Just because throwing the cat amongst the pigeons at 3am is fun, I have never quite understood why some games media sites who employ multiple reviewers, go out of their way to hide and minimize the byline of the review, knowingly and explicitly allow said reviews to be aggregated on Metacritic with a score and yet without a byline there either and then proceed to snivel when people call their sites out for inconsistency of opinion.



"b..b...but, we have more than one reviewer with more than one opinion!" Great but you've not only made no effort to give those people name recognition to make sure readers are fully aware of who is reviewing what and what their personal preferences, personality and particular biases are, but you've actually gone out of your way to minimize that as much as possible. Your priority is the use of those reviewers to strengthen your brand identity as a site, usually at their expense. You aren't interested in viewers attributing reviews to the people who wrote them, you want them to attribute them to your collective brand. When you continue to do that, when you make it your business model, you forfeit the right to complain when people start calling your brand out for ridiculous inconsistencies and contradictions. You want it both ways. You want to maintain your position in the market by outproducing individual critics and reviewers through sheer weight of content, staff numbers and pre-eminence when it comes to getting access from publishers, but you also somehow want everyone to treat each mass-produced piece as an individually crafted, well-defined work of criticism in which the viewer is fully aware of the personal attributes, history and likes/dislikes of the writer. Well, ya can't when you are homogeneous by design. Of course people think you're inconsistent and contradictory when you present yourself as a single, monolithic entity.



If you hadn't already guessed the biggest culprit of that is IGN but they're far from the only ones. Go and have a look at IGN. Go to their reviews section. You will see a list of games. What you will not see is a list of who reviewed them. That's nowhere to be found. Click on a review, you'll be taken to another page (that isn't the review...) no byline there either. No names to be found. The only evidence that anybody actually wrote these things is a tiny little name halfway down the page once you've clicked through to the actual review text. That's it. Not a picture, not a bio, no if you want to find that you've gotta actually click away from the review to a staff page, which often has absolutely no information on it. I clicked 3 of their latest reviews and then that tiny little byline text to take me to the separate profile pages. Bugger all. You'd think a list of their reviews would be front and center there. Hahahaha don't be ridiculous thats far too sensible. The sad thing is, there's a "followers" counter. Oh lord is that depressing. 2 of them had 0. That speaks volumes as to how much priority IGN puts on the damn byline and building up its reviewers to actually have a face and identity of their own. Let's call it what it is. Reviewers them for are interchangeable and disposable tools. Why bother building them up if your company is a revolving door of these guys anyway, or if you're just bringing in freelancers for chump-change to bulk out your content? They don't invest in their critics and that is why they're often not taken seriously. That is why they're called out as a soulless site with contradictory, nonsensical opinions, because as far as pretty much everybody is concerned, nobody actually works there and IGN is actually an army of robots.



Can ya actually blame em though? Many of the people who had a personality and following realized "why am I working for these guys when I can be independent and do much better?" and went and did just that. I don't hate the people that work for IGN, at least not on the content creation side, I hate the company, its policies, how it chews people up and spits them out and despite waning influence, how much they continue to prop up AAA, complicit in the hype engines of big publishers.



So yeah, the next time you see anyone defend a place like IGN with "there are multiple reviewers, with multiple opinions!", ask em to name 4 people that work there. Unless you're arguing with somebody who does, I doubt you'll get an answer.