The problem I have is that review scores are implicitly quantitative, not qualitative.
ANY review must be qualitative to have any meaning. You can't quantify an opinion, no matter how hard you try.
(and before some smartass comments about polls, that's counting a number of opinions within a population. The number itself cannot form the logical basis of those opinions. It's like saying "I believe him, because he used the number 3 in his review.")
So, I read a score of 10/10. This tells me you liked the game. Great. Fantastic.
Anyone can do that, even if it isn't true.
This tells me nothing about the game. Some people THINK it tells them is that it's an excellent game.
And those people are fucking sheep who don't actually think for themselves. Reviews are opinions. Not facts.
If I'm reading reviews to research a game, what good is that 10/10 to me? The READER?
As a summary opinion, it's valid (since opinions are subjective), but still quite useless. It's filler.
How do I know you aren't just typing that to suck off the publisher? How do I know you even played the game?
I can jump onto Metacritic right this fucking second and give any game a 100/100, without having played a minute of it.
OK, so lets assume you actually wrote a review, and you're attaching a score to it as a sort of summary.
Knowing that I JUST FINISHED READING/WATCHING YOUR REVIEW AND GET TO THE SCORE, I should already know your feelings on the subject matter, no?
A little number at the end isn't going to change what you wrote, and if you didn't write anything but that number, I logically have no reason to trust you. So, logically, I don't get why you would include a score except for either purely arbitrary reasons, or pressures from within your field.
In the absence of stupid business practices (like publishers using Metacritic as a basis for payment plans) I do agree that review scores are harmless...but because I think they're useless more than anything. Ignorance and the inability to logically recognize that fact is more harmful IMO.
I won't demand any critic change their style unless they are objectively misrepresenting their subject matter (flat out lying to the audience); as for review scores, I ignore them. They're useless to me because the score is arbitrary, and the scaling is arbitrary.