>>16502436
They are supposed to be, but what their profession is, it seems to be a mystery to everyone, critics too.
A critic is someone that has a very broad knowledge base to share and base comparisons with. Whatever field he is critiquing, he will know most examples of it, how they fare against each other and what the flaws and merits of each one is. However, rating things is not he's actually job.
Around him, there's a bunch of Average Joe's that have limited time and money to enjoy whatever it is that this critic judges and so, they resort to him to get recommendations on what's the best thing for them. The critic is supposed to know his audience and thus be able to recommend something that matches their personal taste with what's best available for them. The Average Joe then puts value on the critic because of the time he saved him and how often he ends up seeing something that he truly likes.
For instance, a movies critic will know plenty of examples in different genres and will even grade them in quality. But when recommending a movie to someone, he won't tell you "You have to see Movie X, it's really good!", that's just his opinion. He's supposed to say "Well, if you like horror, the recent Movie Y is kinda bland but Movie W was great. If you prefer romance, Movie Z is great if you want character development while Movie N has decent comedy to go along if you want to laugh as well".
Now, of course that's not what critics are today. Whenever they aren't spewing just their personal opinion, it's propaganda at best and shit at worst. They do not know their audience, they do not know the genre at all and anything longer than 3 paragraphs will be the writer bloviating about whatever message he read in the game. Anyone interested in videogames gains nothing from paying attention to them.
But most devs either don't know that or don't care because it's still free advertizing. Critics are just another venue to have someone talk about their game and they do not care one way or another how qualified they are to talk about it, as long as they say nice things.
Fortunately, it's all going as expected in a self-correcting manner. Every critic that does this shit becomes worthless and thus loses it's audience, in turn making him worthless to the devs who become worthless themselves when they can't convince the few critics that actually know their shit to talk about them (often when they put out shit).
So nothing to worry about, it's a matter of time really, before the actual critics remain and everyone else fades.