The former Editor In Chief of EGM Dan "Shoe" Hsu has this very interesting article about game reviews on his blog. The piece is written by "an anonymous guy from a big publisher" who speaks on why publishers pressure publications, pull ad buys and blacklist reviewers and publications when their games get unfavorable reviews. Below is a quote but I do recommend you read the full piece.
What many gamers don’t understand is how busy journalists can be – and also how lazy. Lets say you have a game that takes 30 hours to complete, and reviewer plays 2 hours of it and gives it mediocre review based on the first few levels, just because he has 10 other games to review and can’t put in 20 hours. Or when seeing a game pre-release, the journalist complains about things in the game that are obviously work in progress. Or when an editor of a big games website gives his FPS guy a sim racing game to review. Or when someone looks at all the other reviews online for a game, and just follows the crowd by posting a similar review (look at what’s happening to Too Human right now… does that game deserve scores that bad?). These things happen all the time.
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