I'll just point this out from the article "When it’s not obvious that something is a big deal, like a Grand Theft Auto or an Avengers movie or a Game of Thrones-level show, we use metrics like traffic on IGN for news, trailers, and previews to see if the wider audience is interested. We also use publicly available tools like Google Trends and YouTube. Did a lot of people check out the trailer for a new movie? It’s a safe bet they’ll be interested to know more. Did just a few thousand view it on YouTube? Maybe it’s just not clicking with IGN’s audience and a review would suffer the same fate. When those raw numbers leave us uncertain – or even sometimes when they tell us most people aren’t interested, but we are – we often take a chance on something we think is special and should be highlighted, even though it probably won’t do a lot of traffic for us. That’s when you’ll see smaller things make it onto our review list."
I have noticed before they tend to skip a lot of smaller games, which is kind of unfortunate, because those are the ones that need the exposure the most.
"When you consider the main purpose of a review is to answer the question of whether something is actually as good as it appears to be in ads and previews before you decide to spend your time and money on it, there’s no greater waste of everybody’s time and effort than telling people that something they’ve never heard of isn’t good."
IGN is one of the worst review sites I have ever come across. They have no passion for games, it's more of a business for them. Remember when there was a person who plagiarised Boomstick Gaming Review. They may have fired him but before it was brought up IGN didn't care about the quality of the review. Now imagine how many other reviews were plagiarised and that we don't know about. I also recall the Dark Souls 2 DLC review...where the reviewer could not finish the game because it was too hard. How do you even write a review if you can't even beat a game? Somehow that person did. Now they are being political about things such as the JK Rowling situation. You can easily imagine the game losing points because of this some nonsense reasons. All that for political points. Gamers need to stop putting these so-called gaming Jornos on a pedestal. Their voice isn't the gospel, every time we see them give a score for a game, no matter how high or low they are should be ignored.
You're are right. I feel bad for the hosts on YouTube who I always feel are acting how they think gamers would like. They are like NPCs from Watchdogs 2. No one talks or acts how they do in real life. It weren't always like that but it's unbearable now.
Unfortunately most of the game critics/journalists still at larger old sites (IGN, Gamespot, Polygon, Kotaku) seem to fall into two categories: those who really just want to be at a "real" news/culture site like Huffpost, Vice, or Vox, but couldn't get the position, and those who are into gaming but only care about one or two (usually live service) games. Arguably the latter is better because at least they kind of care about games, but if you are really just super into the minutiae of Genshin Impact or Apex Legends, your opinion on Dead Space or Hi-Fi Rush is almost as irrelevant and useless as if you don't know games at all.
Obviously there are exceptions (I think IGN has at least one Xbox writer who still has a decent history in and understanding of the industry), but by and large the people who actually have a breadth of knowledge on games seem to have spun off into their own YouTube channels/Patreon networks by now.
Does anyone remember the journalist who struggled to get past the Cuphead tutorial? No? What about the guy that played Doom 2016 and moved like molasses in the first stage after starting the game?
Anyone play Neptunia V where the first trophy for the intro chapter is "Ooh, looks like you started a new game! Think any game reviewers won't get this one!?"
I don't expect any of them to be hardcore super gamers, but I expect them to be competent enough to complete the game or at least a very significant portion of it, I don't think the majority of them even like games. I generally end up on MetaCritic or Youtube reviews when it comes to deciding if I'm going to buy a new game.
The rating system is borked, yet it's borked on many sites (that review media and products) to the point where it's almost useless. 5 Should be the standard for a game that is playable and okay, but not particularly spectacular or woefully terrible, but instead everything that's average just ends up as an 7 or 8 (in theory, bigger number should mean better, certainly not in practice though). I agree that we should just go back to a 5 point scale instead of 10, 10 point is just meaningless, do 5 and score an average game as 3, anything below as serious issues with story/gameplay/bugs/ect... While anything about 3 is above average or fresh or just outstanding in almost every area that almost everyone should play it.
Sadly, there are now Premium Marketing Packages for a lot of these publications that the companies can pay for which come in with a minimum guarantee. They feature the game all across the publication site etc. It's a marketing cost at this point for the publishers.
Game Reviews are more influenced by money than we realize, unfortunately. It really doesn't lie with the developers but with the publications.
I'll just point this out from the article
"When it’s not obvious that something is a big deal, like a Grand Theft Auto or an Avengers movie or a Game of Thrones-level show, we use metrics like traffic on IGN for news, trailers, and previews to see if the wider audience is interested. We also use publicly available tools like Google Trends and YouTube. Did a lot of people check out the trailer for a new movie? It’s a safe bet they’ll be interested to know more. Did just a few thousand view it on YouTube? Maybe it’s just not clicking with IGN’s audience and a review would suffer the same fate. When those raw numbers leave us uncertain – or even sometimes when they tell us most people aren’t interested, but we are – we often take a chance on something we think is special and should be highlighted, even though it probably won’t do a lot of traffic for us. That’s when you’ll see smaller things make it onto our review list."
"When you consider the main purpose of a review is to answer the question of whether something is actually as good as it appears to be in ads and previews before you decide to spend your time and money on it, there’s no greater waste of everybody’s time and effort than telling people that something they’ve never heard of isn’t good."
Their argument is built on a false premise.
IGN is one of the worst review sites I have ever come across. They have no passion for games, it's more of a business for them.
Remember when there was a person who plagiarised Boomstick Gaming Review. They may have fired him but before it was brought up IGN didn't care about the quality of the review. Now imagine how many other reviews were plagiarised and that we don't know about.
I also recall the Dark Souls 2 DLC review...where the reviewer could not finish the game because it was too hard. How do you even write a review if you can't even beat a game? Somehow that person did.
Now they are being political about things such as the JK Rowling situation. You can easily imagine the game losing points because of this some nonsense reasons. All that for political points.
Gamers need to stop putting these so-called gaming Jornos on a pedestal. Their voice isn't the gospel, every time we see them give a score for a game, no matter how high or low they are should be ignored.
The rating system is borked, yet it's borked on many sites (that review media and products) to the point where it's almost useless. 5 Should be the standard for a game that is playable and okay, but not particularly spectacular or woefully terrible, but instead everything that's average just ends up as an 7 or 8 (in theory, bigger number should mean better, certainly not in practice though). I agree that we should just go back to a 5 point scale instead of 10, 10 point is just meaningless, do 5 and score an average game as 3, anything below as serious issues with story/gameplay/bugs/ect... While anything about 3 is above average or fresh or just outstanding in almost every area that almost everyone should play it.
Sadly, there are now Premium Marketing Packages for a lot of these publications that the companies can pay for which come in with a minimum guarantee. They feature the game all across the publication site etc. It's a marketing cost at this point for the publishers.
Game Reviews are more influenced by money than we realize, unfortunately. It really doesn't lie with the developers but with the publications.