I know people always say review sites gets paid for high scores.
But I wonder if review sites can pay a dev/publisher to not send in a review copy.
As someone who has reviewed games professionally for the last 10 years I can tell you that neither of these dumb myths are true. All it is, is just people being dumb and fighting over plastic boxes looking to fuel a console war and make people look bad because they gave the game a score that they did not like. So they start throwing shades of "Paid off review, etc..."
However, I will tell you though I had been approached before by a particular publisher asking me if they could use quotes from one of our reviews to paint the game in a positive light, despite the fact that the game received a really bad score from us. I won't tell you what publisher it was or what game for the sake of privacy and professionalism but basically, we gave the a game a lower than average score and only had 1 nice thing to say about it, they wanted to quote that particular part and use it in advertising for their accolades. I told them respectfully - no you may not, the game did not receive a good score and we don't want our integrity to look like crap for the sake of your advertising. Obviously, I said it nicer, but you get the idea.
This happened to me only once in the entirety of my career. I will tell you though, that
OpenCritic and MetaCritic average is a do or die situation for publishers and the PR agencies that they work with regardless of what the general gaming public believes. The meta score is the holy grail in today's day for game developers and publishers.