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Gradiant scales and verdicts both works, movie reviews websites do really a good job with both systems

They work because being a movie critic is (or was) a PROFESSION. Overall there was clear guidelines and frameworks to use when picking if something is bad or good, and decades of practice and culture refined the practices until there is a more or less agreement of what makes a movie good or bad and to scale if in simple systems (generally of 5 stars). Besides, cinema is a college study field, there is enough theory to help you identify elements that could constitute a good or bad movie 

Of course the modern state or cinema lead to a proliferation of journalists and non professional critics, which overall decrease the quality of scores, but as I said, there is enough documented text to help and most of those reviews just repeated whatever the true important and influential reviews says

Gaming reviews were originally made from nerds who doesn't have anything else to do with their lifes and created gaming websites, or from few magazines dedicated to gaming news and advertising. This fact holds true for this day. Worst, they seemed to be created specifically to help selling games, that's why the scores are very rarely bad (less than 7). Games need a lot of time and thought to test, a game with like 100 hours will of course be sent to reviewers weeks before the release. If the community start to bomb your game you will just find another nerd to review the game for you

Gaming reviews are, more than anything, bought. They are bought nor for money, but to making those websites afloat with content. If you don't get a gaming code before release your review will maybe take a few weeks to be released and you will just lose readers and clicks because somebody else got their code and released the review before you. So better give this mediocre game an 8 score and keep getting codes from studios 

The problem is then, hardly the system, but the quality of gaming reviewers and the dynamics between reviews and studios. Changing the system won't change the root of the problem.