Is IGN Manipulating GOTY Votes TO Eliminate Black Myth Wukong?

The end of the year is approaching, and with that, voting for the game of the year has started. Since the game of the year is subjective, each major outlet has its spin on things. IGN has decided to hand the decision-making over to the fans to eliminate bias. While it is not a perfect system, it is as close as possible. However, recent events involving Black Myth Wukong have led fans to believe the results might be rigged. Personally, do I think that IGN is rigging votes against this game? Based on their response, it is hard to say. One thing that I can confirm is that IGN removed votes from this title.

It is important to discuss how we reached this conclusion. To determine the game of the year, IGN is running what they call face-offs. Games are matched against each other, and fans pick. There are multiple different matches, and it is a relatively good system. After these face-offs that IGN ran, Black Myth Wukong found itself at 90.4% and number one on the leaderboard. Within a blink of an eye, the voting score of the game dropped to 74%, and it fell outside of the top 5.

Thus, many were asking the same question: How is that possible? That question led most to the same conclusion: IGN hates this game and has decided to rig the vote. At face value, it might sound silly. However, social activists masking themselves as game journalists are everywhere. We see them block people, ban people, and shut down conversations because people do not agree with their worldview all the time. It was not too long ago that IGN was poorly translating and misquoting the studio head claiming he and the game was sexist.

IGN Vs. Black Myth Wukong

As I have mentioned, IGN wrote an extremely vague article accusing the developers of Black Myth Wukong of a bunch of terrible things, including sexism. As the internet started to investigate, they realized that some of the bigger claims of sexism were nothing more than poor translations. That is where most people left the situation until news broke that Sweet Baby Inc approached the Developer behind Black Myth Wukong. They offered their services for an unconfirmed amount of $7 Million. While the amount is unconfirmed, we know that Sweet Baby Inc. did, in fact, approach them.

Now, Sweet Baby Inc has been very honest about their tactics. They have a policy of joining us or else. This led people to speculate that Sweet Baby Inc. was the reason behind the recent negative press. This is a wild jump, and there is no proof of any of this. It is more likely that they saw the negative IGN article and tried to reach out afterward instead. While people use the word extortion because of how the CEO of the company describes her tactics, I do try to be a bit more careful. After all of this news broke, IGN made their original article private on Twitter, at least for a while. They then came out with a statement defending how they covered the story.

The IGN Statement Written By Rebekah Valentine

The statement reads, “Last year, we published a comprehensive report on IGN detailing a number of sexist and inappropriate remarks made by multiple developers of Black Myth: Wukong, including those in leadership roles at Game Science. As of the publication of this preview, Game Science has yet to provide any response or statement addressing our report or their past remarks.

Like Mitchell, I had the opportunity to see Black Myth: Wukong at Summer Game Fest, though my appointment was admittedly a little strange. I was told as a part of my invitation that Game Science would have a statement “related to the reports of sexism.” I arrived at the appointment and saw the game as planned, but when I asked for the promised statement, I was told by a PR representative, “Game Science is focused on the demo during Play Days and will only answer questions related to gameplay.”

Mitchell’s preview doesn’t need my validation, but for what it’s worth, I fully back everything he’s written here. Black Myth: Wukong looks like it’ll be a great game. It’s gorgeous, with snappy combat, fantastic monster design, and some really interesting boss fights. It is also true that several of the people who are making it have made disparaging remarks about women, and don’t seem to be interested either in retracting their past statements, or in supporting the numerous women who are being harassed in online conversations about Black Myth: Wukong purely for expressing their discomfort with those statements. Both of these ideas can exist simultaneously – what audiences want to do about this conflict is ultimately their choice.

The Conclusion

One last note – I didn’t see any women or femme-coded characters in the demo, and I was able to confirm from Game Science that there were none present in the section of the game presented to the press. There will be women in the final game, but for now it is impossible to really comment on whether or not Game Science developers’ expressed beliefs permeate Black Myth: Wukong in a meaningful way.”

IGN Responds

With this history, it is easy to understand why fans are ready to expect the worst. It feels like IGN was never prepared to give this title a fair chance. Immediately jumping to sexism and poorly translated quotes taken out of context does not sit well with fans. The title dropping from the game of the year contention did result in IGN officially responding to all of this. While I would not call what they did rigging, they did remove votes. They said in a statement, “since Face-Offs aren’t limited to logged-in users it’s not obvious which votes are real and which are fake, so we can’t simply delete the exact number of suspicious votes.

However, in the interest of fairness, we’ve decided to remove all of the negative votes from the period that the Black Myth: Wukong community and our engineers have identified as the most likely to be fraudulent, during which the win percentage fell at what should’ve been an impossible rate – a total of 46,000 losses. As of this writing, that change moves Black Myth: Wukong back into the first position on the list, with a 76% win rate. It’s unfortunate to lose any valid votes that were caught up in the mix, but this is the best solution we have given the information available.“

Conclusion

In conclusion, votes were removed, but IGN states that only the votes that might have been fraudulent were taken away. While they admit that this might have caused real votes to be deleted, they did what they thought was the most fair. How much of this explanation I buy, I cannot say. Unfortunately, I do not have any evidence to prove foul play. Thus, I will have no choice but to accept their explanation suspiciously.