That is not the rule. The downtrend is only more likely on big releases because the first reviewers have a good chance of giving inflated scores because they think they're obligated. Small, unhyped releases have as much chance of downtrending as uptrending.

Edit: ofcourse the more reviews the better, but you gotta take what you get.

I thought Rock Band 2 was also >90% for Wii?

Edit:nvm

the averages aren't equal, e.g 90% over 60 reviews vs 85% over 110 reviews.

the second game is possibly better scoring well over more reviewers.

Gears of War and Braid aren't exclusive to 360. PC already has Gears with extra content and Braid is on it's way.

 Gears of War 2.  And this list is as of Jan 3 2009, not the future.

Metacritic does not do a plain average.  They keep their methodology secret, and use weighted averages.

You don't have Bioshock yet??  Go get (great game)!

This was a good year for the PS3 though, as a year ago, this would have been much more lopsided.

The METASCORE is considered a weighted average because we assign more significance, or weight, to some critics and publications than we do to others, based on the overall stature and quality of those critics and publications. In addition, for music and movies, we also normalize the resulting scores (akin to "grading on a curve" in college), which prevents scores from clumping together.

In addition, for our film and music sections, all of the weighted averages are normalized before generating the METASCORE. To put it another way that should be familiar to anyone who has taken an exam in high school or college, all of our movies, games, and CDs are graded on a curve. Thus the METASCORE may be higher or lower than the true weighted average of the individual reviews, thanks to this normalization calculation. Normalization causes the scores to be spread out over a wider range, instead of being clumped together. Generally, higher scores are pushed higher, and lower scores are pushed lower. Unlike in high school, this is a good thing, since it provides more of a distinction between scores and allows you to better compare scores across movies (or CDs).

http://www.metacritic.com/about/scoring.shtml#scoring

i think this weakens my argument but doesn't refute it completley.

No, it's not. Myself and others refuted this claim in the IGN goty thread but you seem to want to hold on to your misleading claim. A gem that nobody plays is still a gem. Playtime is not indicative of quality. You are looking for a neat and tidy way to judge games where no such method exists.

these aggregated scores are stupid, i cnt belive some ppl judge a game according to metacritic.

a good example is fable 2, it was 92 according to 52 reviews, then aggregated to 89 from 70+ reviews? does the game all of a sudden become less worthy at 70+ reviews aggregated compared to 52+ reviews aggregated.

its just a joke