Ex-IGN employee Alanah Pearce has made a video about the massive 10/10s littered across IGN, Metacritic, and other reviewer sites, mainly spurred on by The Last of Us: Part II.
I don't know why I was expecting something reasonable. To her credit, I suppose, it's maybe
half reasonable.
Her opening justifications for the skewed review scores are incredibly weak. I don't buy for a second that a 5/10 score isn't average when IGN openly operates on a scale of 1 to 10 and
most people haven't read IGN's list of score meanings. It's a numeric scale from 1 to 10. The number 5 clearly falls in the middle. It doesn't require anything beyond elementary school mathematical knowledge to immediately grasp "that must be a middling score" and therefore the immediate corollary of "7 must be a notably above average score". She paints 7 as "average" because major publications will deliberately look for higher-end titles to review, not wanting to waste their time with trash - and that's completely valid, except that that doesn't make 7 an "average" score on the scale of 1 to 10, but rather the "average" score issued by the publication in question. It says nothing about the relative quality of individual games and everything about which games the publication chooses to review. On the scale of 1 to 10, 5 is average; 7 is noticeably above average. Insisting that 7 is average is at best poor communication and at worst deliberately deceptive.
AAA isn't the bastion of high-quality games she makes it out to be. It's the bastion of games with millions of dollars pumped into graphics, writing, and marketing, most of which do very little actual groundbreaking in terms of
gameplay, which ostensibly is the thing a
game review should primarily care about. There's
plenty of below-mediocre trash fires in AAA, and a mountain of paint-by-numbers yearly releases that do nothing noteworthy, yet somehow most of them earn 7 or more on the 1-10 scale, and it takes a truly
abysmally bad game like
Fallout 76 for IGN to dip down to a mere 5, which on the IGN scale is officially labeled "mediocre". Pardon me while I feign surprise at how the scoring scale actually appears to work, and at how it doesn't line up at all with how Alanah describes it.
Her points on Metacritic's invisible proprietary fuckery with review scores and unscored reviews are 100% accurate.
Her points on directing more criticism at publishers are excellent (aside from "journalists are on your side", which is hilariously dumb). Publishers control access to games. They should be pushed to be more permissive.
Her mention of game reviews not being a big driving force for sales is spot-on, but not terribly relevant because publishers aren't completely rational beings. Publishers' literal job is to, among other things, fiercely protect the public perception of the things they're overseeing, in order to maximize profit. They experience fear. They react irrationally to things that shouldn't require fear responses. They do things like getting pissed off at Jason Schreier for repeatedly leaking things, in the name of controlling public perception of their products. You don't need to be the big fish in the pond to put egg on a publisher's face.
Her repeated assertions that reviews are definitely the honest opinion of the person who wrote them can be defanged with two simple words: Jeff Gerstmann. Or, alternately, a number of additional words: Jeff Gerstmann was fired from Gamespot for the high crime of giving a big game (whose publisher was heavily advertising said game on Gamespot) a relatively low score, which pissed off the advertiser (who, again, was the game's publisher). We know this because the contract that forced Gerstmann to remain silent about this was rendered void when CBS (Gamespot's parent company) purchased Giant Bomb and brought Gerstmann back under his old umbrella, and he explained this himself. Eidos pulled advertising for
Kane & Lynch: Dead Men after Gerstmann's score for that game provoked their wrath.
Nobody buys review scores or reviewers directly. That sort of payola would be ratted out immediately by low-end games writers desperate for a "real" story. No, the real cancer is the fiscal conflict of interest, the fact that the publications that review the games are directly dependent upon the publishers of said games for advertising dollars, review copies, press event invitations, and special treatment in general. Nobody wants to be the next Kotaku and piss off a big publisher for the sake of clicks. The name of the game is playing it safe.
, that was an interesting quest, and I love how the good ending turned out where the Inquisitor is fully convinced she was in fact visited by Mary, and sentences her to some penance that really isn't, and was forced by the circumstances of the times to make her submit.
I'm absolutely going to try out 
