They openly talked about it when CBSi (also owners of Gamespot) bought Giant Bomb back in... 2012? I forget what year, but it was pretty open about his Kane and Lynch review got him fired.

How so? Until I got to college my second job (after "sandwich artist" at Wendy's) was as a paid contributor to one of the two powerhouse gaming blogs at the time (the one that wasn't Kotaku; if you were in the scene back then, you'd heard of us), back when blogging was first coming to the public consciousness and the term "blogosphere" had yet to be coined. And while in retrospect I'd classify the quality of my own writing as "tabloid amateur" at best (please, God, don't go look at it!), we held ourselves to quite high standards of integrity: we could not accept any gifts from publishers, including paying for our own lodging and airfare when traveling to events; if we attended after-parties (at E3 and such), we had to disclose our presence and acknowledge any conflicts of interest; and when receiving games to review not only did we have to disclose as such, but we were forbidden from keeping any games, so we held raffles in order to award the games to our readers (back when physical copies were the norm, remember). If even our flying-by-the-seat-of-our-pants blog could adhere to standards, why is everyone so dim on the prospect of integrity for game journalists?

Isn't violating embargo different? I thought most reviewers agree to that explicitly.

That's not necessarily true, lots of gamers are just casual gamers who will only buy the blockbusters, just as with movies, and will probably not go beyond checking the metacritic score before buying, or even worse they will preorder it before the reviews are even out.

I think the main difference is that AAA games are much more expensive than a movie ticket, so the percentage of people who do this is lower.

"better" doesn't seem a good description for the gaming community's connection to studios. In many cases, gamers themselves might even strong-arm media outlets for studios with or without permission, hence the inflated scores. The recent fake review on Mario Odyssey comes to mind.

This behavior has near zero repercussions for gaming studios. Despite companies like Ubisoft blacklisting and badmouthing critics who gave honest opinions of arguably poor game design choices, these companies have never been richer