I don't understand why so many people hate IGN. It is clear, if you listen to their podcasts or watch their editorial videos that they are just a bunch of video game enthusiasts. I actually think they are quite good at what they do.

To be sure, a reviewer's preference affects how they see a game. But in their honesty, they embrace this fact. The reality is, games are art! Of course the personal tastes of the critic are going to color the review. Their solution for this reality is that they candidly embrace it. They talk about what they liked and didn't like, not about how many levels the game has–and then just slaps a score over those rote facts. And their method of reviewing a game fairly is to let the person with the most expertise in the genre review it, because they are best able to compare it to what has come before it in said genre. All the editors play everything (because they love games so much, that's what they do in their spare time), but the person who does the review is the one who is most qualified. Take Skyrim for example, they'll probably give that to their lead PC editor, Charles Onyett, who is a big PC RPG fan. And then, big games will often get a "second opinions" article, where all the other editors who have played the game will weigh-in on the game in question, and sometimes they may have a different opinion than the reviewer had.

But the thing that irks me the most is when people suggest they get paid for their reviews. Simply put, that's just preposterous! And if you think that's true, then I guess you also think Bethesda is dishonest enough (and has the spare change) to pay for the 2008 GOTY award that Fallout 3 received from IGN.

(Now, somewhat ironic given where I am posting, I think one of the biggest missteps IGN have made recently concerns their article, "Top 5 Reasons Dark Souls Will Eat Skyrim's Face." I understand that the writer was trying to garner interest for a game that he thought many might overlook, but I do think his reasons were poorly demonstrated. But it was clearly a tongue-in-cheek editorial, and I think he had the best intentions.)

In summation, I think most IGN haters just aren't paying close enough attention to the reality of the situation.

It's the internet. What is really just a mild dislike becomes a rabid wave of fan-rage and hate.

In my situation, I don't really have anything to do with IGN except for when people bring up the stupid things they've done. It's easy to dislike them when that is all I hear about them.

Aside from that, their reviews are some of the most useless things I've ever heard of, to be perfectly honest. An 8/10 from IGN would mean the game is pretty average. Also, you've said that they aren't bribed for reviews, but you don't really have any evidence to confirm that, whilst there is quite a bit of evidence and arguments that suggest the opposite.

Simply put, they aren't the worst thing in the gaming industry, but there is a certain amount of truth in the saying that "You can't spell ignorance without IGN."

I don't like their reviews but I've never went out my way to outright hate them, anything they review is a 8, 9 or 10 / 10, lies!! I think they're just scared to voice their real opinion, maybe they are being bribed or they're just ass kissers? :shrug:
I also dislike their videos on Xbox, anytime I watch them I just see "Hey look what we did!!!" or "I cheated and got this achievey, wanna copy me, do exactly I did and get [censored]edd up?".....extreme, maybe but I don't like the videos and I got bored of the Chobot girl's persistently annoying voice ??

You said it yourself, you don't pay attention to them, so what makes you say their reviews are rubbish? I'm all ears.

And I don't provide any evidence that they don't get bribes BECAUSE THAT'S IMPOSSIBLE. What evidence would I bring, all the employees bank statements? There is a reason that people are presumed innocent in a court of law until proven guilty, the reason being that the reverse is preposterous. No, it is the one who is making the claim, that "IGN takes bribes" that must bear the burden of proof, not me who must disprove it. I don't even have to have an argument really, not until you provide an argument. So where's your evidence? Asking me to disprove any proposition is ridiculous, or else do you first assume that fairies exist, and then demand that the zoologist prove otherwise?



I think the main mistake you make is to assume that some people might not like those 8s, 9s, and 10s as much as the reviewers claim to. I hate CoD, but does that mean that it isn't among the best at what it does, or that lots of people love those games and are happy playing them so much. As I said, they strategically choose who should review a game, and I would call them unfair myself if they chose someone like me to review a game like CoD. And just because I have no interest in games like CoD or BF, that doesn't mean I'd call those bad games; it's a matter of preference. I bought Payday: The Heist on PS3, and I love it, but I am willing to admit I love it because of my preferences, and furthermore, I'd easily be willing to say that the shooting mechanics in CoD or BF are much better than Payday.

I mean, would you care to be more specific about a game that you think was reviewed poorly? How would you have reviewed said game, and why would you have reviewed it thusly? I understand you don't feel that strongly about it, but I ask because I do think that you are probably allowing your preferences to unduely color your opinion of how fair IGN is being about a given game.

I always disagree with the reviews, I hate the 'dumb/overhyperactive' act the people put on the videos and they flamebait. I just judge a game on how good it is to me not on what some people who are annoying try and tell me. :glare:

I don't hate them, I just ignore them.

There was a reason I don't pay any attention to them in the first place. I read a couple of reviews, and I thought they were a joke. I've occasionally been linked to one of their reviews, or come across one, so I know that nothings changed. I'd still say I don't pay much attention to them, though.

My reason for pointing out that you had no evidence to the contrary was that you were dismissing the claims against IGN out of hand. By no means did I mean to say that because you can't prove IGN doesn't take bribes, it means they do. Rather, I meant to point out that you must consider both sides of the argument, rather than dismissing claims for no reason.

Simple, because their rating system is pretty much 1-7 = terrible, 8 =average, 9 = anything not Zelda, Metal Gear or GTA, 10 = Zelda Metal Gear and GTA.

I don't care about their reviews at all. I love IGN for the IPL.

Never really been a fan of them. Got to admit I was a little aggitated with their Metro 2033 review. Came off as it they hadn't really played the game, in my opinion anyway. After that, I've just stayed away.

Well, I've never seen anything that has deserved anything better than dismissing out of hand; the only thing I ever see is unfounded accusations. Do you care to offer anything of substance? If not, why are you defending those that I am dismissing out of hand?




Straw man.

You are projecting with those scales; the score explicitly says "Okay," "Good," "Great," etc. below it (8=Great, not "average"), not to mention the fact that the repeatedly say when asked that the written review is far more important than the score. I bet you are mad at IGN for rating a game a 7.5, not realizing that you are making up the idea that 7.5 means anything but "good." And are you really going to tell me, for instance, that IGN was far off the mark as regards GTA IV? That game was brilliant, and everyone in the industry rated it incredibly highly.

I know that this is difficult, but rather than making up info that suits your argument and feeds your need for a scapegoat, just read the ratings breakdown: http://games.ign.com/ratings.html

My preference to what?
I am a big fan of Shooter/RPG/Strategy/Puzzle games, the only way I'd call a game a bad game is if it was too simplistic, too plain, predictable, complicated systems etc But I rarely say its a bad game, only 2 bad games I've came across is, The Maw and Mr Driller Online...But even these are OK games for people that want to play in those genres or are little kids/new gamers, I would have these rated at about 4 - 5 but http://xbox360.ign.com/objects/142/14259873.html and http://xbox360.ign.com/objects/142/14237542.html...I would agree with that one though. Maybe because SquareEnix is behind The Maw it got such a good rating? I've played it enough to know an 8 is unjustified.
They have CoD4 at 9.4, I like this rating as it is a classic and the most original CoD of the annual releases, as well as it setting the bench mark for the rest.
They have WaW at 9.2, this is iffy IMO I don't feel it should have been so high, maybe a 7-8, since it wasn't pushing on anything new and the controls/graphic textures weren't even on the level of CoD4, granted it wasn't the same company.
They have MW2 at 9.5, this game as a whole was on par with CoD4 but to me feel short in some places but raised the benchmark again in others, this game was good as its story followed that of CoD4, pushed boundaries with the No Russian level and left us in shock at some points and with a good IMO cliffhanger. So maybe 9.5 does this justice.
And Black Ops is rated at 8.5, this is probably a bit low considering WaW was 9.2, I felt Black Ops out did WaW since I stop playing that after like 1.5 months online and I'm still playing Black Ops a year on, its campaign was, different. I would say this was rated lower than I expected though and maybe should have its rating switched with WaW. But I think the main reason this is so low is because of its online just being another chewed and spit out version of CoD4's MP.

Battlefield 3 is rated at a 9....the chances of them actually doing a proper review since the day it was released or off the beta/trials at gaming events is slim.

Because of article like dark souls will eat skyrim's face or them putting angry birds on the top 100 modern games list and putting angry birds abive dfagon age origins on yhat list.

I don't follow any gaming press (apart from Yahtzee's Zero Punctuation, but only for humorous reasons), forums around the internet are all the feedback i need ^_^

You can't spell IGNorance without IGN
Personally I don't like sites like Gamespot either so I go to Mean Gentlemen for reviews

And if you plot the scores that games receive you'll find that it's not a bell curve like you'd expect, rather it's weighted heavily towards the 8-9 range - http://www.blogcdn.com/www.joystiq.com/media/2006/08/scoreinflajoy.jpg

It's also humorous how you say I had the straw man, then in the paragraph below say this: "And are you really going to tell me, for instance, that IGN was far off the mark as regards GTA IV? That game was brilliant, and everyone in the industry rated it incredibly highly."

In reverse order, shall we.

Game journalists get most games, particularly big releases like Battlefield 3, before the game is released. So your concern there is unwarranted, because they've been playing it for longer than a day (the review build of Saints Row 3 has been playing on screens in the background of IGN videos for weeks, and it is still over 2 weeks before that game is released). And I must ask, do you think that 9 is way off base for BF3? If not, I don't know what you're complaining about.

Your main concern about CoD seems to be that Black Ops was underrated, especially as compared to WaW. You concede that part of the rating is probably because of the rehashed multiplayer. Forgetting that WaW and Black Ops were reviewed by different people, two YEARS elapsed between those two reviews. I'd bet that the reviewer of Black Ops would admit that it was better than WaW, but WaW came out two years ago, the industry changes. (In fact, I think the reviewer explains this fact exactly in their review, even saying that Black Ops is better than MW2, but it doesn't break the mold as much as MW2 did.)

Finally, I've never played The Maw so I can't say much, except that Metacritic puts it very close to what IGN does, so it isn't far off the industry assessment overall. However, Twisted Pixel made The Maw, not Square Enix. Two points of interest about the actual developer. First, Square Enix hasn't received the best reviews from IGN lately anyway; FFXIV received a 5.5 (mediocre), and FFVIII (as well as Square Enix itself) is constantly trash-talked in IGN podcasts as being very much behind the times. Second, Twisted Pixel was a tiny independant developer at the time of The Maw, it being their first IP and their first game to publish on their own. It would have been almost impossible for them bribe anyone at that time.

Why would you expect scores to fall on a bell curve, exactly? (Edit: I see what you are getting at, but it is an arbitrary distinction. The chart you showed just demonstrates that they prefer scaling by 20 points [.5 incraments] rather than 100 points [.1 incraments]. The distribution of the values is still comparable to Gamespots, not to mention IGN admits that they exclusively grade on a 20 point scale now.)

How is that a straw man? You frickin' criticized IGN for rating the a GTA game a 10/10, and the only GTA game that received a 10 from IGN was GTA IV. Do you know what a straw man is? Seriously, I think you are confusing it with some other fallacy. Which GTA game did you mean to suggested was overrated, if I am commiting a straw man fallacy?

YOU CAN'T SPELL IGNORANT WITHOUT...

Seriously though, do people really need to repeat that 10 times per IGN thread? You're no more original than the 'rap= retards attempting poetry lololol' people.

If you don't like IGN, then don't waste your time hating them. And don't discuss their bad articles on forums everywhere. Doing that is just going to get them more views and money, and encourage them to do more of those. Just IGNore them.



Winner: Dark Souls!

Yes I realised the fact that reviewers get the game early, so they can spread the word of the game and basically show it in its brightest light as the cheapest form of advertisment, after I said it. I wasn't complaining, I've not complained about any of it rather just passed an opinion. Like I have said, I could not give a rats ass about the ratings IGN et al give out as they influence me in no way shape or form, I'll pass my own judgement thank you :thumbsup:

As for the CoD titles, I don't care whether some guy called Bill or Pikachu reviewed them and what they said, I'm going with what the ratings were and whether or not they do the game justice or are just exaggerations. I used these as examples of a big game being rated big when perhaps they shouldn't have been, and I only used these title since you have assumed I don't prefer them to others when infact they're my top played games. You also asked for my critic on a title and I gave you the whole CoD series from CoD4 ~

I was sure Square were behind the Xbox version some where, I knew about TP. Maybe it was rated by a Indie games reviewer then and not an actual all round genre gamer, since given its due it is a pretty decent indie game but when tosed into the ocean of games out there its rating of 8 would surely be ranking about 3 with the whole gaming community behind the ratings. I believe its rated 2 stars on xbox Live maybe 2 and a half. Again I never mentioned the word bribe, I said because Square were behind it it may have gotten the high rating since its a big name, BUT since I was wrong of the creators that obviously isn't the case.

They are mainstream reviewers which means that they are being given things by publishers. These gifts taint everything they say (on a subconscious level even).

I personally find modern publishers to be the worst thing to ever happen to any art form, video games included. Therefore, anything tainted by a publisher's money is something I will ignore (in IGN's case, their reviews).


I dredge the seedy underworld of unpaid blogs for my reviews.

I hate IGN because I hate things that are dumb and poopy. Therefore, since IGN is dumb and poopy, I hate IGN. If IGN were not dumb and poopy, I'm afraid that I would not hate it, and even possibly like it. However, IGN is inherently dumb and poopy, and thus, it cannot be liked.

There, I believe my argument is sound.

I learned long ago not to read/listen to other people about what I should and should not like.

I remember really enjoying WOW until I read the forums. Literally it was like a light switch in my mind where I went from really loving the game and enjoyed spending time playing it to cancelling my subscription. This occurred over about 1-2 months.

The thing I realized is that when people point out all the flaws in a game, I can't overlook them anymore. However, if I don't read/listen to those people then I can overlook the flaws and make up my own mind about what is and isn't fun. Nothing, absolutely NOTHING is perfect in this world and sometimes minor flaws can become huge obstacles when I continually focus on them.

So I just play the games I enjoy and ignore sites like IGN.

I don't understand. Why would they "show it in the brightest light" as "advertisemant" if they weren't being bribed? You later say that you never said the word bribe, so what cause would IGN have to do this then? How does IGN benefit (from promoting a dev's game, when apparantly the game didn't deserve it)? After all, they are staking their reputations on it; surely they wouldn't do it on a whim. Why would they rate a Square Enix game highly, just because it is a big dev? How would they benefit from that?



Good. No one should take a person's word blindly. I don't.



Not good. What they say, and who says it matters. You are pretending that IGN claims to be the end all, be all objective source for numerical gaming evaluation, and then you **** on them for making such a claim, but that isn't what they claim at all. You don't like them because you think that they think their numbers are important, but they think their numbers are the least important aspect of their reviews. They admit that people have different opinions, and they are just trying to inform you about the game, which is primarily done in the text of their review, not in any number. I'd estimate 70% of their editors have wished that they could do away with the numbers, but that's all people (people like yourself, as you've admitted) look at, so they have to use the numerical ratings just to get you to open up the page; there hope is that you'll read a word or two while scrolling down to the bottom (but again, you don't care about them, least of all what they actually want to say to you).