In what appears to be an unfortunate mix-up, IGN has retracted a review that they published for the upcoming Decay of Logos.
According to IGN, the retraction of the review – in which they gave the game a low review score – is due to receiving an outdated build of the game that was “not representative of the quality of the final version.”
As someone who has reviewed hundreds (if not over a thousand) games and worked with publishers for sixteen years, it’s not uncommon to receive early builds of a game. They often have bugs that are not present in the final release – although “final” releases these days are often updated multiple times post-launch.
In a post, IGN explained the situation to their readers:
After the publication of our Decay of Logos review – which we scored at 3.9 due in part to major technical issues on our Xbox One review copy – the publisher, Rising Star Games, brought it to our attention that they had mistakenly provided us with a review copy that was two months out of date and not representative of the quality of the final version. This is a very unusual (but not unprecedented) situation, and because we at IGN never want to misrepresent a game to our readers we’ve retracted our review and will post a new version when we can.
A note on our policy dealing with pre-release bugs: It’s always our goal to present readers with the most accurate, up-to-date picture of a new game that we can when a game becomes available, but with the way modern game development works that means trying to hit a moving target. So, because we’re sometimes playing before a final day-one patch is ready, when we encounter major bugs we’ll often reach out to a developer and ask whether these issues will be addressed by launch. In this case, we contacted PR last week with a list of many of the bugs and stability issues we’d run into but were only told that a patch would address crashing problems. This appears to have been the result of an unfortunate internal miscommunication at the publisher. We’re of course very sympathetic to the developers who created Decay of Logos and will always go out of our way to be fair to game makers and their work.
This is a tough position to be in as a publication. No one wants to retract an article or a review for any reason, but sometimes it’s necessary. Needless to say, receiving an outdated build of a game is not their fault, and they did the right thing reaching out to the developers. IGN made the right call with their retraction, and they deserve credit for it.
