Blog | Retro Game Players

Announcing IGN Playlist

Gaming is one of the most enjoyable hobbies on the planet, and if you’re like us at IGN, you’re also playing an ever-growing amount of games, in more places than before. But with hundreds of games on subscription services, and new titles being released every single month, how do we keep up, and how do we know what the heck we’ll like?

So we’ve spent the last year bringing our product and engineering teams together, gearing up to help gamers make sense of it all, and are ready to get it in your hands. We call it: IGN Playlist – a place for all of your games, across the major platforms.

Available Now

We know gamers are trying to organize their libraries through homebrew solutions in spreadsheets and notes documents, and Playlist is built to leverage the scale and reliability of IGN’s vast catalog of titles from the past 25 years of gaming. We wanted to create a product people could trust to house their libraries, and help them discover, track, share, rank, and curate lists to share with their friends. Check out the areas of Playlist below to get an idea of how it all works.

Discover — Discover is Playlist’s homepage for finding new games. It’s updated weekly to surface interesting lists, new and upcoming games, and other fun and interesting categories to help people find their next favorite game or keep up with what IGN’s covering.

Library — Any game on IGN can be added to user libraries. Playlist users can track what they want, own, play, pause, beat, and quit. They can share the game, add it to a list, and more.

Playlists — Playlists are a great way to curate, share, and rank games. Users can create ranked and unranked playlists, and share playlists to social media, Twitch profiles, Discords, and more. IGN Playlist also aggregates the hours of game time of user lists, powered by HowLongToBeat.com

Community Ratings — Playlist lets players rate what they liked, and what they didn’t about games they play. People can select from a number of descriptors and aspects of games so they can remember their experiences. Games with enough ratings will show the most loved aspects of a game.

Guides — Any time someone marks a game as “playing”, Playlist will automatically include available IGN guide content in the “My Guides” page to provide quick access to game help, to help them make it through their backlog.

This Is Just the Beginning

IGN’s Product vision is to help people enjoy more games, movies, and shows, and share their experiences with each other in fun, inclusive ways. From learning about games through our editorial coverage to saving time with IGN’s game guides, IGN Playlist is the next step in your gaming journey.

We’re sure that as you all spend time with Playlist, you will surprise and delight us with all of the awesome, funny, niche, and weird playlists you all cook up. Do you already know what your first Playlist will be? Let us know in the comments!

Check out Playlist from our navigation, or Get started right here

Posted in Uncategorized

Announcing IGN Playlist

Gaming is one of the most enjoyable hobbies on the planet, and if you’re like us at IGN, you’re also playing an ever-growing amount of games, in more places than before. But with hundreds of games on subscription services, and new titles being released every single month, how do we keep up, and how do we know what the heck we’ll like?

So we’ve spent the last year bringing our product and engineering teams together, gearing up to help gamers make sense of it all, and are ready to get it in your hands. We call it: IGN Playlist – a place for all of your games, across the major platforms.

Available Now

We know gamers are trying to organize their libraries through homebrew solutions in spreadsheets and notes documents, and Playlist is built to leverage the scale and reliability of IGN’s vast catalog of titles from the past 25 years of gaming. We wanted to create a product people could trust to house their libraries, and help them discover, track, share, rank, and curate lists to share with their friends. Check out the areas of Playlist below to get an idea of how it all works.

Discover — Discover is Playlist’s homepage for finding new games. It’s updated weekly to surface interesting lists, new and upcoming games, and other fun and interesting categories to help people find their next favorite game or keep up with what IGN’s covering.

Library — Any game on IGN can be added to user libraries. Playlist users can track what they want, own, play, pause, beat, and quit. They can share the game, add it to a list, and more.

Playlists — Playlists are a great way to curate, share, and rank games. Users can create ranked and unranked playlists, and share playlists to social media, Twitch profiles, Discords, and more. IGN Playlist also aggregates the hours of game time of user lists, powered by HowLongToBeat.com

Community Ratings — Playlist lets players rate what they liked, and what they didn’t about games they play. People can select from a number of descriptors and aspects of games so they can remember their experiences. Games with enough ratings will show the most loved aspects of a game.

Guides — Any time someone marks a game as “playing”, Playlist will automatically include available IGN guide content in the “My Guides” page to provide quick access to game help, to help them make it through their backlog.

This Is Just the Beginning

IGN’s Product vision is to help people enjoy more games, movies, and shows, and share their experiences with each other in fun, inclusive ways. From learning about games through our editorial coverage to saving time with IGN’s game guides, IGN Playlist is the next step in your gaming journey.

We’re sure that as you all spend time with Playlist, you will surprise and delight us with all of the awesome, funny, niche, and weird playlists you all cook up. Do you already know what your first Playlist will be? Let us know in the comments!

Check out Playlist from our navigation, or Get started right here

Posted in Uncategorized

Former PlayStation Boss Reveals His Best and Worst E3 Moments At Sony

Former US PlayStation CEO Jack Tretton certainly had his share of ups and downs at Sony. While his tenure was filled with more highs than lows, PlayStation certainly had its tough moments between 1995 and 2014.

In a new interview with Axios, Tretton shared some of those moments, recalling some of his best and worst moments from E3. They include the PlayStation 4 reveal, which managed to deal a devastating blow to the hopes of the Xbox One before the generation even began.

The reveal included the "Official PlayStation Used Game Instructional Video", which mocked Microsoft's DRM policy of restricting used games (which the company eventually reversed). The PlayStation 4 also managed to undercut the Xbox One by around $100 due to Xbox's console including the Kinect.

"I have a lot of friends at Microsoft now and had a lot of friends then, and I wasn't necessarily looking to do it at their expense. I was just feeling really good about it," Tretton said.

But times weren't always so good for Tretton. In 2011, PlayStation suffered a 23-day PlayStation Network outage due to a hack that left some 77 million accounts exposed. PlayStation endured heavy criticism for the event and wound up offering 30 days of free PSN to all members among other make-goods.

Tretton opened E3 by apologizing for the event. "While that was necessarily a tough message to deliver, I thought it had to be said."

Elsewhere, Tretton reflected on some of his other projects at Sony, which he felt were "orphaned a little bit" and weren't given the necessary attention they needed. He cited PlayStation Vita's low sales and the slow adoption of PlayStation's virtual reality headset as examples of such projects.

"There were certainly technologies that I thought were good but just didn't have the level of support they needed," he explains, talking about how some of them lacked the marketing budget they needed and other support.

Tretton left Sony in 2014 and is now part of the Interactive Gaming Ventures, a fund working closely with indies with a mission to acquire an independent studio. While acquisitions are a hot venture as of late, with both Xbox and PlayStation announcing steady acquisitions like Bethesda, Activision Blizzard, and Bungie, Tretton doesn't see this trend as a negative. He is currently looking to buy a billion-dollar game company himself.

George Yang is a freelance writer for IGN. You can follow him on Twitter @yinyangfooey