I noticed that it depends on which media.
When it comes to movies, I tend to more often than not side with the critics.
When it comes to games, I tend to much more often side with the audience (I've noticed that Metacritics audience-side is really reliable for my tastes).
I have the perception that most movie critics do it out of passion for the medium, while most video game journalist tend to follow the market and kowtow more often with editors. Maybe games entering the mainstream culture will change this over the decades.
Eh, it's hard to know the specifics of what sort of critics you're reading and how you're responding/identifying with them. However, my tentative theory for where that divide is coming from is the fact that film is an older medium and film criticism has been institutionalized as an intellectual pursuit for sixty/seventy years at this point, so there's a lot more of an institutional infrastructure for a critic today to fall back on in terms of genre, form, expectations, and education.
Games criticism, by contrast, was only really institutionalized as a specialized academic discipline within the last fifteen years, and even today academic games criticism falls mainly within the purview of broader critical theorists, feminist theorists, cultural critics, semiologists, etc. rather than academics of games
qua games, while commercial games criticism draws its institutional origins alternatively from consumer advice publications
a la tech or car mags or from company-run rags that were little more than in-house advertisements for upcoming games.
I feel that as the institutionalization of the medium
pro se continues, we'll see video game reviews start to take on a character more akin to what we see in film criticism, and less of the "box-ticking to generate an algorithmic score out of ten" which has historically characterized the industry.
