I take the Metacritic ratings quite seriously in making my purchases. Like most adults I have a job and kids, and therefore a limited time to enjoy my hobby (or my wife would say addiction) of videogaming each night after the kids have gone to bed and before I need to. I also hate wasting money on a game that I buy and then have to drop playing because of a lack of continued motivation to play on. So I prefer to weed out the undesirable games before I decide go out spending my money. Metacritic is the most valuable tool for me in that pursuit, but I use it in combination with my genre preferences.
Let's say I am about to buy a game and I know I like JRPGs, so something like Blue Dragon (Metacritic Score of 79) is a good buy, but I don't like Survival Horror quite as much, so Left 4 Dead (Metacritic Score of 89) is not for me. If Blue Dragon was at 74, and Left 4 Dead at 94, I'd probably have gone for the latter instead. Without Metacritic such a decision is not possible.
