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I've read a few reviews on there, and they seem to have glowing reviews, for example Total Warhammer 3 and Pharoah.
These are games that other reviewers have critically examined, and at least when it comes to Total Warhammer 3 valid criticisms.
Their reviews seem more elaborate advertisements rather than actual reviews.
Anybody else have opinions on their reviews?
Hi Reddit! I’m Tom Marks, Executive Reviews Editor in charge of game reviews at IGN. Joining me is Dan Stapleton (u/danstapleton), who held this seat previously before becoming our overall Director of Reviews last year.
Many moons ago, Dan would host a reviews AMA here on r/games annually to shed some light on our process, our reviews philosophy, his perfect sunday, and anything else y’all wanted to know about. I’m hoping to pick that torch back up, so we’ll be here today starting around 10am PT to answer whatever questions you have – ask us anything!
For some quick background on us: I studied game design at UCLA, after which I got a job at PC Gamer in 2014 – I became IGN’s PC Editor in 2017, swapped to a more general editor role the year after, formally joined the reviews team as Dan’s right-hand man in 2019, and finally took the reins as Executive Editor officially this year. Meanwhile, Dan has been around since time itself, starting at PC Gamer in 2003 (a coincidence, I swear) before becoming Editor-in-Chief of GameSpy in 2011, then joining IGN to lead game reviews in 2013, and now overseeing all our reviews coverage (games, entertainment, tech, etc).
As reviews editors, we generally work behind the scenes to keep track of upcoming games, find the right reviewers to assign to them, provide feedback on the written and video versions of those reviews, and enforce our reviews policy and philosophy along the way. We do take on the occasional review ourselves as well, and you can check out all the ones we’ve written for IGN here:
Tom’s author page
Dan’s author page
Lastly, copying Dan’s homework a bit from his last AMA in 2017, here are answers to a few particularly common questions right off the bat:
You can get a job at IGN by watching this page and applying for jobs when one looks like a fit for you!
No, we don't take bribes or sell review scores. Here's our policy page, which also lays out exactly how we define what each score means.
It may have been nine years since Dan posted this answer about why IGN is not going to get rid of review scores anytime soon, but it’s just as true now as it was back then. (Though we have removed the decimal place from our scores since then!)
Here’s a breakdown of why it can feel like reviewers only give high scores - bonus fact, we gave nearly as many 4s in 2023 as the previous three years combined!
Update - 3:56pm PT: Dan and I will still be answering questions when we can, but we'll probably be doing so a little slower/less frequently from this point on. Thanks to everyone who has posted, sorry if we haven't been able to get to you yet and we hope folk found it useful!
Update 2 - Jan 25, 10:45am PT: I believe we've hit nearly all of the questions that aren't either trolling or repeats of stuff we already answered (apologies if I missed something that's not one of those, I am still answering stuff here and there as they come in) but one question/comment we've gotten a LOT is why we don't have multiple reviewers on a single game to provide different perspectives - and Dan actually wrote an article all about that idea already! Hope that provides some more insight for folk.