I would say that there's no importance in objective measuring of a game's quality, because such a thing is impossible. Metacritic is basically the site that exemplifies how bad this is, but also that there's an industry pressure to put numbers to something which can't be presented in such a manner.

There's also a problem with the separation of journalism vs. critics vs. news junkies.
1) Journalists are basically those who report on unknown news.
2) While game critics are basically those who analyze.
3) And news junkies are essentially those who wait for the associated press.

Now, the problem is we think that games journalism encompasses 1 and 2 (though more accurately, most think it probably encompasses 1 and metacritic), when it basically encompasses 2 and 3. This is the reason for the vitriol towards the idea of games "journalism," because it's not really journalism, it's simply waiting to receive slop from whatever various news source will provide it. Unfortunately, news services also fellate those who will provide said information to a particular website (typically being the content producers themselves). This means that, for a long time now, the system has become one of master and slave, where the writers are being dominated by demands from their news whoring masters, who have been able to control the system of information by exclusivity. The problem goes so far as to stretch onto game critics, who are similarly subdued. More than this, the problem is the lack of separation of these three things, and I'm not talking about physical separation, I'm talking about awareness. People merge these things together as if they're related, as if they're similar, when they're clearly not.

The closest thing to actual games journalism, is mostly on Hardcore Gaming 101's blog, and it typically has to do with stories about videogames in places like Egypt or China or Korea. Stuff that gets no American media attention, because that's basically what journalism is; bringing to light stories that are important, but that no one is talking about. Typically, because there's some belief in the media that it's not "worth" talking about.