https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DEU7HHyV0AA-OYS.jpg:large @Danstapleton pls, stop pretending to be dumber than you are. I don't think you're this thickheaded. Here are some blindly obvious reasons why that is terrible false equivalency.

1) Nobody reviewing on Youtube works for Youtube. Everybody is an independent contractor in a revenue sharing agreement and everybody owns their content. Youtube is a 3rd party host for independently owned content. An analogue for your bad comparison would be "huh, people keep complaining that NBC is inconsistent with their opinions, but nobody complains that cable is inconsistent with its opinions!" Really, come on.

2) Youtube is not listed on Metacritic. Some individual producers that happen to post to Youtube are listed, individually, on Metacritic. None of those opinions are attributed to Youtube, every review published on IGN is attributed to IGN.

3) Metacritic and the rest of the internet list your reviews as "IGN reviews" not by the byline, because you actively go out of your way to suppress the byline. Your business practices elevate the IGN brand over the people who review for it. You ask to be treated as a single entity, so people treat you as a single entity.

4) Your willing participation in Metacritic aggregation and insistence on continuing to score everything, results in people comparing numbers and scratching their head when they don't either line-up with what was said in the review or match up consistently with other reviews on the site. If you did not want people to do this then what is the point of scores at all? People are naturally going to do that when you try to present something completely subjective as something that feigns objectivity. Christ the age old example of God Hands 3.0 vs Imagine Babyz 7.5 will never be forgotten. If scores don't serve as a way to quickly compare one title vs another, what the hell are they for?

There are plenty of traditional media sites that do a better job of emphasising who the writer is and what they think, their preferences, biases, likes and dislikes. As a result of that the people who read those sites are better equipped to understand where an opinion is coming from. An opinion without that context is basically worthless, outside of objective technical information such as framerate cap and a feature list, most of which we can find on the back of a box and don't need a review for.

In conclusion. Of course you will defend your site, you're the editor of it, but you're a smart educated guy and you can do it far better than that.