How much stock do you put into review scores?

I was talking with an ex-freelance game journalist yesterday on an "anonymous" forum. He claimed to have worked regularly for a somewhat major gaming news outlet until he was blacklisted from the industry for trying to expose the rampant corruption. He then went on to say things like the following:

Every publisher out there tries to buy scores, with the only exception possibly being Nintendo (he admitted he just hadn't found any evidence against the big N, but they could be guilty of it too). Even Indie developers do this, the difference being they don't have the same kind of resources to work with.

He said that every A, B or C-list game site is corrupt as far as he knows. Big name sites like IGN, Game Informer, Pc Gamer and, yes, Gamespot are rampant with corruption. Reviewers are often offered incentives for tuning up scores, and there are usually deals in place between big name publishers and gaming sites involving advertising revenue, paid vacations, monetary gifts and, in rare cases, even high profile prostitutes in exchange for more favorable reviews.

He said that Companies like EA have hundreds of people at all times whose only jobs are to post favorable comments about their games in forums and monitor the internet to find out what is being said about their products. There are sites like NeoGAF which are actually owned by various publishers. These sites are used to manipulate the consumer landscape in the gaming industry. That's where concepts like "core" gamers come from.

He said that Adam Sessler is generally considered to be a jackass amongst his peers, and that he has major issues regarding his hair loss. G4 employees are warned not to even mention his hair at any point in his company, because he will go berserk.

Now, I'm not sure how much of this is legit, but he made some remarks that at the very least showed that he'd done lots of research to concoct such an elaborate lie. And when you look at things like the infamous Kane & Lynch incident here on Gamespot, ridiculously inflated scores of high profile games (GTA IV a 10?! Gears of War 3 a 9.5? All those other 9s and 9.5s for games that are legitimately 8s or 7s?), the Black Ops Mansion Getaway fiasco, The DICE review copy filtering, multiple times that Rockstar has been ousted for bribery...I don't know. It's kind of worrying.

So, and here's my main point, with all of this stuff out there, a lot of it just a google search away, why do people on System Wars still use game scores as arguing points? Why do you let these review scores influence your gaming decisions? I think it's about time we, as gamers, took a little more responsibility for how we get our information, and what we let influence our purchases. That's all I guess.

A bit.Games are expensive,a review helps me decide if it's worth it.

The majority of games I buy I already have an idea of what to expect, I tend to pay little attention to a difference of say between 8.5 to a 9.5, for me thats usually down to the reviewer's taste.

For games I know nothing about or very little about, a review score atleast tells me whether its worth investigating further or not so in that sense they can be quite helpful.

Very little, If a game gets 4s or something across the board, I'll avoid it. Otherwise its fair game until I play it myself.

Buying a game should be a careful process, at $60 its not a small monetary investment. Reviews help me make a decision about whether or not a game is worth my money. Of course that is only one factor in the decision making process. I am not blind to companies paying off sites, editors using scores for page hits, rushed reviews, and biased journalism. Thats why while important, I take everything as a grain of salt. User reviews are just as bad and tend to be overexagerated toward the extreme ends of like or dislike. Somewhere between all the fanboyism, hype, fluffed up words are actual facts that I want to know. It helps to have some reviewers you find credible (like arstechnica)

Of course reviews are used for this pathetic "war" which people obssess over constantly. Whatever.

None at all. A score is just a number that reviewers just throw onto a review at the last minute. No one even really thinks about it. It's the actual review, the part where they say what the game did right or wrong, that matters. Also, gameplay videos like the Giantbomb quick looks are huge helps.

0/10, i have disagreed with so many reviews that I don't see the point of paying attention to them

Little to non.

I treat them as a resource, not a bible.

It depends. If it gets critically panned like Lair, then yeah I'll reconsider my purchase. If it somehow "flops" on a single website (inFamous 2), then i don't give a damn.