realse a good review or two and they can get access to more titles before the release date.
So IGN make a review for a game giving it a high rating, they get noticed by the company, IGN then gets another game to review, creates a loop where they are profitting.
They benefit from this as their name could appear on the boxes / they get income from it, their name (IGN) is highlighted throughout the gaming community as a place to go. How are they not benefiting is a better question?
The games company is then selling more games thanks to IGN's good reviews as people are falsely lead to buy a game that was never worth the review/rating it got.


I don't care for their reviews, because I don't like their reviews, I have read previous reviews that based my opinions of the rest, I wouldn't blindly just not read it for the sake of not reading it.
The numbers, the reason I used them is because those are supposed to depict a simple image of the game 10 - thumbs up get it its awesome, 1 - it svcks don't waste your time. But if their rating nearly everything 7+, are they truely believeing that games worth that 7+ rating or or just doing it as a way to gain access to more pre-released software.

^ Pretty much this if I had to say anything

The internetz is a very horrifying place and can blow things WAY out of proportion. Example would be people's mild dislike of that Justin Bieber kid or however you spell his last night. Hatred for him has escalated to the point that people had so much hatred for him they put out a fake death notice saying he died in a car crash. There's also been pictures on CH/Break showing people making fun of him saying "Every time you tip me a JB fan dies".

Not quite. It's more like saying "Doctors in commercials for a drug are being paid to appear and therefore they are biased".

The actual doctor you visit and who prescribes you your medication is not reviewing the drugs, he is providing them (in this anology he is closer to Gamestop than he is to IGN).

IGN has am mobile app that updates with the latest gaming news, so I love IGN just for that. Don't pay much attention to the reviews, have GameInformer for that.

I enjoy their reviews for an insight on the game, rather than the actual score they gave it :shrug:
I use Joystiq and Game Informer for my gaming news.

I remeber that there was a guy on these forums who said that a reviewer got fired for giving "Cane & Lynch 2" a low score. Well if you ask me, that is just IGNorance.

IGN doesn't have the best reviews, some are spot on and others like Catherine are rated too high. Some of the articles aren't done in a down the middle type fashion like the Dark Souls would beat Skyrim Article. Listing all the stuff that's great about one side but witholding all the good things from the other. Other then that they are decent but no where near the Journalistic capabilites of Gameinformer which I consider to be the best in the industry.

What's interesting to me is that so many people seem to have an expectation that a review should accurately reflect what the reader finds important in a game.

However, it more closely resembles a number of other things such as the writers perspective, the company philosophy and the future plans/agenda for the website owners.

I think it's an unrealistic expectation to think that IGN or any other site like that would carry reviews that we find helpful all the time. Hopefully we can find one that does so the majority of the time. That's why I prefer gamespot where you can see gamers reviews - those tend to be much more in line with my experiences.

I've also been amazed at how much fun I've had with games that were rated 4, 5 or 6 out of 10 by critics and other gameers yet I found them to be a blast!!

I agree with Jethrol, this is the same as those ambiguous "best yadda yadda" lists seen and people's outrage.

As far as reviews go, it's supposed to represent one person's opinion based on playing the game. The idea is to get a subjective, 3rd party representation, a piece of advice so to speak, on what they liked, didn't like, and like any piece of advice, up to you whether or not you want to listen, whether or not the advice makes you come to a conclusion about the game enough to play/not play it, or just one piece of advice while looking for other review sources.

I don't see the big deal about it if it doesn't agree with you, or doesn't use your preferred language or sense of humor/taste, find another website. All this rage about it is pretty pointless, albeit entertaining.

They're too mainstream. It's not cool to like something so mainstream.

:rolleyes:

Personally, I don't dislike IGN any more than I dislike any other review site. If people want to follow them fanatically and take their opinions on video games as law, that's fine by me.

1) People still care about review scores in this day and age? They only really seem relevant to people who want to parrot them or complain about them.
2) Gaming "journalism" as a whole is a joke. IGN is just one of the more blatant examples - and can you really trust a site owned by NewsCorp?

It's generally against their reviews. Like how they'll give some of the greatest games of all time 9.5 and won't round that to a 10 for some pathetic reason.

I hate their coverage. All of their videos have some awful voice over from some guy (with a terrible radio voice) making lame jokes.

By that logic, every form of entertainment journalism is pointless and a waste of time.

Seriously, are you calling all sources of gaming news a joke?

I couldn't care less about that corrupt greedy IGN.

Speaking of ignorance...http://kotaku.com/328244/gamespot-editor-fired-over-kane--lynch-review

More or less, yes. I have yet to see any that haven't done something facepalm worthy. Some of them are just worse than others.

Why so much hate for IGN?

Because hatred is fun. Men (and women) were made to hate. Those guys who control the watering hole over there? We should bugger them with spears. Only problem is, nowadays, everyone's pretty much united in one boat. Hating real people is a bad, destructive thing. So people get their fix of hate in forms like this.

So it's just gaming journalism you have a problem with? Not every form of media journalism?

And I happen to think Gameinformer does a pretty good job of coverage, nothing they've done has pissed me off in any way.



Hatred is fun, it's certainly more entertaining then love(most of the time) and it's even better to hate in a group. Who wouldn't want to form a mob and go kill Frankenstein?

But I think that's just blind hatred for the sake of it. Hatred (or at least dislike) for IGN has a legitimate founding.

No, but the difference is I can generally avoid the hate for real news outlets when I'm talking about gaming. Not so in this case, where you have to listen to people complain about things over and over and over and over. Hell, there's even a thread on the first page of the Skyrim board right now complaining about the reviews before they even happen! I can guarantee you there will be threads filling up the board as soon as the actual reviews come in, complaining about whatever goofy numerical score Outlet X decided to give it.

This is why I like X-Play; specifically, Sessler.

I just wanted to point out that the most recent Podcast Beyond episode (IGN's Playstation podcast) talks a lot about how they go about reviewing a game, and more specifically how they make the call on giving a game a 10/10, as they recently did with Uncharted 3. I think it gives a fair amount of sober incite as to why they review games the way they do (and why any gaming journalist would do so, too).

http://ps3.ign.com/articles/121/1210864p1.html. If you just want the discussion about Uncharted 3 getting a 10, etc., skip to about 49:45 or so. A listener writes in and asks about the score, and they spend most of the rest of the show talking about it. (Some people claim to be "annoyed" by the voice of one of these people, so be warned I guess. I have no clue what being "annoyed by a voice" actually means, though; I am annoyed by what some people say, and the rhetoric they sometimes use, but being annoyed by a voice sounds like a personal problem, to me anyway.)

Edit: BTW, I just finished said podcast, and Greg Miller predicts Skyrim will win GOTY at IGN, in spite of just saying Uncharted 3 is his favorite game of all time at the time of recording the podcast. (And a corollary prediction of mine is that it will win IGN's GOTY even though it will almost certainly not review as 10/10; svck it nerds.)