That's the question that GamesIndustry.Biz's Phil Elliot is asking.
Splash Damage studio director Paul Wedgwood thinks that this is a bogus metric because scoring methods are so incosistent across websites and mags:
We know that some websites score quite high and some quite low, but in general, all websites tend to score between 60 and 100. There's never a 37. It's as if that whole section doesn't exist, so zero starts at 60, so three stars, and goes up to five. It's just not really an accurate enough measure.
There's a crucial point that Wedgwood doesn't mention, that I think undercuts the effectiveness of this reward strategy much more swiftly: The simple fact that the gaming press is a parade of boners.
Metacritic accepts reviews from some of the most amateurish websites out there. The reviews could quite literally have been written by fifteen-year olds. Even the large sites can't be trusted to provide players with reviews that matter, are we ready to put the fate of our developers' salaries in the hands of these retards?
Related Links:
Things You Should Be Reading: The Review Score Symposium
Kudos: Play Magazine’s Scoreless Reviews
Molyneux's Redemption?