The thing that I think that a lot of people are forgetting, which is I think what we're seeing with Duke Nukem, is that there are two prongs for how publications get their money -- advertising is one, but the other is traffic. If your web site has 5000 people coming to it a month, it's going to demand a lot less money for ads than if it has 5000 people coming to it per hour.

With DNF, when the reviews started coming out, I think it became a feeding frenzy to pick up on new and different parts of the game to complain about to drive traffic to those sites. The delay of DNF made it so this release was / is perhaps the most compelling release in years, and so when researching the game, would you be more interested in hearing an average review that touches on nothing new, or a review that complains bitterly about the humor, or the tiny Duke sections, or the driving sections, or the lack of enemy AI, or whatever?

Game reviews are like network news -- if you add a partisan slant to it to excite or inflame your audience, you have a better chance that people will stick with it longer to see what else is going on. That's what I think happened with Duke -- the reviews seemed to start out as average (when I first checked meta critic, it had two positives, seven mediums and two negatives, now it is 2 / 22 / 17, including 1up.com giving it a zero).

Why did they do this? Well, because it makes you go, "Oh my! 1Up gave it a 0! Let me see that!" Hell, it even worked on me. And thus, they can charge more for advertising.

It's crap, but there really is very little "journalistic integrity" left in any medium since everything is more or less run by the industry they seek to cover.