In yet another apparent confirmation that the mainstream ‘geek’ media is in bed with the very companies they cover, a former IGN staffer has claimed that during his tenure with the site, he and his colleagues were “not really allowed” to leave negative reviews on comic books.

This supposed lack of ethics was levelled on February 6th by freelance journalist Tres Dean, who reviewed comic books for IGN from April 2014 to May 2015, in response to a tweet about the outlet’s recent Hogwarts Legacy review.

Aggregating critic scores is a fine idea. But lumping them into “fresh” or “rotten” ratings on the basis of a 60% cutoff, and then aggregating those pos/neg results into a “Tomatometer” score is why many films have hilariously skewed results on RT.

I’m not revealing anything new. Everybody knows it’s stupid and flawed. But beyond that, might it not be damaging to the film industry when such a misleading score system gets so much attention? Good films can miss the credit they deserve, while bad films get way too much. And all thanks to the “fun” of some vegetable icons.