Explaining – and Fixing – IGN's Face-Off Controversy
Over the past few days you might’ve caught wind of some controversy stemming from IGN’s community game of the year Face-Off. It’s become a full-on drama, complete with literal ups and downs, shocking twists, and accusations of foul play flying. There’s also quite a bit of confusion, so to clear it up a bit I’m going to walk you through how we got here, and how we’re making it right.
Early this year IGN rolled out a new version of our Face-Off tool, and it’s become a pet project of mine to use it to get our community to create ranked lists of games, movies, TV shows, and literally everything else that people have opinions about. It works by showing you two things and letting you pick whichever you think should win, whether that’s The Empire Strikes Back vs Attack of the Clones, or Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 (2011) vs Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 (2023). It then generates a list of your personal rankings, while also mashing your votes together with everybody else to create a community ranking. It’s far from perfect, and we hope to iterate on it so that it becomes a better experience that creates a more accurate personal list for you in fewer matches. Even so, it’s been a lot of fun to mess with and find interesting ways to use it – and to watch people agonize over tough choices between two things they love.
On February 22, after a few big 2024 games had launched, I started the What’s Your Game of the Year So Far? Face-Off as an experiment to see how the running tally would look if we’re adding new games as they come out. Importantly, this was an informal test that asked a casual question about how people are feeling in the moment, and it was never presented as our official Game of the Year community vote. We still plan to do that the old-fashioned way later this year, and it will be entirely separate from this. (To answer the frequently asked question of why Elden Ring: Shadow of the Erdtree is on the list when it’s a DLC expansion and not a full new game: Because
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