They kind of paint Metacritic in a poor light. It's not Metacritic's fault THQ has the policies they do.
Nah, they just gave Metacritic a B-minus. It's not Ars's fault that Metacritic interprets that as a 67 out of 100.
It's true - Metacritic isn't at fault for THQ's policies, but then that's what you get for coming in and changing the mechanics of the game review world.
But when a game gets 8/10, it somehow either is an 8/10 game or the game reviewer is wrong.
Somewhere along the line people forgot that reviews are subjective, not objective.
(New) Games cost $60, and occupy a variable amount of time. Since I'm bootstrapping my startup i.e. poor, I only buy games with a high expected value. I typically look for $1 / hour of entertainment, or better. This means I buy games that I can expect to play for 50+ hours before getting bored. Modern Warfare 1, for example, I played for hundreds of hours, making it a great bargain.
The game review scale is also highly compressed. The difference between 8/10 and 9/10 is often the difference between "good game" and "unplayable".
In fact, since Metacritic do actually have a policy for the kind of reviews Ars makes, this article ends up feeling a little disingenuous. Or at least not the whole story. I don't think they are really doing as much of a service as they make out by not giving a real score. For me it's a negative.