Sorry @danstapleton but replying claiming I've condemned games for performance before is entirely missing the point. Did you actually read what I said? Your review is entirely fine. The issue is your score. I have never scored anything. You know the wonderful thing about not scoring a game? You can say anything you like, you can dislike a game for the most personal and minority of reasons and it absolutely will not matter, because the audience is forced to take that criticism in context with the rest of the review and judge whether or not that would be important to them. As soon as you create a score, you give the ability for audience members to judge the game outside of the context of everything you said and in this case, on a very popular and influential external website like Metacritic. Personally as a critic I'd be horrified at that prospect. Companies ask us for permission for box quotes even though they don't have to and yet we're supposed to just let Metacritic take our score, change it to fit their "100% or bust" system, take a quote of their choice and then flatout refuse to change it at any point? Does that not horrify you? It would me.


When it comes to performance critique my audience knows for certain that its only the experience of one person on at most 3 configurations. They know to then go on and look at other experiences to see if there's a common problem. We've also learned through self-reflection that giving more general, aggregate performance information is more useful to the consumer than emphasizing our personal experience. Better to refer to what the majority are experiencing, on more common hardware configurations, which is very easy to do when you're dealing with a game post launch that is in the wild and being played by hundreds of thousands of people on Steam. Like I said, with that reply you've missed the point of what I said entirely, maybe not even realized that the original post was a defense of your review and not a criticism of it. The clue would have been in the first line but, perhaps you skipped that, looking for my final score? It's a 7.


You go onto say "well, we must have scores because if we don't people who want scores will go elsewhere". 1) It's gotta suck to have such low confidence in your audience that you think they have that little loyalty to your outlet, that sounds like the kind of problem that needs addressing. You have the most well-funded writing team in the industry with a ton of talent there and more access than any other outlet on the planet. What do you have to be scared of? 2) This is why hammering a games score for such a rare technical problem is potentially problematic. You confirm this by saying that score-oriented people exist, so much so in fact that you are apparently scared they'll stop reading you if you stop using scores, therefore it stands to reason that both your score and more concerningly, the out-of-context Metascore genuinely affects their purchasing decision. With this knowledge in mind and knowing that Metacritic cannot change your score, when dealing with an issue that you yourself acknowledge in the article is both rare and you would have also known was getting fixed (we knew there was a beta patch coming, you had worked directly with Arkane on save issues so they would have told you this as well), pulling the trigger on a 4/10 which Metacritic will never change, based almost entirely on that bug is in my view not a good choice.


The power of Metacritic and scores is a problem your outlet has helped create. By pandering to these silly people who take score so seriously, afraid you'll lose them as an audience if you don't (you know what I said to people who don't wanna watch long videos with no scores? See ya, don't let the door hit you on the way out), your site is feeding the problem and the power of Metacritic. You can't operate without acknowledging that it exists and that all your reviews are on it, nor that as IGN your scores are weighted over almost every other outlets in Metacritics hidden calculations. The reality is that people will not read the review and they will not see any update you post about performance or bugs, they will see that score, whatever cherry-picked quote Metacritic decides to plop on the page and that'll influence their decision. You cannot operate as a Metacritic published outlet and then go onto pretend Metacritic does not exist. It does and you have a responsibility to what goes on there as long as you continue to be voluntarily listed on it.


You rightly argue your duty is to the consumer. Absolutely true. As of the beta patch 14 hours ago though, that duty to the consumer isn't fulfilled. Metacritics entry on the game for IGN is now misleading and inaccurate. It's not even the score that's necessarily the issue now, read the quote they chose. "If the PC version of Prey hadn’t become completely unplayable from crashes and save-game corruption just as it was hitting its stride, I’d have called it a very good or perhaps even great game." They claim the games unplayable. They don't even mention the part of your article that says the bug appears to be rare. According to Metacritic, in IGNs estimation, Prey is literally unplayable on PC (not your PC, just PC in general), which was factually false prior to the patch and is certainly factually false now that the beta patch is available. That isn't helpful to the consumer and as you rightly pointed out, your first duty is to them.


I'm sorry that a company as financially sound and in such a safe position in the market as IGN isn't willing to set an example and remove scores from the equation (or at least themselves from Metacritic). If you truly believe it's vital to your relevance as a critical outlet, that's kinda sad. I've seen people defend scores in a variety of ways. A lot of those are arguments of personal preference and they can't inherently be wrong. People have the right to put a score on a game. Most of the critics I really respect still use scores. That hasn't changed my respect for them. You chose specifically though to defend the practice by saying that you might lose viewers if you didn't do it, so I think it's justifiable to hold you to that. That to me is an admission that you're doing something that you acknowledge is harmful, but you're doing it because the bottom line matters more. Try not to take this the wrong way but I kinda pity you and the other writers over there, it must be awful to be shackled like that to the ways of the past because of company profit margin. Hopefully you guys get to go independent at some point on Patreon and do things your way, there's pretty clearly a lot of talent over there (even after most of it ran off to make Kindafunny).


Finally, as much as it's nice that IGN are finally starting to care about PC performance issues and factor bugs into their reviews, you've gotta admit its a pretty odd look when you give Dishonored 2 a 93%, a game which had widespread issues on PC across the board and Fallout 4 a 95%, a game that's still jank and buggy to this day. That's the other problem with scores, people will look for consistency and then they'll see something like that and find none. Should they look for consistency? Ideally no, it's a stupid made up number, but if you have a score system there's an expectation that its not just a made up number, that it has some meaning and follows a set of rules. It's pseudo-objectivity, an effort to quantify complex subjective opinion mixed with objective technical (but configuration dependent) experience, into an arbitrary value. If you read that back the whole practice seems absurd doesn't it? Yeah, that's kinda my point.


I hope some day an outlet of your status and prominence will take the lead in changing our industry for the better in this regard. In the meantime, one can only hope that somebody doesn't come along, read that Metacritic quote and score, then decide to move onto another game over a bug they now with the patch, will likely never, ever have to worry about.