Dude, stop bringing up bribery allegations against Microsoft for business dealings they were having abroad like 10-20 years ago as somehow meaning they definitely bribe gaming outlets to write negative reviews about other people's games. It doesn't stand up to scrutiny at all. If it was true then Sony games would never get high scores from these outlets, but they do, and Xbox games would never get low scores, but they do.
Microsoft encouraged console warring, ok? What do you think PlayStation has done? And Nintendo has absolutely encouraged platform warring against Sega and Sony in the 90s and early 2000s too.
Also if having some shady or dodgy actions totally unrelated to games media is enough to make a company suspicious then what about Nintendo's history with the yakuza? Or the fact that both Sony and Nintendo have been sued for price fixing in the past?
You wanna know something funny, out of these three companies only Sony has ever been
caught trying to manipulate reviews. In the early 2000s they created a fake movie reviewer and featured quotes from "his" reviews on posters for those movies.
Well, I mean books and movies using 5-point scales is a decent argument for why games should too. A 5-point scale is not inherently worse than a 10-point one, but the problem is when both are getting mixed and matched on aggregate review sites like Metacritic.
You know the cost of living in the US is vastly higher and these game companies are competing for people with a lot of the technical skillset that the tech industry at large uses as well, where salaries are insanely high?
US studios were having $20-25m budgets in the past because games were far less ambitious and much smaller in scope. Japanese dev budgets have also skyrocketed compared to 20 years ago, it's just that the salaries that are livable in Japan are much lower and the yen has depreciated a lot compared to the dollar.
Nerds have made plenty of stinkers and dogshit games, and people from minority backgrounds can and often will be nerds as well. You guys are taking the greatest hits of the 90s and 2000s, ignore all the trash that came out during those years, and are comparing it to the mediocre and bad games of today that will be forgotten about in a handful of years.