Devs being bonused/rated/whatever by metascore isn't just about the association with sales. It's not fair to rate devs based on sales because you could give a crap dev your most famous IP, and spend more on marketing, and the game would sell better than a great dev who is creating a new IP and you don't market it as much.
Obviously an incredibly imperfect system and puts you are the whim of critics.. but it's more fair than sales.
At companies, sales is always an important metric. In particular Net sales and profit measures. Gross sales means nothing. Marketing managers can have market share % goals to strive for.
It looks like in gaming reviews scores are a thing. At my companies, nobody cares about review scores like someone scouring Amazon and Walmart customer ratings, or Google reviews.
Blame can always be shifted to other departments or budgets, but as a whole as long as the targets are reasonable and management is willing to re-look at the targets set based on factors (ie. covid heavily impacted companies in 2020), then that's as good as it gets.
Every company I've worked at sets initial targets, can revise targets mid-year, and then after the year is over, it is up to the high level execs to evaluate performance based off factors. Another factor that is out of the hands of people is currency exchange. That is always a discussion point because how can you hold a Canadian Division getting grilled 1-2% on a annual currency swing which nobody has control over.
Bonuses are paid at a corporate level. It comes down to reasonable targets and people willing to consider out of my control factors. If bosses set bad targets or dont give a shit about things, then you'll get a bad target to go after and people will be pissed.
I wonder how loose the targets are at game companies. If the target is 1 million copies at $50 million net sales at an MC score of 80, how hard they are on it.
I can tell you from above, not only will bosses try to help out workers by factoring in cases they had no control, but every company always hedges their bets and purposely overstates goals a bit. Not in an impossibly achievable way. But we goose it up 1-2% as buffer, when the real number committed to corporate is a touch lower than they think. We always do that. Only some of us at the office know the true sales and profit numbers we need.
So for a gaming company, the real number for a bonus pay out is 950,000 copies at a 77 score.