Any journalist that gets pre-release benefits from big publishers can't be trusted with his opinion, period. That's because his opinion will always be filtered. He paints game in a bad light? Publisher won't give him a review copy for any of their future titles. This means he can only start playing on launch day and by the time he's played enough to write an opinion, people will have already moved on to the next game and every other outlet will have had a review up for weeks. Getting review out asap is the most important thing for gaming outlets. That's why you end up with reviews like PC Gamer's Pathfinder: Kingmaker one which I can almost 100% guarantee was written by someone who didn't play the game at all and wrote it based on previews posted by other outlets months before the game's launch.
And the best thing is that journos love to suck publisher and dev cocks. The relationship should be strictly professional for objective evaluation, yet time and time you can see them acting as best buddies which goes directly against interests of recipients of their reviews. Of course it's hard to write a review bashing a game you know someone who you consider a friend worked on for several years, so they try to paint it up. The question is, what is the purpose of said review, to make reviewer's dev friend feel better or to give potential consumers an objective opinion on the product?
With all of this taken into consideration, it's easy to see why one might opt for journalists being the only ones able to play the game and write their "opinions" that readers will take face value and, almost certainly, get hyped even more. I have zero doubts that CP 2077 will sell bonkers numbers and be a gigantic commercial success. The question is, what comes next? What if half the things they've said about the game turn out to be false claims and the game doesn't live up to even half of its enormous hype? This isn't Ubisoft with thousands of employees and capabilities to shit out multiple titles every year, the bubble can burst really quickly.
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