So there’s a petition on Change.org demanding that Metacritic stop including scores from gaming megasite IGN.com in its meta-scores. Why?
Because IGN gave the new Doom reboot a score that was … lower than the scores other critics gave it! Thus proving that IGN.com is irredeemably corrupt!
As petition creator Ivan Kovalev explains this logic.
Doom recently got a 7.1 in IGN, severely altering the score that it deserves, All other reviewers give it sterling reviews and has 90% and above score on steam.
Translation: It’s about ethics in you not liking a game as much as I like it!
Advanced warfare received a 9.1 yet being a mediocre game, IGN is paid off by large devs and shouldn’t be use as a legit source of review.
Translation: Any time anyone disagrees with a consensus I also happen to agree with, someone must be paying them off!
How far does your head have to be up your own posterior that you’re unwilling to accept the possibility that someone has a different opinion on a game than you do?
I’m not sure, but given that there are more than 1200 signatures on the petition so far, we can conclude that there are at least that many gamers whose head-up-their-own-posterior score exceeds this threshold.
The comments from petition signers are of course also quite lovely.
The top comment, from a fellow calling himself “Mike Hunt” — get it, get it? — somehow manages to work Anita Sarkeesian into the mix.
IGN is an uninformed, idiotic source paid off by big companies. I rank them at the same level as Feminist Frequency, the aneurysm causing garbage that kills the braincells of any logical being unfortunate enough to stumble upon it’s lie-speckled articles.
Uh, that should be “its lie-speckled articles.”
“IGN is like marrying crackwhore,” explains commenter Lale Gator from Belgrade, Serbia.
You know she isnt the best but still doesnt matter cause she perform everytime you want it from her,but on the downside she always gives you new STD.
Er, that doesn’t even remotely make sense as an opinion about a game site. It doesn’t even make sense as an opinion about a crack addict.
“Ign in cancer to gaming,”declares memes mcghee from Berlin, Israel.
“The don’t rate games probably,” adds Dexter Dorks of Dohah, Qatar.
At this point you may have noticed that I have given up on correcting the grammar and everything else.
“IGNorance should be punished for consecutively selling out,” Paulo Santos of Hollywood, Florida demands.
“People should not be misleaded!” cries Portugal’s Francisco Novais.
“IGN is polluting the gaming community and should be stoped,” Oscar Gerkman of Vingåker, Sweden angrily mutters between bites of lutefisk.
I guess the people have speakened, huh?
Omg, this is so stupid.
It is okay to not like a video game as much as others. Personally, I don’t like Ocarina of Time. I respect it and see why people like it but I do not. If I had to write a review, it wouldn’t b as positive as others but that is okay.
Doom is selling well, I love the game because I work long hours and complex storylines are fun but time consuming. I like simple games with fun multiplayer, that is Doom.
Why is everything on the internet now a conspiracy? Even game reviews.
I watched a play through of the new Doom because of my misplaced nostalgia for the franchise, and yeah, 7.1 seems about right. It’s certainly better than Doom 3 and its gay demons* but the lack of enemy types and minimal story hold it back. The combat system makes the whole thing into Immunity Frames: The Video Game. A shame, because the same studio rebooted Wolfenstein a few years back and that was really great.
*Because they kept coming out of the closet! If you played Doom 3 that’s a hilarious joke, take my word for it.
I looked up the Swedish guy. He turned 17 two months ago.
And here I always thought selling out was something you could only do once. In between consecutive sell outs, do you have to sell back in?
But it’s so nice to see these folks protecting the little guy from the corrupt ratings manipulation of the Big Game Devs. The little guy being, in this instance, Bethesda Softworks, developer of the Elder Scrolls games as well as Fallouts 3 and 4. Bethesda is a subsidiary of ZeniMax Media Inc., a private company that Wikipedia tells me was reported as being worth 1.2B 9 years ago. You can’t keep little ZeniMax down with your machinations, Big Gaming!
How is it news that IGN are not worth reading? For many years now they’ve managed the difficult task of being both obsolete and useless. The fact that they still exist at all is surprising. The fact that they’re corrupt is definitely not surprising.
Doubtless that’s just me being a casual, though. These people are real gamers and aren’t fooled.
IGN is pretty well-known for giving reviews rather proportional to the amount of money the publisher spends on advertising. Pretty common among the larger reviewers; infamous incident back in 2007 with Kane And Lynch where Jeff Gerstmann gave it a low score at GameSpot, the publisher pulled their ads, Jeff Gerstmann was fired on nebulous tone grounds and the review was removed, and the ads came back. I pretty much stopped paying attention to the GameSpot-Gamespy-IGN semi-interconnected cluster over that.
I wounder if it ever occurred to gators that maybe that it was all the sites that gave Doom higher reviews where that ones who got payed off and IGN was the one giving a non-bias review.
@Guy
IGN and gamespot are one in the same?Oh ok then I guess IGN wasn’t the un bribed honest review here but I still think its possible that all the over reviewers where payed off as.
Back in the early 90’s Doom was a benchmark game, you could always tell how fast your graphics card was by how well it could run it. I think that is the only reason Doom is regarded the way it is. These kids who were not even born then, have a kind of false nostalgia for a game they didn’t play.
This article is interesting, but a little off topic. It’s about how feminine games are culturally devalued.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/jun/05/girly-games-history-of-pink-rachel-weil
I’m not sure about how connected they are exactly, mostly just that IGN crosslinked to the others heavily back when I read them and they behave in similar fashions. My understanding is that companies don’t pay off the reviewers to give their opposition lower scores, but set the effective going rate for good ones.
Holy crap, IGN still has a reader? Does he surf there on Netscape after dialing up on AOL?
This is snapshot, in miniature and high definition, of everything that’s wrong with polls. If the polls are well-run, you can find out with a pretty high degree of certainty what people think…but you can’t find out with any certainty whatsoever whether or not their thoughts are the right ones. IOW, how good of a game Doom is will always be a matter of opinion, not fact.
…
sweet fancy moses, but i love reading their hilarious grammars.
@Virgin Mary
Yeah. They guy I looked up was born in 1999, i.e. Doom and Doom II came out many years before he was even born. He was 5 years old when Doom III came out. They’re like conservatives, nostalgic for a time they never knew in the first place.
There’s actual evidence that IGN has been paid off for game reviews? Interesting. Terrible awful worst ex boyfriend used to tell me that, but he also believed Olivia Munn was a dastardly Fake Gamer Girl who made a profession of entrapping gamer boners, so I’ve always considered his opinions on the intersection between video games and other media to be… suspect.
But again, if that is the case, I’m not really worried about Bethesda being a victim.
These are probably the same men/boys who tell women and girls to stop complaining about first world problems and should worry about the poor women and girls in other countries.
??? The COD teams are pretty big as developers go, not sure I understand that line of argument.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/insertcoin/2015/09/07/mad-max-and-gamings-5-10-review-score-system/#1cbac2d5dcee
“All this said, bashing anyone mercilessly for a review score needs to uh, not do that. The whole concept of questioning someone’s credentials and motives and intentions because of a score is absurd, and this latest 5/10 controversy has been blown out of proportion for all the wrong reasons.
I’m also watching Jim Sterling getting ripped for giving Metal Gear Solid 5 only a 9/10, and having a fond flashback to when I was torn a new one for a month after I gave Halo 4 an 8/10.
I think there’s a conversation to be had about how we score games, but ripping apart a reviewer or outlet for a specific score is never productive, and needs to stop. Though I’m not naïve enough to think that will actually happen.”
Surprise: Oscar Gerkman is a 4channer.
On the fun side, the IGNorance play on words is almost cute.
I hear DOOM is actually quite good, at least from a certain goatdog I follow online (you get a nonexistent cookies if you can tell who I’m talking about and if not, the person I’m talking about can be a bit NSFW if you decide to snoop).
One of the silliest things is that 7.1 should mean it’s actually pretty good because 5 should be the standard. As for IGN, I sometimes go there if I see it in a search but I’m no avid reader of the site. What’s so special about IGN that makes anyone want to be a regular reader?
For all of his faults, I do agree with Ben “Yahtzee” Croshaw on this one: It’s impossible to give an arbitrary number to an opinion on a game. You can’t quantify “opinion” in the basis of a score, and if you need a high score in order to feel good about liking a game, maybe you need to stop letting other people dictate what is and isn’t okay for you to like, because you’ll only end up offended when someone doesn’t share the same absolute opinion as you.
The thing about game reviews is: They’re all subjective as fuck. If you don’t like a game review, find someone who reviewed it more to your liking. If you don’t think IGN bootlicked Bethesda enough (I’m sure everyone’s still cleaning the taste of polished leather off of their tongues from Fallout 4), go find another reviewer who licked those boots to your liking.
Or, you can stand the fuck up, and realize that one person’s opinion of a game shouldn’t matter that fucking much to you, and if you like a game, then you fucking like it, regardless of what a critic said. If you like a game, no one’s fucking stopping you. Like your damn games.
Do I agree with the fact that Morrowind has some broken game mechanics? Abso-fucking-loutely. Do I still love it? Fuck yes.
Did DMC get dead-panned by critics and fanboys alike? Yup. Do I still enjoy it? Fuck yeah!
Do feminist critics point out that a game might contain sexist, racist, or otherwise bigoted elements? Yup, and I’ve done it myself. Does that mean I stop liking games they say are problematic? Fuck no.
I like what games I like, and I’m not going to throw a temper tantrum because a critic said they didn’t like it.
On the topic of GGers and their cries of “Objectivity!”: Bullshit.
They don’t care if reviews are subjective or objective. They just want to hear all the games they like getting praised and the devs getting their asses properly kissed, and all the games they don’t like getting thrown in the nearest fire pit.
Hypocrisy, thy name is GamerGate.
(Also, mocking ESL people’s grammar is in bad taste – although with names like “Memes McGhee” and locations like “Berlin, Israel,” I can’t really put too much stock in any of them being real and not just #Shields, huh.)
Echoing what Paraoxical says, games can be both flawed and enjoyable.
I love Fallout 4, but I don’t like how it uses a poor man’s version of the Mass Effect dialogue menu or that the perks require the player to be a certain level. However, I understand that Beth was trying to streamline something, and they were trying to preserve some sense of game balance at the cost of a bit of player freedom.
Also, I see people criticise the guns of Fallout 4 for being odd choices, like how the Assault Rifle fires a common bullet but 5.56 is rare in-game (and the gun looks like a Lewis Gun and not an assault rifle at all). Also, why does the Combat Rifle fire the .45 pistol bullet and why doesn’t the .44 Pistol have a .38 option when .38 was one of the most common revolver bullets in the 50s, which Fallout is inspired by? But, while I can agree these are problems, the unusual guns give the game a more unique aesthetic than the typical “pick one of 20 different AR-15 variants and a token AK” that many games seem fond of.
Also about Fallout, New Vegas is my favorite game ever, and I play on 360 without mods. I played it so much the disk broke in the console, and I promptly got the Ultimate Edition with all the expansion packs. In fact, its the only game I have any significant DLC for. And it’s my favorite in spite of the ugly character models and frequent environment clipping, and the fact that the shooting doesn’t even feel that great. And yet, I love it anyway, in part because I feel like it captures a sense of adventure so well.
I love how progressives are the ones who get outraged over nothing.
I would not be surprised if among thoses 1200 peoples a few are actuals devs of Doom whose bonus is tied to metacritic score. The fact metacritic is so important to the actual pay of a bunch of people isn’t sane nor healthy.
The few moment I have seen of it made me think it would not even be 7.1 on my scale. I am not gonna throw a tantrum for that, especially since I have understood that people seem to actually find something worth their times in thoses AAA games. That sadden me because it’s less money for games I like, but on the other hand games I like seem to do just well, so eh.