It's the corruption of the reviewing system. On a 0-10 scale there is a very specific way you have to review. Meaning the way you rate a game MUST, and I can't stress that part enough, be representative of the sentiments. Meaning an average game should and must always be rated a 5... not a 7 not an 8 not an anything else. Because average games are being rated 6s and 7s instead of 5s we are left with less moderately bad games and more above average games. Plays on the extremes now with either bad games being really terrible or good games being rated as really good.
The other problem is that we are still reviewing games on an industry as a whole merit. Meaning considering how well it fits either in the genre, the library, the series, etc. Because the majority of the review is not based the actual game itself a game can be viewed as better or worse because of it.
Finally, perception is a key problem as well. Publishers recognize that seeing as being average isn't a good thing. But if they can make an average score mean a 7 (or sometimes even an 8) then average doesn't appear all that bad. And because we have BOUGHT into this marketing trick and corruption of the system we agree with them. Perceptions need to change first meaning we need to stop considering games that get rated a 5 as inherently bad because it should mean the game is average... as that is the definition of average (a mean between good and bad qualities).
Obviously it's not hard to tell this is going on. Reviewers have naturally corrupted the system over the time where we get to this generation where anything under an 8 is not even considered a great game and anything under a 7 is considered bad.
I could go into more detail but I'd need to do a lot of research to figure all that out haha. But this is definitely one of the reasons why i have little faith in the current critical reviews in the mainstream and one of the reasons why I can't assert metacritic as a definite authority in gaming quality. They might be unbiased in giving the average of scores but if the average of scores is on a corrupted system then that ceases to matter. I guess there's nothing I can really do about it and complaining won't get me much of anywhere but it is something I have quite an issue with. Thus generally I only read a few reviews for most games from only a few sites and leave it at that.
