Our practice of giving games either a "Buy, Rent or Skip" verdict is too vague for Metacritic to arbitrarily take our score and tell its readers what it thinks we meant. Since we're not weighted in the Metacritic score, no one bugs us about what rating we're going to give a game, and we've never been presented a variable embargo based on the score. In other words, not being a part of that scoring system removes a lever that publishers can use to try to change how their games are covered. Based on the number of publishers willing to send us early games to review, they don't appear to mind.
via arstechnica.com