aJillSandwich: What makes no sense is, this is Bethesda we're talking about. There are lots of companies who make a habit of releasing shit games, and Bethesda is not one of them. Example: Earlier this year, Bethesda didn't send out review copies of Doom until one day before release. And for what? The game got excellent reviews.
Two likely reasons:
* They have very poor internal quality control and are aware of this fact, so they're very reluctant to ship what is likely to be a very buggy product, as you say, to avoid negative reviews from professional reviewers and instead encourage coverage from positively biased "influencers".
* You never know how the gaming press are going to react to a given game. Even a lot of the supposedly legitimate journalists are quite given to bias and bandwagon thinking, so they're likely to cut certain products more slack than others. For instance, there's a bandwagon groundswell at the moment against reboots, meaning that many journalists will attack a game or a movie just for being a reboot, regardless of the quality (see Robocop reboot, which turned out to be quite good in its own right). Or when there's a popularity contest between two or three main franchises: Marvel. vs DC (online so-called "critics" have really ruined their reputation with that one), PS vs. Xbox and so on). It was good and possible that, despite the quality of the game, Doom would have been savaged for not being classic Doom.
Following on from point 2: As Jim Sterling recently disclosed, publishers have a knack of trying to "buy" positive reviews. Proper journalists usually won't buy into this, and indeed, the best journalists will often publicise the fact that publishers tried to buy them off. I know WBIE got a lot of stick for this, but as far as I can tell, a lot of the major publishers do this. YouTube influencers, on the other hand - having less journalistic integrity, being less commercially aware and desperate for views and exclusivity - will agree to anything.
