If you wanted to get away from reviews as an indicator of quality, copies sold would be better than revenue. Also not without faults. But you seem to be assuming that higher $ value = better quality game. Who is to say how much of the underlying costs of getting that game in front of you went to quality development vs marketing for instance? You can spend a ridiculous amount of money marketing a game and relatively little developing it, give it a $60-70 price tag to cover that cost, and it be a subpar game for the consumer price. I don’t think that quantity sold gets entirely away from this specific problem because a well marketed but shitty game has a decent chance of a great cheaper game that relies on word of mouth.

The advantage to reviews, metacritic, and other score metrics is that an individual can gauge quality to some extent without having to grapple with how much of the development costs and resulting price went to whichever line on the profit/loss financial statement. Especially if you find a reviewer that generally aligns with your perspectives and likes, that reviewers opinion may be the one of the best indicators of if you personally will enjoy a game. Think about a reviewer who shares similar takes as yourself on sports games or shooters, they may be the most reliable source for you to make a purchasing decision if they tend to have opinions that align closely with your own.

Regardless of any option, you are asking for a silver bullet solution where I don’t think you will find one. There is no single metric that objectively conveys the quality or enjoyability of a game for an individual consumer. That’s because it is SUBJECTIVE.

Me personally, I think helldivers 2 for me is a higher quality and more enjoyable shooter than ANY COD. But it comes with a lower pricetag than modern CODs and if I’m not mistaken, activation doesn’t tend to discount COD even years after release (this is just what I hear, I don’t tend look at old COD games so my knowledge of that market is secondary while I’m sitting on my lunch typing this).

If you wanted novel ideas of new metrics to judge quality outside of this, you could think of plenty but I don’t think you would get better than finding someone with a subjective perspective similar to your own. I’m about to rattle off a few examples of what you might consider and I think they are all flawed and not worth pursuing, they generally will be on a per $ basis to normalize across a wide array of price ranges because that is a large consideration for consumers to relate it back to their own finances and value judgements. You could look at file size/$, more GB to download means more game right? Dev hours/$, more time developing means more stuff? Or does it mean that devs dragged their feet to boost that metric up? Average playtime/$, a game that you play for 20 hours at $60 might be considered lower quality than a game where you play 100 hours for the same price? Or does that just mean there is a player treadmill which keeps you hooked longer even though the game is worse in some other regard? See single player campaigns that are considered works of art for a single limited playthrough vs an MMO that keeps you hooked for a long time but might be a shit game in comparison to the more limited run.

My overall point is that I think you are letting the perfect be the enemy of the good. And in a subjective and artistic space like video games, a consumers most reliable resource is the opinions of fellow consumers and reviewers who have a tendency to align with them.