How do reviews work on Instant Gaming News?
, by Thibaut
You may have noticed that a major new feature made its debut on the site this week. That’s right, we’re embarking on the risky endeavor of game reviews. Since gaming reviews are often met with a certain degree of skepticism (sometimes justified) from readers, we wanted to be as transparent as possible about our editorial process.
First and foremost, it’s important to note that we do not receive any games from publishers or development studios. We purchase the titles we review ourselves. Thus, we have no interest in favoring any particular game. If we liked it, we’ll say so, and if we hated it, we’ll say that too. We will never seek to promote a game just so it sells well on Instant Gaming or for any other perk.
As you’ve probably guessed, our rating scale ranges from 0 to 10. In this specific case, we’ll use every possible score on this scale (in half-point increments). If we loved a game, a 9 or a 10/10 may appear at the bottom of our review. Conversely, a title we deem a failure may be given a 1 or a 2/10 (or even worse in the case of a disaster). This score reflects the reviewer’s personal opinion but is by no means universal. Everyone is free and entitled to their own opinion. On IG News, a 10 out of 10 doesn't equate to a game's absolute excellence, but rather to the reviewer's unforgettable time with it.
Furthermore, we provide our opinion on a game’s content without taking the specific characteristics of different platforms into account too heavily. If a title has significant technical flaws or glitches on a specific platform, we’ll point them out in our review, but this won’t necessarily affect the final score. Very often, problems of this kind get fixed on future patches. Our goal is to clearly highlight these potential bugs without letting them weigh too heavily on our score—provided, of course, that the gameplay experience isn’t significantly compromised.
Finally, one last very important point: since we purchase the games ourselves, these are inevitably titles we’ve been looking forward to with varying degrees of anticipation. As a result, low scores may be fairly rare at first. We will, of course, try to broaden our scope over the coming weeks, but this will happen very gradually. We will also be making several improvements to the layout of the reviews, too.