Login: dewitt                            Name: DeWitt Clinton
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I’d give it a solid 8.

Of the past 30 reviews on IGN, 17 have a score “8” (out of a possible “10”). 9 are rated a “7”. Only 4 reviews rate any other score at all, and not one product rates below a “5”.

On the one hand, I get that sites like IGN review only high profile products, and reviews are expensive content to produce. This will naturally skew results towards better products in general, since the truly terrible products won’t even get the time of day.

But on the other hand, a review score of “8” is lazy. At best, it says, “maybe don’t not buy this product.”

At worst, any review distribution so heavily biased towards “8”’s and “9’s” sure appears like the editors are going out of their way not to say anything negative at all about products where keeping up a steady supply of product is existential to their own survival.

“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.” -Upton Sinclair

I’m not saying it is that way. I’m not saying it isn’t. But the appearances of such a distribution are terrible, and undermine the credibility of IGN reviews overall.

By way of light comparision, in job interviews I try to never to rate candidates “leaning hire.” “Leaning Hire” is a low-value signal to feed into what needs ultimately to be a strictly binary decision. I’ve even heard of scoring systems that outright disallow liminal ratings, e.g., “no 7’s or 8’s”, thus avoiding taking the easy way out.

For followup: It would be illustrative to run each review through a LLM to parse sentiment and predict a proper score. I suspect that even if there is a thumb on the editorial scale, the words themselves reveal the full distribution of opinions far more than the numbers do.

(And that Mixtape review score will be a topic of mockery discussion for years to come.)