I think you may be underestimating the degree to which reviewers were captured by the publishers. It was a pretty big meme back in the day, where AAA titles pretty much always got a 7 or more. The incentive back in the days of magazines was early access to games. If your magazine didn't have the newest blockbuster on the cover along with an in-depth review then your magazine wouldn't sell. That meant that you had to have a relationship with the publisher, a relationship that would get chilly if you didn't consistently give the publisher good reviews.
I remember when Kotaku started (long before they were bought out) and they were lauded as being immune to this interference. Same with Giant Bomb, which has now changed hands many times.
I'm not saying the current system is perfect - I'm just saying that my own preference has completely changed. I stopped reading game reviews probably a decade ago and now I have a small selection of creators who have proven themselves to me. They didn't do so by trying to be a YouTube equivalent of game journalism (ala TotalBiscuit or Zero Punctuation) but simply by playing thousands of games. The review is incidental, their primary focus is on playing the game.
The days of listening to the opinion of someone who played the game for 5 hours in a rush to meet a deadline are gone for me. The days of someone shoe-horning reviews into gameplay/sound/ui/audio breakdowns are gone for me. For almost any game I care about there is someone who is just playing it, and I watch them play it, and decide for myself.
Exactly, I remember so many of the mags being hot garbage, and the industry itself would gladly blacklist a journalist that said anything bad about them.
The thing with lets-players and different youtubers is there are a bunch of small time ones that like a particular genre and play things around that. If you don't like the ones you're seeing, search around and you'll typically find a number of different people playing the game and putting up on YT.
I remember when Kotaku started (long before they were bought out) and they were lauded as being immune to this interference. Same with Giant Bomb, which has now changed hands many times.
I'm not saying the current system is perfect - I'm just saying that my own preference has completely changed. I stopped reading game reviews probably a decade ago and now I have a small selection of creators who have proven themselves to me. They didn't do so by trying to be a YouTube equivalent of game journalism (ala TotalBiscuit or Zero Punctuation) but simply by playing thousands of games. The review is incidental, their primary focus is on playing the game.
The days of listening to the opinion of someone who played the game for 5 hours in a rush to meet a deadline are gone for me. The days of someone shoe-horning reviews into gameplay/sound/ui/audio breakdowns are gone for me. For almost any game I care about there is someone who is just playing it, and I watch them play it, and decide for myself.