You don't know me, please don’t pretend either to know our processes. We don’t get a budget for reviewing games. We are thankful, and always state as such to the dev teams and publishers, that the vast majority of paid for titles are given to us as review copies. To use the age old expression, if you don’t ask, you don’t get, and if a dev declines, then that’s their choice and we respect it. To date, no one has declined.
I have a real job, this is done in my spare time amongst everything else. Sheesh, who thought asking a simple question would invoke so much ire and consternation? As said, we are obliged most of our review copies for free. Most of tbe payback on a review is the publicity rather than the actual score the game receives, if we don’t get a copy, c’est la vie, something else gets reviewed, no skin off my nose.