So sure, we all have trouble picking out the difference between two colors which are right next to one another on the color wheel, but that doesn’t mean we lack color vision.
To the author of this article: learn not to extend your claims so far beyond the strength of your arguments that you come off as simply absurd.

Did you actually read what anyone said? No one has said they would use a metacritic score to judge how good a game was to play, how much they would enjoy it.

Read what I said. Games with good metacritic scores sell more. I highly doubt this is a causal relationship, its not the metacritic score that is causing the sales. Could be a good game, or good advertising, or whatever…

Doesn’t matter, the score predicts sales relatively well.

So do you have a good source that discloses advertising budgets by title that I can use instead of metacritic?

In fact, it takes a huge leap of faith to say that the review score has any effect on sales at all, given how closely game review scores seem to track ad budget. Just doing a quick check of several AAA titles, I had a really hard time finding a single one with a score under 80. Even big budget games universally accepted by critics as being far from one of the best games ever, still came in with scores of 80 or above. Even in series where some titles are universally accepted as being far superior to other installments of the series, the entire point range of the series is rarely over 5 points.

What is even more interesting is to see how radically scores of the same game fluctuate based on platform, and how heavily it was advertised on the given platform. Not to get too specific, but a few examples would be Halo 2 Xbox: 95 PC: 72, Skies of Arcadia Dreamcast: 93 Gamecube: 84, Grandia II Dreamcast: 89, PS2: 68, PC: 70. These are the same games, just with different release dates, and different marketing budgets. Sure, there might be some porting differences, but 20 or 30 points worth?

The argument seems to be:

Good scores = good sales = good game = scores are an important measure of the quality of the game.

However, you could just as well have the scenario where:

Good ad budget = good sales = good scores = scores are just another part of a publisher’s advertising arsenal, and have nothing to do with the quality of the game.

I have to agree with the author that scores have almost no meaning. At best they might be seen as a gauge of how popular a game is (which is in no way the same as how good a game is), and at worst they are just a metric judging how many ad dollars the publisher had to throw around.

The Metacritic score for a game title is very highly correlated with sales for that title and highly predictive of sales.

Would I personally buy a game based on a high metacritic score? No.
Would I bet that on a games ‘box office’ base on metacritic score? Yes.

For the uninitiated, game developers actually make the products, and game publishers generally fund, market and distribute them. A product’s success or failure depends not only the developer’s execution, but the publisher’s control (they have all the cards). If a game is misdirected or unsupported via marketing by a publisher, this also leads to low Metacritic scores.

So the developer Metacritic fate – whether the developer is competent or not – is largely in the hands of the publisher.

All told, your “industry killing” description is apt, given that those actually making the products are being driven out of business largely due to Metacritic’s influence.

Some game reviewers will get caught up in trivial issues and use that to batter a game. Others will overlook key flaws and give a game a glowing review. The more varied the reviews the more you know to take care before buying.

If every game reviewer pans a game, then it’s a pretty good sign you might want to stay away.

Far better to use these sites than to rely on folks at Penny Arcade or Shacknews who gush about mediocre games in the hopes of getting the social support they need to appreciate the purchase they made.

Aggregators will always be useful. But it’s up to the reader to make best use of them.