Not only Bethesda refuses them. The time magazines got a free copy for a review before release are long gone.
The best they can hope is an invitation from a studio to play a few hours in their building.
But this is only logical for them. The influence of the press for sales is not so strong anymore. Gamers are happy
with little youtube snippets and *leaked* infos.
And even if a mag gets a copy beforehand....games today are far from finished (a day one patch of some GB is
not unusual)....so a review is more guesswork than actual info.
That's the reason why I don't pre-order or and wait for real reviews after the release and wait even longer for
the first patches.

I'm becoming very curious about the the topic of no early reviews period and now I'm wondering about games in the past.

Does anyone know if DK Forever has early press because I do remember it's release was a huge fucking mess onto it's own.

I think if their games could have multiplayer, they did. As far back as i know of their games with Warcraft 2 i know it had multiplayer support. But multiplayer doesn't mean it has to be always-online. Starcraft and Diablo 1&2 did these just fine where it was optional, while all the recent games it's more required even if you want to play solo.

XXX shovel-ware was released on steam but no one noticed because no one covered it?

I'll disagree there. TotalBiscuit almost always goes over not only flaws he noticed, but hardware and performance tests. I recall him doing the DC ultimate alliance and Fable Anniversary, both of which had issues vs their original titles.

Then there's Arkham Knight and Assassin's Creed Unity. How many more of those would have been sold I wonder if there was no information until much later in it's cycle? How much worse if Steam wasn't offering refunds (finally).

Somehow this seems just as expected.

Some Youtubers also pull crap, being bought to cover a game and make it seem more engaging than it is while getting paid (or even having owned/kickstarted the game). It's probably easier to purchase a youtuber but how big his audience is will be smaller than the larger outlets in general.

not for me, but thats probably because i'm a bethesda fan. i actually did expect that skyrim se wouldn't have any performance issues on consoles and would be pretty polished bug-wise.

i hope that they fixed at least the big save bug that made the skyrim, oblivion, fallout 3 and fallout nv on xb360 and ps4 unplayable.

I fail to see your point.

True, but the difference is that Youtubers usually aren't professionals being paid to review games, nor do they actually call themselves journalists, so I don't hold them to the same standards.
Tbh, I don't really pay attention to Youtubers either, I usually prefer to go by user reviews. As far as I'm concerned, the easy availability of user reviews combined with Youtube stuff pretty much makes gaming "journalists" obsolete. And obviously Bethesda agrees.

While I agree, I do think that having as informed as possible information before purchase is a good thing. Youtubers are wanted because of their raw reactions and feedback (or because people find them entertaining).

Still there are going to be many people who don't search for reviews or wait for them, and have to have a craps shoot (usually against them) on if the game is going to be up to snuff or not.

As someone else stated, they did this with Doom & that turned out to be a big hit (well, except for their early beta pvp thingie), but it doesn't guarantee it will with other games.

Dishonoured (Yes, with a "U"!!) 2 is en route & whilst I'm fairly sure it'll be a good game (first is good stuff) I'm also not daft enough to take that risk.

Anyone (yes, I'm staring at all of those NMS fools) that pre-orders before seeing anything other than clearly scripted "gameplay" gets what they deserve.

Anyone that waits until after release is a wise Monkey indeed.

Yes well, if people want to buy games without any way to know its quality or lack thereof, they have only themselves to blame if the game sucks. There have been enough cases of overhyped games being awful or broken on day 1 that any sensible gamer should have gotten into the habit of waiting a few days after release even for a game they're really interested in imo.

And either way, having early reviews or not makes little difference to those people who like to pre-order games.

Only by getting burned a few times will pre-order culture come to a halt. There's been quite a few high profile games as of late, including NMS that's been very disappointing.

Just have to see.

That and big name video game "journalism" makes the 24/7 news cycle seem objective by comparison.

I actually heard about this on the Jimquistion first. Interestingly enough, Jim points out that publishers do apparently send out review copies to select critics only - namely those who are more likely to give favourable reviews (duh).
Combined with the "last minute review copy" stance, the intent here seems to be pretty clear...
Regardless of whether you think Jim Sterling is an imbecilic annoying twat, this seems to be all but consumer-friendly.

It really won't affect me much either way, since I don't preorder and actually wonder how pre-order culture ever became a thing in the first place. But, apparently people like buying cats in bags ;)
I'm curious to whether that actually is bound to change at some point? I've got the feeling that even post-NMS, people are just as likely to preorder as they ever were [citation needed].

Yeah, I've noticed game companies are jumping on that bandwagon too. Mafia III is a recent example of it.