In the spirit of a new decade of games, movies, TV shows, and comics, we at IGN have a special announcement: we’re making a change to our scoring system and dropping the decimal from our traditional 100-point scale. That means there’ll be no more 7.1s or 8.9s – not even 6.5s. Just nice round numbers from 1 to 10 that clearly and decisively convey what we’re trying to say. After literally years of internal debate, we’ve come to a strong consensus that this system will improve the quality of our reviews and allow us to communicate with you better. It’s a big change, so let’s walk through some of the reasoning behind it.
IGN has used a 100-point scale for the vast majority of our 23-year history, and in most cases it’s served us well. A lot of people love the pinpoint accuracy of that system for the way it allows you to declare one thing slightly better or worse than another. Under the right circumstances, this allows you to create an ordered list of reviews that accurately reflects the very specific sequence in which they’re recommended, which is useful for at-a-glance comparisons. As a reviewer, it’s nice to be able to recognize improvement or decline in a series, however minor, with a slightly higher or lower score.
Source: IGN.com Announcement: IGN's Review Scale Just Got Simpler