Raise your hand if you've paid $60 for a heavily promoted game that got near-perfect review scores, only to find it to be a frustrating, cookie-cutter mess that had you doing a mental inventory of all of the things you could have bought with the cash instead ("three remote control flying sharks!). Do the critics, like, get a different version or something?

No, the system is set up so that big games rarely get the scores they deserve.

This is a huge problem from the consumer end -- games are a much bigger time and money investment than movies, books, or any other media, so having honest reviewers you can rely on is crucial. You're trying to get an opinion on what might be the only game you buy for the next couple of months, but it's becoming increasingly apparent that critic scores and user scores just don't sync up. Call of Duty: Ghosts currently has a score of 74 on Metacritic -- not a fantastic score for a AAA game with that kind of budget, but check out the average user score: 2.3.*

*Metacritic uses a 100 scale for critic reviews but a 10 scale for users.

Is that just a bunch of young gamers throwing a tantrum because they thought the game would have actual ghosts in it? Well, read the reviews -- the critics' write-ups boil down to "It's a recycled version of the old games, but still good," while the users' consensus is "$60 is a lot to pay for recycled material, guys." You can see that same divide with lots of games -- Total War: Rome II had a respectable 83.5 score at launch (currently down to 76), but the user reviews? 3.9/10. Mass Effect 3 is at 89 for critics vs. 5.0 for users, the latter group being way less forgiving of an ending that rendered every previous choice in the franchise meaningless.

So why do the critic scores skew so much higher? Well, behind the scenes, studios are doing everything they can to obtain the highest Metacritic score possible at launch -- some teams even get bonuses for hitting Metacritic targets. From the publication's standpoint, those reviews exist to bring website traffic. That traffic turns into revenue from advertisements ... that were purchased by the studios whose games are getting reviewed.

If you give the game an award or especially high praise, the publication could appear on that game's box -- which the reviewers also get paid for. Basically, the publishing companies are paying the review site's bills by buying ads and renting their words, so from the struggling writer's perspective, it's bad business to give bad reviews.

And there is a very close interaction between the game journalists and the game makers' PR guys. So with a few exceptions, most major game reviews go like this:

Journalists are invited to the studio or a rented room at a convention. They play the most polished level and/or segment of the game for a couple hours, maybe over the course of a few days. Drinks and meals are on the house. Keep in mind that they're getting dropped into the middle of the game somewhere, because complicated gameplay that builds on lessons learned in previous levels would be extremely frustrating, whereas you want the journalists to experience fun and excitement. So we're talking graphics, simple combat, flashy cinematics, and controlled linear environments that look really good -- as long as the journalists never stray from the path, which is why there are marketing execs looking right over their shoulders and telling them where to go. And it's amazing how intuitive level design becomes when the guy who designed the level is there to explain it.

But that disparity between user scores and critic scores is going to catch up with us, and it won't just be the critics who get bitten in the ass. If the gamers don't have any critics to trust, they're going to stop buying games the day they come out. And since the industry puts so much emphasis on launch day box sales, that's going to look an awful lot like a crash to the people in charge.