But there is often an untold aspect involved in setting an embargo date: Some embargoes are in place for no other reason than to give another site an exclusive on that review. Let's call bullshit on this process right now. Did that site do any extra work to get the exclusive coverage -- and I mean, real legwork or investigative work, not just putting together the best "deal" for the publisher? No. The only work involved may have been making the review sound effusive enough to justify the high score that allows the site to keep the exclusive, thanks to certain restrictions occasionally requested by a publisher's marketing department. Embargoes designed to protect the publisher from a bad score, or a competitor's deal with a publisher, fly in the face of why embargoes were originally created, to protect the public interest -- not the publisher interest.

Yes, in the past, pre-Crispy, I was in the business of negotiating for exclusive reviews. First review always means the best traffic, right? The numbers bear that out. I came to realize exclusives were not worth the risk for games with extensive multiplayer components, because they couldn't properly be tested pre-release. How do you review a multiplayer game when you can't test it in real-world conditions against people who aren't developers and on servers not belonging to the developers or publishers?