Do some publishers pay websites/magazines to give their game a good score?
In the current climate, publishers tend not to bother with the print magazines due to their low circulation to target markets following the uptake of the Internet, and now spend their money on brand awareness in order to sell their products. The most obvious of these recently has been EA, whom have spent many millions on pushing the EA Sports and EA Games. The benefit of this is that for casual games purchasers (which are the majority), they can go into a store without knowing what they want and notice a brand that they have seen advertised on TV – an EA Brand, and pick that product up. So to come back to the original question, nobody would ever admit to paying for a positive review score and the sites and magazines know that their own credibility could be damaged if they make things too obvious, but they may well be times when an publisher paid trip somewhere (with free beer) could make the difference between an 85% score and a 90% score. Possibly …! Q. Who controls the game? Does t
