5 is how it should be and how it was back in the day. I feel as if giving good reviews out there is due to the amount of clicks and good press to a review site (Yes same can be said when dishing out an extremely low score) however to make the kids happy lets give games 8s and 9s and they will come back to our site. Its also pretty obvious that many fanboys believe all there 1st party titles deserves 9s and 10s and anything underneath that is considered blasphemy. 

In the 90s, anything with a score of an 7 and 8 were considered must play games where as today, a game gets a 7 its considered laughable.

Angry Joe on YouTube does it right.

Very true.  There was a time when almost every game got an 8 or a 9, and anything lower was pretty bad.  Some reviewer might try to go against that trend now, but because many of the bigger review site will still rate AAA games on somewhat of a curve, it is hard to tell who is being honest.

So while I believe gamers have had their perspectives mislead at times, it is deffinetly the reviewers from (I wanna say mid PS360 days?) that started the trend.  I understand why some people think the way that they do.

But again, this just further enforces the fact that the numbered review system has become so flawed in general that it should just be done away with all together.

5. Otherwise, why do it out of 10, and not just 5?

Soooo after reviewing the results of the thread I noticed two things.

1. Most people agree that 5 should be the number assigned to an average game.

2. A game that gets a 5 is not worth buying.

Or to use Rol's argument: Most of the bad games are not reviewed and that drives the average review score up. If all games were reviewed the average review score would be 5, not 7.

^^^This argument implies that your average game is not worth buying. A lot of what other people said, in the thread, echoed this. I'd quote them, but I'm lazy and hate doing multi-quote responses.

7/10 should be average, a 5/10 sounds pretty mediocre imo since to me it implies a failing grade of an E or F as opposed to the former which is a C.

Ah, thanks for clearing that up. So you're saying that if all games were reviewed then the average would dip below 5/10, right? 

IMO a game of average quality (when you count all games in the manner that we're talking about) isn't worth buying at all. There's too many higher quality games out there, like you said. 

Being that our society is taught from a young age (via schooling) that average is somewhere in the 70% range (C's on the report card), it only makes sense that reviews follow the same criteria. A 5/10 game is, quite frankly, pretty awful, but that doesn't mean it got nothing right. It might still have a decent soundtrack, smooth controls, or some other beneficial quality.

Average should be 5 or 6 at most. Good or decent games should be getting 7 or above... for some reason a lot of people seem to think anything below 80 is garbage/not worth playing. I blame reviewers for inflating scores

5 sits right in the middle of the scale - it pretty much implies that game has about the same amount of good and bad in it...or "A near-equal balance of good and bad that can make a game either fall disappointingly short of its evident potential or be mildly entertaining despite its many failings."...or "Take it or leave it".

3 out of 5 stars or 6/10 is usally first tier of decent game that manages to have more good than bad stuff.

That sad, reviews can be quite subjective, especially when it come to more niche genres reviewed by mainstream sites...or occasionally downright iditioc ones, like Eurogamer or Polygon.

The rating system should never be a mathematical figure because 10 out of 10 is 100% which is perfect. It would make more sense to go by fail, pass, average, great and excellent. There should never be a 5/5 of 10/10 cuz that's a perfect score especially when the reviewer makes it sound so.... which is another topic.