People always claim they wanna see reviews before they buy their games, it’s the anthem of the anti-pre-orderer. Surely some of those reviews would come from games journalists.
The problem though is that it’s not sustainable to give away your content for free. You have to get advertisers to pay you and most people interested in games journalism are probably gonna have ad blockers, so then you have to fall back to whoever will pay you. You also have to avoid getting on a publishers bad side as a smaller journalist, or you’ll be black listed and your career will be over. So what can you do besides take money to fudge some reviews?
This is the problem with all free news content also, by the way. Somebody’s gonna pay for it, if it’s not you then it’s the people who want their opinions to be the prevailing one.