Game Critics

I actually wonder why crowd-sourced reviews have become so ubiquitous, to the point of almost being necessary (along with five-star ratings). Has anyone legitimately attempted to challenge the status quo here? I'm reminded of videogamedunkey on YouTube and his video about game critics[0], where he goes into some detail about the preferences and integrity of the critic being just as important (if not more) than the review and rating. Professional critics build a strong reputation around their taste and preference and they gain notoriety from doggedly sticking to those principles. So you'd likely trust the opinion of Roger Ebert or Mark Kermode if you share their taste in cinema, and even watch something you normally wouldn't if even they recommended it. You're very likely to subscribe to a publication whose critics align with your own tastes because they're effectively curating content for you in the form of recommendations. None of that applies when you have reviews from a succession of total strangers - you're not going to research dozens or hundreds of commentators to establish a logical consistency in their point of view and decide whether or not their tastes align with yours. More often than not the reviews are low quality and low value, spread across a five-point scale but essentially treated as a binary like/didn't like system. At that point, crowd-sourced reviews tell you nothing you didn't know already: some people enjoyed it for one reason and others didn't for a dif