[gekko]

Certainly the publisher provides the journalists with the copies of the game before it's released, but it's not with any agreement that the game will receive a high score. Reviews are advertisement, and almost certainly ensure when the game releases there's an article on the front page of every site featuring it. Sure a good review is always what they want, but this is video games, not politics. It's not ALL corrupt.

Yes, there is certainly a relationship there. IGN would be nothing if it couldn't get the news from publishers, but IGN is also the largest gaming site on the web, and publishers want their game on the front page. Larger sites like IGN have strict policies to prevent any possible issues. IGN has policies against journalists receiving gifts from publishers, and the journalists are also deliberately not told about advertisement deals. For example, the journalist reviewing Gears 3 isn't allowed to know that the advertising department was planning to give Gears 3 the full-page ad this week because it might influence the score. If the game for a 5/10, that ad would still have gone up.

Now there are certainly examples of corruption in the past, but that kind of thing can easily kill a journalist's career and severely damage the reputation of a company. For a fan site or blog, that means nothing. For a site like IGN, those guys (some trained journalists, some not) are making a living doing that job, so that's a huge risk. Also it's a big risk to News Corp. if they get caught. There's famous stories of this kind of thing happening to companies as big as CBS (with the famous Wigand story), so I'm not saying it's out of the question. However, it's certainly not the norm.