I always mention it when I notice that in a game. Makes me think that, surely, at least a flash game must have been made with a ridiculous minimum on purpose, perhaps as a bit of a parody on other games.

I think score inflation is used mostly to make the player feel like they are getting good scores, faster.

One example is Skee Ball:  



Don't need the 0s.

Since it is a kid game, they are trying to reinforce the feeling of praise, by starting off with a "huge" reward. People would be more likely to think something is better because it is a bigger number, or something that they can quickly identify as significant in some way.  I think it is all psychological, basically.


However, if it is game with 10 as a minimum score, it can be alright, depending on the game. If you score 10 when you do something small, and get 12 when you do something slightly bigger, it can make sense, if they had a particular scoring method in mind (e.g. Geometry Wars). If it goes from 10 to 100, then it is completely unnecessary. However, if any of the numbers between the two are used, then the 10 might be necessary to avoid using decimals. So, they have to, at some point, use as many of those zeroes at the end of a minimum score as possible. Each one at the end that is never changed should be removed in the final version.