Why do people always say reviewers get paid to give good scores?

[Profyrion]

I usually don't pay much attention to a single review score. You can get a better idea of a game's value with composite scores on metacritic and gamerankings.com. Especially for games that get 20 or more reviews.

And I never pay attention to player reviews. They are universally worthless.

[Hraklea]

I don't think they get bribed, I think professional reviewers are actually that bad and they like any sort of famous franchise crap they get.

[antelope591]

It's not that they actually get paid for reviews....it probably happens but a lot less than people think. The main reason is they don't play a game long enough to give a good impression of the total package. The main games people here are complaining about are not games you can form a good opinion on after 10 hours of playtime which I doubt most reviewers go past. DA2, ME3, Oblivion, Skyrim, Diablo 3.....these games are all awesome (with the exeption of DA2 which was just trash) if you play them for like 10 hours or less so its very understandable why every review rates them a 9/10. Its when you play them for like 40+ hours that the problems of the games become very apparent. You think a reviewer's gonna sit there and play 1 game for 40 hours when they have to do like 50 reviews in 1 week?

[Yavannie]

There's a reason why the first handful of reviews are usually more positive than the ones that appear after a while. There is absolutely dealings between game devs and reviewers, including the devs hand picking a few people to give early reviews with lenient scores. Anyone remotely involved in the game industry will confirm this.