That's not a problem with MC though - the problem is with some people in gaming community that want to see winners and losers based on these MC scores.
Mm, sure, anything can be weaponized. But no, I would definitely argue that this is an inherent shortcoming of the MC format. There are several layers of problems. Who is the audience for MC? By design, it's trying to aggregate as many different perspectives as possible and homogenize them into one easily digestible figure. It's meant to be a quick and dirty benchmark for a casual audience that isn't necessarily going to dive into the reviews and read them. There's absolutely a market for that - most people aren't going to read 2 reviews on a game, let alone 50. Still, that's the reason why MC doesn't really concern itself very much with interpreting words and scales into something consistent. It doesn't really matter to them.
HOWEVER, the scale that they use implies that the process is much more precise than it actually is. It collates, but doesn't include reviews that don't score or use a different scale. It assigns a number out of 100 (even to scores that can't reasonably be interpreted that way), and implies and even encourages on the website and in marketing that a single point of difference is meaningful in some way. Is a game scoring 85 better than a game that scored 83? MC may not outright say that.. but they're not NOT saying that either. And they're happy to let people run away with that assumption and blast it all over the internet.
That's before we even get to the methodology of aggregation. MC is an average. I don't know if it's a weighted average (maybe that would be better), but regardless.. the math gets in the way at the top end. The people who really really love a game can't give it 120, there's an upper limit to the score. Therefore, people who think the game is bad OR EVEN just think it's decent but not great can have an outsize influence on the score the closer it gets to the top of the scale. High MC scores are fundamentally an indication of
consensus. People like the game, and there weren't too many outliers. That's especially a problem for games that are divisive. If 1/3 of the audience LOVES a game, but 1/3 of people don't like it, does that mean this game is middling? Nope. It just means it appeals to a specific group of players, and not to everyone. But wait, isn't that true of EVERY game? Yes. It is. So why is that a problem?
Because video game reviewers are not the same as the general audience that MC is targetting. We've had this discussion before, so in brief, reviewers are a specific breed of people. They tend to be knowledgeable about games and history. They tend to have a decent grasp on trends and movements in the industry. They tend to play more games and more varied games than most people. They tend to be early adopters and be interested in seeing new things (partially because they remember and play more games). Importantly, they also have audiences - often audiences that are different from the wide net cast by MC. And.. why will a racing game almost certainly not win GOTY this year or next year or the year after that? Because it's not the kind of game that reviewers value in that way. DOES THAT MEAN REVIEWERS ARE BAD AND THEIR SCORES ARE MEANINGLESS? No, certainly not. The point is not that their reviews or scores are bad, merely that they don't fit into the system that is set up with MC.
In sum, yes, I think the MC concept is deeply inherently flawed in many ways, even though I think it does serve a legitimate purpose for people. Still, I would personally entirely rework the way the system is run. Rotten Tomatoes is often seen as an analogue for MC, but it's really not. It sums up the number of reviewers who would RECOMMEND a movie. I think that can be a fairly useful metric, because then we understand that the difference between 83% of reviewers recommending a game and 85% is fundamentally not important. And, of course, we haven't even touched the trend of reviewers moving away from scores entirely (and even reviews!). But, I agree, THAT issue is not on MC. Wow I wrote a lot. Sorry.