dan hushoo wrote:

Plus, most companies want a guaranteed score or range of scores. We did play with this fire once at EGM...the very first time I was faced with it. I thought I could deal with it by protecting the reviewers from that discussion—I’d let them review the game independently and then see if the scores were high enough for us to secure that exclusive.

from dan's site wrote:

So early on in my career, we used to horde all those freebies and take them into Electronics Boutique, Best Buy, Target…whoever was willing to give us trade-in or store credit for those (some game companies were wise to that and would punch a hole in the UPC barcodes before sending stuff out to editors). I’m very embarassed to say, this was a very profitable process for us…especially when we would sucker a Best Buy customer service rep into taking in our receipt-less games at full retail price for store credit!