You are reading too much into this. If IGN does give it Game of The Year, perfect scores, etc, then you will have a case. But it was put there by a staff member nas an obvious joke.
By the way, you might be a little confused. This was found in the code from an EA website, not an IGN website.
Wasn't a joke. Was an actual paragraph on the site, linking to the ign homepage.
The blame rests more with ea, but you have to wonder why they chose that verbiage. It's a legal world and you just don't go misrepresenting other organizations without:
A) repercussions.
Or
there being something to it.
Based on ign's response that ea used that text as "placeholder copy, it sounds much like a cover up of the latter. Professional web staff for large firms like ea don't publish copy on a live site without it having gone through a copyrighting and editing process before being approved and then published.
And no it wouldn't be a shock if that's exactly what went down.