On Tuesday, Bethesda Softworks – publisher of popular game series The Elder Scrolls and Fallout, as well as renowned games like Wolfenstein, Doom, and Dishonored – announced it would no longer provide reviewers access to its unreleased games until 24 hours before launch. It’s a policy that upends decades of gamers being able to rely on impartial critics to provide them an idea of a game’s quality when it goes on sale. We think this policy is damaging – for informed gamers, for games criticism in general, and even for Bethesda.

Obviously, Bethesda’s games are its property to do with as it pleases, and there is certainly nothing requiring them to be submitted for review. However, there is a reason providing early access to critics has been the standard practice in the games industry (as well as film, books, etc) since the very beginning: It’s a show of good faith. Allowing independent critics to evaluate a product and recommend it accordingly is a courtesy to consumers, and a demonstration that publishers and developers have confidence in the thing they’re asking you to spend money on and in the review process.

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When we look ahead to Dishonored 2 next month, and the rebooted Prey

“ Most developers love to get critical feedback.

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We know developers and publishers appreciate reviews for all of those reasons, and perhaps there are more. But to most critics – and all of us at IGN – those are all side-effects. We’re not writing reviews for developers’ sake. They are not our audience, and we don’t presume to know more about game design than game designers do. We review games for you, for the express purpose of helping to guide you to the ones we think are amazing and avoid the ones we don’t think are as good.

“ Google Trends shows when the world is searching for reviews.

For example, here is a Google Trends chart of search traffic for “Dishonored review” for the month it came out, October 2012. This is a very typical graph of interest for a game that’s just come out.

The peak is release day, October 9. Just two days later, interest had fallen by nearly half. A week later it was down to a quarter of the peak. Remember, these searches represent the interest level of gamers everywhere in seeking out reviews – in other words, this is when most people wanted to know if Dishonored was any good. Had Bethesda’s new policy been in effect at the time, the vast majority of those people will find only limited, rushed impressions that could skew either excessively negative or positive in circumstances where the game in question starts strong and gets boring or starts weak but gets better over time. So while Bethesda may understand that their players value reviews, the policy ignores when reviews are at their most valuable to gamers.

“ The price of games is not prohibitive for IGN.

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In the interest of putting cards on the table, it’s also worth noting that IGN profits from traffic on reviews, just as any ad-based publication does. However, reviews do not make up a majority of our traffic, and the site would not wither and die even if we never posted another review. In fact, reviewing smaller games is often a money-losing proposition for us, but it’s something we’re willing to do because we view it as our responsibility to highlight games we find interesting for our community. And while it’s impossible to do a direct one-to-one comparison of the same game reviewed two different ways, our numbers indicate that a review in progress does significantly less traffic than we’d get if we jumped the gun and slapped a score on a game without having played through it completely or having tested the multiplayer servers in a live environment. Again, we do this because we think it’s responsible criticism, even if it takes longer and makes less money. And because individual reviewers do not earn more money based on the traffic of their articles, there is no incentive for them to sensationalize their opinions.

“ Critics would love to be able to take a month to review each game.

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“ A rushed review will almost never be as thorough as it could have been.

IGN’s reviewers are not totally immune to the effects of working under rushed conditions, but due to the support of the many other types of content we create around new games as they come out, we’re in a fortunate position where we’re able to resist the rush and hold our final review scores until we feel they’re ready (as we did with No Man’s Sky, Mafia 3, WWE 2K17, and others). Unfortunately, that comes at the cost of being able to offer you the timely, completed reviews you’ve come to expect from us over the past 20 years.

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It’s true that even in absence of timely reviews you’ll be always be able to look at streamers on Twitch and YouTube and IGN to watch a game being played to decide if you like it, and that can be a great help. But seeing a few minutes or a few hours of gameplay still isn’t going to give you the full picture, or an analysis from someone who’s put in dozens of hours and has had time to think about why a game works or doesn’t and put those thoughts into words. This was certainly the case for No Man’s Sky, which seemed exciting for the first few hours but quickly became repetitive and dull. The difference between a knee-jerk reaction and an informed review is time.

“ These policies absolutely do not infringe on anyone’s right to criticize games.

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Where we go from here is up to Bethesda and other publishers. For IGN’s part, even though our access to certain games may begin later, we will continue to take the time that’s needed to play them to completion (where reasonable) before assigning them final scores, providing you with review-in-progress updates as we go. We’ll also keep producing all our traditional live streams, Let’s Plays, video clips, wiki guides, and more.

I would never ask any gamer not to buy a game they’re excited about to make a statement about a review policy – and I, for one, intend to play Dishonored 2 next month (unless reviews are unexpectedly poor). I can only echo Bethesda’s advice that gamers who care about avoiding disappointing games wait for reviews to come out before buying, and to think about how much you value reviews where the critic has been able to take the time to thoroughly play a game and consider its strengths and weaknesses. And if you don’t, you might be surprised how much you’d miss them if they were to disappear.

Dan Stapleton is IGN's Reviews Editor. You can follow him on Twitter to hear gaming rants and lots of random Simpsons references.