So a few things.
1. None of that shit is on reviewers? Metacritic bonuses are entirely the result of the (incredibly bad) deal the publishers made with the developers. That's not an agreement the reviewers entered into at all and any results of them giving a bad review should not be on them; hell, for the sake of integrity it explicitly shouldn't be considered. And what are you even trying to say when you're going on about the education of this hypothetical reviewer (and: actually... lol, do you realize what thread you're in)? That they need a college education to truly value the crunch these developers put into a game...? Do you somehow get less fucked over by your employer/publisher if someone with a masters degree and industry experience gives your game a 4/10? This line of thinking is outright nonsensical.
2. Do we even know if these Metacritic deals still happen? Because I sure feel like I haven't heard about any in years and yet people keep bringing them up when this topic comes up.
3. This is incredibly irrelevant to begin with because none of the recent overblown "controversies" over the supposed incompetence of journalists related in the fucking slightest to a significant shift in scoring. Actually, several of them had nothing to do with reviews.
1. So you're saying it's viable for every developer (whether a full studio or a team of a few guys, or even one guy) should just be fully independent from publishers? Not that easy, and certainly not if you're trying to put something on a console.
2. There might not be high profile cases but it wouldn't surprise me if there are still many lower key incentives for hitting certain targets. Whether it's reviews, sales, active users, unique users, etc. It's the kind of shit companies love to tout to their investors/stakeholders. My sister works in advertising, formerly for entertainment properties, now more boring stuff - some of her former co-workers did game as campaigns for devs/publishers (she was mostly tv/film) for the ad agency as an outside consultant on specific types of media (e.g. internet ads vs. TV ads, product placement, billboards or print ads, etc.) Metrics are used for pretty much literally everything these days with big data being a thing, ESPECIALLY ADVERTISING for high profile products that can take hundreds of millions to make.
Just most game publishers know not to be as much of a dick about it as Bethesda was.
3. This is a fairer point, but just because it hasn't happened as much recently doesn't mean it hasn't happened in the past. The Destructoid review of Dark Souls is pegged as a 70/100 on Metacritic (though I don't think the review itself gave a score). Though the author stated he had played the game for over 90 hours and still wasn't done with it. Dark Souls, hailed as perhaps one of the most influential games of the generation has an 89 Metacritic. If someone was shooting for a hard 90+, then yeah even one mixed or outright review can be damaging, especially since Dark Souls wasn't exactly a gangbuster of seller for 2011, from what I can tell, Skyrim, Madden, 2 different Just Dance games, Batman Arkham City, and at least one Call of Duty all sold more. From what I can tell it didn't even break the top 10 in Japan that year either.
Another interesting example might be vanilla Diablo III and later Reaper of Souls. Giant Bomb (Brad FYI) gave the vanilla game a 100/5 Stars, and that was probably before the RMAH launched and more issues became apparent (and iirc not even the gold AH was in on launch day). Overall the vanilla D3 scored one Metacritic point higher than Reaper of Souls. In the Giant Bomb review of the sequel (which was only the console version for whatever reason, so not a 1-1 direct comparison), Jeff reviewed the game and gave it a 4 stars/80%. Diablo III at launch sold over 3.5 million copies in the first 24 hours, over 12 million copies for the base, PC exclusive game in 2012 making it the best selling PC game of the year and at least the 3rd best selling PC game of all time now LTD, perhaps one or two slots lower if you just take even the confirmed first year sales of the base game.
However despite that kind of success, the game was heavily flawed in its initial state, even doing in at least some spots technically less than the current spate of "looter shooters". It went 4 years after being announced to released, and the Blizzard, Irvine version that launched (still changed heavily in those 4 years) would have been in development even longer than that, as the announcement was with a rather well realized 20-minute gameplay slice demo. A Blizzard North version was started in 2001 before being scrapped almost completely with the closure of that studio.
Anyway the base game of Diablo III was so flawed and a dumpster fire even after patches (besides other controversies regarding him) that the game director was eventually shunted down/quarantined to "additional designer" for the Warlords of Draenor WoW expansion among other lesser roles like "strike team" before ultimately leaving Blizzard and the industry altogether in 2016. There were a lot of broken promises and other tidbits of bad publicity that could 100% be pinned on him.
Although to be fair most of the former top brass (especially in design/production) at Blizzard has left by now, whether honorably or dishonorably, so it's kind of a shit show. The leads responsible for the launch of Blizzard's most beloved games/expansions are pretty much all elsewhere now if not retired or working on something unannounced in development, except Jeff Kaplan who is still on Overwatch.
You can argue Metacritic's methodolgy is flawed, but Opencritic also exists, etc. And even if no outright rated reviews existed, I'm sure there would be pressure to have "favorable" reviews from outlet X and Y if not overall critic sentiment.
Also this post got a lot more detailed than I planned so I apologize now if it's a little incoherent — I've been typing it all on my phone as well.
