The Pokemon and Mario games still review well.

I knew that Sonic Boom was an 8/10 game all along.

This is how i genuinly feel and it is actually one of the things i do like about Nintendo. Now with that being said, serious question. Are these improvements ACTUALLY meaningful or do they FEEL meaningful because the gap in time between games is so much wider than most? 

But if they are major sites why would they have to resort to such tactics to get ad revunue? Wouldnt that defeat the purpose of being a major site? Im not saying they dont do it but i would bet that it seems to be a big issue with smaller sites that are trying to come up.

I mean we all love to say IGNorant but lets be honest here, IGN hasnt really focused on video games in LONG time. I wouldnt be surprised if they get more traffic for "whose gonna be in the next Marvel movie" article than say a review for anything that would be considered a less than AAA game

Can't disagree with the article, its been noticable for some time, especially over the past 10 years as revenue has switched from magazine sales to online. This was what I felt the whole gamergate thing should have been about, instead it got hijacked by a bunch of misogynist pre-pubescent man childs with the social grace of someone diagnosed with severe autism (but without having autism) and now 'gamergate' is about rampart sexism and bullying in the gaming culture, instead of about questioning the integrity and standards of game related 'journalism'.

The influence of Metacritic on the gaming industry is also an issue. Metacritic is a huge source of clicks for gaming websites, but if you don't use a point based review system you aren't listed. Developers bonus's are often tied to Metacritic scores, which can lead to developers being risk averse and conservative in their design process. You can't run the risk of making a design that polarises people (because that will bring down your Metacritic score and your bonus) so you focus on the tried and true ideas that aren't creative but don't offend people. The Toyota Camry of game design, which is why gaming outside of the indie movement seems so vanilla,

Nothing will change though so long as ads remain the main revenue source for gaming websites. As consumers we only have ourselves to blame, we've enabled it to happen. My favourite reviewing method is what ArsTechnica do, there is no number or star system, at the conclusion of each review its just a few lines for the great, the good, the bad and the ugly, and a buy, rent or skip recommendation. That way, you get an understanding of a games good and bad points, and you can determine if they matter to you. I've enjoyed games that they've not been impressed by because things they marked as 'bad' didn't matter much to me, and in other games things thats were assessed as 'great' I didn't care for. The important bit is that I had the knowledge to make that determination myself and that's what makes it a good review system.

not really considering most of the small sites probably want to be big sites

It's pretty funny that this could all be nothing more than a clickbait article just like it's accusing publications of running. I mean, the site is entirely anonymous. None of the sources are named, no websites called out. I could have written this article citing my 3 sons as sources.

Personally unless you're willing to go on the record or prove the authenticity of its content somehow, I don't see the point of publishing something like this.

How is this article or this thread proof of anything? it doesn't take much to throw up some info about critics saying this or critics saying that. If this was an independent study by a trusted media source who had actual critics going on record with bonafide whistleblowers this might mean something. At this point this article just reads like your typical paranoid fanboy rant. It's worth a discussion, but to suggest that this is proof is presumptive.

This made me chuckle.

Article lost me here. How are The Order reviews a fiasco? What should the game have gotten? Sure there were some scores that were way too low, those 20s and 40s... but someone also gave it 95... So really it goes both ways. There's also the fact that this is unsourced, which doesn't make it realiable.