IGN gets its GOTY right, but its ratings wrong

IGN has released its console-specific GOTY awards and Fallout 3 has come out on top with the top honors for the XBox 360, which is something I can fully agree with.  What’s odd about it, however, is that Fallout 3 received a 9.6 from IGN just a couple months ago while GTA IV received a perfect 10 when it came out earlier this year.

Now, I’m sensitive to the fact that “better” games can come out later and receive worse scores than earlier, lesser games.  Certainly, game reviews are but a snapshot in time and the context of when something comes out is certainly going to color the rating.  This actually can happen all the time when “clones” of originally innovative games come out… they’re typically “better” than the original because the developer was able to build on top of what came before it, but will receive a lesser score simply because it’s no longer innovative.  There’s nothing particularly wrong with that.

But, Fallout 3 is not a “clone” of GTA IV, and GTA IV came out only a few months before.  It really doesn’t make sense to me that two completely different kinds of games would come out in the same year and the supposedly superior game comes out with a worse review.

Now, there are a number of possible factors that could have contributed to this:

1. I was right and GTA IV was simply vastly overrated when it came out this year.  IGN basically succumbed completely to the hype and couldn’t make an objective judgment about the game.
2. IGN felt obligated to give the game a ridiculously high score since it got the “exclusive” review, which should always be judged with some skepticism.
3. Different editors wrote the two reviews and simply had differing opinions, and more editors overall thought Fallout 3 was the superior game despite the editor in charge of the GTA IV review disagreeing.
4. Some amount of “recency” effect is influencing their decision.
5. Fallout 3 is the superior game, but some flaws/bugs end up “docking” more points than GTA IV. The “whole” of Fallout 3 was still superior to the “sum of its parts” somehow.

It’s very likely #3 and perhaps #4 plays a large part in this, but it still seems like a big site like IGN should know better, especially when it’s dealing with heavily hyped “exclusive” reviews. While I’m aware that only one editor is responsible for writing the reviews, it was my understanding that they all consulted on the scores.  In fact, a second editor gave “Another Take” at the end of the review and gave equally effusive praise.  It doesn’t seem like he had any objection to the perfect 10 score either.  And not only was it a perfect 10, but every SUB-category received a perfect 10 as well (Graphics, presentation, etc), whereas Fallout 3 only received a perfect 10 in “Gameplay.”

There’s no perfect review system and as we’ve all discussed before, the actual numerical ratings of games is far less important than the text of the reviews.  But the numbers are still there, and they’re meant to act as some sort of guideline, and something just doesn’t look right when a completely different, lower-rated game is judged to be superior to a game released that same year that received the maximum possible score that has only been doled out 3 or 4 times in the history of the publication.

I’m not sure what exactly the remedy to this is other than for IGN to try and keep their hype in check and potentially not do any more “exclusive” reviews, but something didn’t seem to work here, and IGN should be aware of it.