It's how people can say a game is good because it combines all the opinions of reviewers around the world to give it one total score.

Bragging rights. "My console has the highest meta-score y'know!"

il highlight the problem with site like metacritic.

game A scores 90 based off 44 reviews, and game B scores 84 off 87 reviews.

^to me thats totally unfair as the 2 games dont even have the same amount of reviews for each.

I don't know why people rely on reviews anymore to be quite honest. Most game magazines are almost completely dependent on ad revenue from the very games they are reviewing.

i know its best to play the game yourself and see what you think.

ive disliked games that got high scores before and liked games that got low scores, for eg. psu on 360 900+hours on that game but it scored poorly.

Not to mention that the people doing the reviewing are generally the J-school grads who couldn't get jobs in real media.

Actually i think most of them are working in Public Relations now. Especially now with the whole internet journalism thing.

It's also because most people can't be bothered to read the review (even if it's worth it due to the general low quality).

My thread that got closed and was accused of being flamebait was actually supposed to raise the discussion over the point of overly high scores and what is behind that.

Baa

It's good as a general rule of thumb, and also good to view the general opinion of the gaming community. Reviewers are gamers, just like us, except that they hide their biases behind claims to journalistic integrity

Obviously there is never going to be universal consensus, like those heretics who complain about how bad looking Ocarina of Time is (yeah, they're out there), or the people who hate on GTAIV for reasons ranging from rational to off-the-wall and back again. This lack of consensus weakens those who bandy about metacritic averages in an effort to show which console is best, but its still good for a rule of thumb.

I will be upfront about the fact that as a Nintendo fanboy who has become more and more at odds with consensus of "Gaming Journalists," i have developed inherent biases against the whole system, but there is definitely some merit to it. It's just not the end-all that some people try and make it out to be, particularly the *ahem* "Game Journalists"

The game magazines are like proxy third party PR people. The more product they can sell, the more likely they'll get more ads in the future.