Re-writing History: The IGN Saga

Check any review on any major gaming website, and you'll see them. Gamers angry at the publication for writing a bad review about their favorite game. It's a tale as old as the first issue on Nintendo Power, and it's likely to continue unabated forever. It's just something reviewers have to live with: giving that bad score to a game that they later grew to love, or vice versa. But it seems at least one gaming website is trying to change all that.

Today, IGN announced a new policy (Read about it here). Apparently, due to the changing landscape of gaming releases (with Early Access and alpha builds both being released as full priced titles on Steam), IGN will now have the ability to go back and right what once went wrong, all while hoping the next leap will be the leap home (or I could be confusing them with Scott Bakula).

Doesn't this not sit well with anyone else? It seems so disingenuous. What's the point in writing a review if you can just go back and re-write it? What's the point of developers even trying to release the best possible product if they know they can patch it later and get a better review? The whole thing just seems weird to me, and I know I can't be the only one.

The first game to get the re-write treatment appears to be League of Legends, the massively popular MOBA game from Riot Games. Originally, the game scored a 7.7 which isn't a bad score for an IGN review (which has the overall most fucked reviewing scale I've ever seen, where a 7 is average and a 5 is poor). The new review "replaces" (though it can still be accessed on the site) the old one, and changes the rating to an almost-perfect 9.2, with the only major gripe this time around being the lack of voice chat. Was the first review an accurate representation of League of Legends today? No, since the first review was written back in 2009. But does that mean IGN can completely wipe the slate clean and say "Whoops, sorry guys! We love this game now!" And it's there where I have trouble saying yes. Read the new review here.

See, this is exclusively a problem that arises from Internet publishing, since changing a review in print means taking space away from another story to print a retraction, and since space= money in the world of traditional printing, it was often easier to just stand by your review. There have been a few notable exceptions to this rule, such as Weezer's Pinkerton album being called the third worst album of 1996, which was later retracted in 2004, and it was given a 5 star rating. Obviously gaming is a totally different beast, with patches and updates coming out fast and furious, but I think there are still many reasons to keep this method of reviewing media.

First off, it's almost certain to be exploited by publishers. There's no way it won't be. I can see it know. EA releases a game, claiming it to be "a work in progress", IGN (fittingly) blasts it a new one, EA fixes the issues, IGN changes the score. That just doesn't seem right. A developer always try to release the best possible game the first time, not whenever they feel like it. I might be willing to give a pass on MMORPGs and MOBAs for this, since by their very nature they're constantly evolving and changing, but I'd never be able to excuse it from, say, the next Assassin's Creed. You only get one chance to make a good impression, devs. Make it count.

And the other thing that I could see happening is, fair warning, totally paranoid heresy. I have no basis to believe this might  happen, but the fact that it could happen is enough to give me pause. There is a definite possibility that IGN could change their reviews based on community opinion. Why is this bad, you ask? Well, let's take the game Rust as an example. Now, as the game is now, no reviewer in their right mind would give it anything higher than a 5. It's way too incomplete. We have absolutely no idea what the "final product" (which I'm putting in quotes because to be honest I doubt the devs even care about a final release at this point) will be. However, if you ask most popular gaming websites, Rust is an amazing piece of gaming that deserves your money. Now, if you review Rust and give it a bad score, what do you do when the almost certain backlash comes? The easy answer is change your score to reflect that of the community, because more people happy equals more page views equals more ad revenue. Again this is totally speculation, and I have no evidence that IGN will allow this to happen.

So, overall, does it really matter if IGN can change a number after a game is released? To me, yeah, it does. Games should stand on their own merits at release, and anything that's released for them after the fact should only do one of two things: fix a bug (i.e. game not saving or unbalanced weapons) or extend the universe (i.e. expansions and, to a degree, DLC). The ability for a website to go back a change their review completely undermines that, and I think IGN would do well to disown this policy ASAP. But then again, what do I know?

Update: I am not dead!

Ok so I know I don't have many viewers, bu this is just a PSA that I'll be, from now on, writing at least one post a day, Monday through Saturday. I'm also going to start doing reviews at some point in the near future, probably starting with Titanfall in March. If you have any questions, please leave them in the comments below.