The games press has always had one central problem: their main source of revenue is advertisers of games. When a bad game gets a bad review, the advertisers pul

The games press has always had one central problem: their main source of revenue is advertisers of games. When a bad game gets a bad review, the advertisers pull their ads, and the outlet goes down. I was fired for exactly this type of bullshit back in 2001. It's not even kickbacks. It's free games. It's sustaining paychecks. It's free food, booze and t-shirts. It's free steam keys, and trips to LA to meet developers. It's not kickbacks. It would have amazed me to have even had that option of money bribes on the table: all I ever got were chocolates, plush dolls, a miniature plastic trebuchet. In the end, I never changed a rating because of any of that junk. But smaller outlets where they can't afford to be honest are swayed by this stuff. Most osf these folks you suspect are probably cheap fucking dates: bought with a game branded bottle or scotch. There's a lot of money to be made by being a "Cheerleader for the Industry," and not as much in being the bastion of good content, honestly. That's because the first option requires no real readers or followers, just sponsors. The second requires your content to be somehow better than everyone else's, and today that means competing with like, 10,000 other people one URL away.