A game reviewer with any amount of experience will not be swayed by a free game, they're literally drowning in games. A free code isn't some joyful thing that we celebrate, it's either more work or an awkward conversation with PR later.
Also, unless you are an independent entity, if the company doesn't provide the game free, your business will expense it, so it's not coming out of your pocket that way either. And even if you are self-employed, you write off games you buy as business expenses (though it still hurts.)
So I've never been clear what audiences believe the difference is to a reviewer? (Bad writers may potentially take it out on a company if it
doesn't provide copy, but not because they have to pay for it, instead because not getting a copy early screws up the review plan and causes the content to go up late.) But it's good practice, even if to me it's a null issue as far as what the press should be criticized/scrutinized on.
I feel like professional review sites like Gamespot / IGN / Polygon's of the world shouldn't fall into the #ad category.
If not on the review itself, I believe many if not all professional review sites have a blanket disclaimer in their Review Policy or Ethics Statement or somewhere stating, "Companies send us stuff for free to work with."
Though that's on their site; I'm not sure if I've seen disclaimers (either from pro or am reviewers) on Youtube? When it's written, it's easy to write it somewhere it can be found, but it's an easy thing to neglect in video and not something a site would put in its About page. YT doesn't have much disclaimer functionality that I know of, it might be smart to add it since even the pros may skirting FTC violations and not even be thinking about it.
Completely agree with this.
Are there any negatives here?
When I was involved with reviews at a site, we started posting these citations, and instead of clearing the air, we saw on boards and comments an increase of complaints about privilege and influence. There might also have been more respondents quoting the citation text to try and say, "Hey dude, they JUST told you exactly what's going on, why you acting like they're hiding and shady?", but in general, bringing to light the business practices made people more likely to complain about those business practices, not less, whether they were fair practices or otherwise. Try to explain yourself and you only dig your grave deeper.
But complainers are going to complain. The problem is, gauging contentment is much harder. If there was a larger value in the community being informed and secured by the knowledge from these citations, it's not something that would show up in any metrics, so I'm not sure if anybody knows if they work or not on a macro level. Ideally, it does more good than harm.