Would it be too obvious if I answered that it was because the reviewer thought it was better than a 0.7 and worse than a 0.9?

And the reason why VGC is using a "meaningless" numerical system is because they did a poll of VGC users, and a plurality of voters asked for a 100-point scale, more than doubling the votes cast for any other grading method. People want the clarity of numbers over letters, and they want enough granularity in the scale that they can distinguish between a game which barely made it to the 80s and a game which almost made it to the 90s.

Results - 26/11/08

For the love of, it's not that complicated. We used to think that subjective things like art and literature could be objectively defined as good or bad on a scale by people who were super educated. We moved past that view of Literature and art to a more post modern subjective view of art and literature. Videogames however have gradually lapsed into this view of objective quality that can be determined by a small group of people with authority over the topic, except these people do not receive the authority to make this judgement from education, they receive the authority from fanboys that make them into authority figures despite their own disdain for them.

Did you miss it too?

Read the first paragraph again.  He leads into his point by talking about literature.  It's hard to miss.

Your right. It's way overrated by the press.

Just to nitpick this slightly, Amazon/Ebay/Allreaders/iblist and more all review books with a numeric scale.

It's just that you see slightly more forum activity around "Killzone 2" than you do Heinlein's "It's great to be back."

Letters are no more inherently meaningful than numbers.  Choosing between them is essentially choosing between the useless mainstream scale or the useless nonmainstream scale.  Yay.

You get no clarity from either system because the actual numbers have no meaning.  There is no truly objective difference between an A and B nor a 9.1 and a 9.4.  It doesn't exist.  People argue about scores all the time because scores mean different things to different people. 

Those scales work in the educational system because I can objectively give you a 90% on a test because you got 2 out of 20 questions wrong.  Video games lack that quality (or it's just that no one has ever come up with a solid enough rating system).

There are executives now, I believe, who use Metacritic and Gamerankings as part of their decision-making process. They will also put pressure on review sites to tweak reviews accordingly. Look at what happened with Kane and Lynch: Dead Men (whatever it was called) and how it got a Gamespot reviewer fired, because of the rating and review.

What does objectivity have to do with it? It's a matter of ranking, not objectivity. You can deliver a list of pros and cons for two games along with an explanation of why you list those attributes as good or bad, but you won't answer the the most important question people want to know between these two games: Which one is better?

That's what the number is for, and why the number is more clear when you have more granularity in the scale. That's why people want to see 8.0 and 8.9 instead of just two 8s. Just because there's no objectivity in any of these numbers doesn't mean that knowing which game ranks better in the subjective opinion of a group or individual is worthless information. The only real problem is that people think an aggregation of subjective numbers alchemically makes those numbers objective.

I guess my point is that while some people might be content with just seeing an 8 or even a simple "it's good," most people out there want to be able to prioritize things, and they want a simple, fast, and clear means of doing so.

Agreeed I gave up on reviews along time ago. I read them sometimes just for info on games but i don't need some nerdy guy telling me what i'll like and what i won't. Everyone has their own tastes.