In the shooter Doom, a passionate fan is dissatisfied with the game review rating on a US site. He quickly called for a petition.
Game reviews from gaming sites are always a bit of a dilemma: The enthusiastic fans of a game can never have the overall score high enough, while meticulous critics would love to lower the rating for every little flaw. One thing is certain: The reviewers can never please everyone.
Now a curious phenomenon has occurred regarding the shooter Doom: A fan was so unhappy with the rating from the US site IGN that he called for a petition online.
Doom fan starts petition because he finds the rating too low
IGN rated the game just a few days ago with only 7.1 out of 10 possible points, which according to the American Ivan Kovalev is far too low. Since this score would distort the average on the rating pool website Metacritic, he is now demanding that IGN’s review be removed from there.
For this, he promptly directed a petition to Metacritic, in which he explains that IGN ruins the overall score. The other ratings are all excellent, just as Doom deserves.
Out of 35 ratings, only four are below 8, several sites even award more than 9 points to Doom. Overall, the game from id Software currently has an average score of 8.5 on this review aggregator portal.
To give his petition more weight, Kovalev brings up Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare: This game, which he considers average, received a score of 9.1 points from IGN. Therefore, he concludes that IGN is being “bribed” by “big developers” and is not a reliable source for reviews.
So far, the Doom enthusiast has managed to mobilize nearly 1600 supporters for his petition. Whether Metacritic will respond to this is rather unlikely. Because as mentioned: In game reviews, the reviewers can never please everyone. By the way, 92% of user reviews on Steam are positive.
In Stellaris, the publisher defends the tester
Curious: Just two weeks ago, there was a very similar case at IGN. Players suspected “rigging” with the strategy game Stellaris. Fans suspected that the tester clearly had a problem with publisher Paradox and wanted to give them a bad rating as revenge, trying to support this with tweets from the tester.
Here, the publisher of the game, Paradox, intervened and defended the IGN tester: Reviews are subjective, the tester is a professional, and there are no doubts about the integrity of the review.
