Historically speaking, have you ever noticed that on some games, the reviewer consensus is much higher than the player consensus? And other times, the reviewer consensus is much lower than the player consensus. What do you think causes this?
Amazon got caught accepting $10,000 for anonymous new reviewers that gave perfect fanboy reivews.
Magazines have been shutdown for publishing real comments that games sucked, and hardware honestly did not work.
Game companies hire people to write 'creatively' to smoooooooth over HUGE bugs until they get enough money to figure out how to patch.
Words are just words. I think if users are talking about your product good/bad it's still alive. The day we stop saying World of WarCraft Ninja LOOTER!!!, mabye WoW won't be here anymore. Wiki & Wikia!!!???<--They delete your work. Stay off them.
Users are more brutal and honest than reviewers just trying to make a quick buck blowing smoke, and the things user's write are gold for someone who cares. If there are a ton of users and more reviewers, you can smell the cover-up. Search YouTube for Ninja Looter and you'll spot the Blizzard funded one.
Money, plain and simple. The major review sites today have it in their own interests to make some games look good and make others look bad. I'm not trying to sound like some "Conspiracy Wacko", but honestly, I think that's the Real Reason for it. Half of the review sites in one way or another are owned by a corporate entity that is in turn owned by another corporate entity which is in turn owned by a major video game company. The direct lines of ownership aren't always plain as day to find, but with a little digging into the people who own certain corporations you can piece the trails of ownership together on your own to see what games are made by whom and who owns the companies that ultimately control the reviewers.
There are some honest reviewers out there still, but the list of those gets smaller and smaller every day as even small review sites get offers to be bought out once they reach a certain level of users.
I find it best to form my own opinion on a game and if it's one I want to buy I do as much research into it as I can before I commit to the purchase. More often than not even in the past I often found my-self disagreeing with reviewers anyway even when they wrote reviews simply for the joy of doing an honest review.
Players as a whole honestly form their own opinions and if those clash with a reviewer then so-be-it. They'd rather be honest about how they feel about a game than go with the flow of so called popular opinion. Some games don't get massive financial backing to be hyped up and as such many review sites won't give it a lot of coverage or won't care enough to give it a high score even if it is a good game. Again, money is a factor here, and the proof is in the very fact that a game will have a Widely Accepted User Rating that is high while official reviewers won't give it a high rating. An honest review site would more than likely agree with the commonly accepted views of the people playing the game, the players.
Also many so called reviewers lose what it was that made their opinions matter to begin with in the act of being a professional reviewer. They lose their love of the game because they are forced to go through so many games and often can't give the attention to a truly good game that it deserves and will often see bright spots of merit in a game that otherwise is a steaming pile of crap and they concentrate their reviews on the few things a game may do right instead of the many things it may do wrong. This is often the case with a lot of games today put out by one of the more major companies. Some reviewers, like GameSpot, will give a game a higher score than it deserves because it's put out by a game maker or publisher that they don't want to piss off for fear of financial backlash or because in some way the same person owns the review site that also owns a controlling share in a game maker or publisher.
The whole review system these days is just as crooked as politics. Also major review sites with tons of readers get special treatment from the game makers and publishers, often receiving early review copies of games, insider access to the companies and how the games are made, granted personal interviews, while independent sites with a small reader base don't get any of the special treatment that the "journalists" from the other sites get. Could it be because they may only have a few thousand readers or is it because they're owned and operated by a few independent people and not a mega corporation? hmm....
You have sites like metacratic these days that enable people to get a squillion sources in an instant. if you cant make an adequate judgement yourself, from reading them and watching youtube clips etc, then you deserve to have your money taken by supposedly all-powerful, colluding media/developers. Back in the day it was just pictures on the back of a box and a blurb. we managed ok.