Don't feel bad for abandoning IGN, so has 75% of the rest of their audience

[Jumpin]

makingmusic476 said:
The likelihood of IGN's declining popularity being caused by Matt Cassamasina is pretty small.

Tossing out ~9.5 scores for every big game that comes around is probably the bigger reason. Their reviews don't have much credibility these days, and their reviews are the reason they became popular in the first place.

I still can't believe they gave Resistance 2 a 9.5 just because they were afraid to say Gears 2 was the better game. Killzone 2 ended up scoring lower than Resistance 2 as a result of the inflated score, and I think they're the only site that rated Resistance the higher of the two. The actual text of each review paints Killzone 2 to be the much better game. It was like "This game is really good. 9.5" compared to "This game is so awesome! 9.4." Same could be said about Resistance 2 vs Gears 2, just change that 9.4 to a 9.5.

I think that is a general trend among many review sources. It is just the larger the website, the more likely that kind of stuff is going to attract the negative press on the subject. This has a lot to do with the actual income the site receives. I can't say for certain because I haven't done any extensive research, but the whole Gerstman/Gamespot/Eidos thing was very well publicized. IGN hasn't had a scandal on that level, but a lot of people have suggested  this sort of thing goes on. Other fairly well documented cases have been Rockstar's free GTA4 review vacation.