Andrew Pfister, 1UP.com games reviewer claims on his blog that Midway has decided to bunish 1UP for their low Mortal Kombat review scores by ignoring to send them review versions of their latest games.
The story according to Andrew Pfister is as follows:
"You may have noticed that we're running a bit late on our Mortal Kombat Wii review...apologies for that.
Why is it late?
Because Midway didn't send the game to us for review. Apparently there were some bruised egos over there. Or a singular bruised ego. We're not exactly sure. Someone felt left out when Milky talked about top-tier fighting games in some preview a while back and neglected to mention MK, and EGM didn't score previous Mortal Kombat games as high as some of our competitors did. So Midway has decided to not send us review code at all as some sort of punishment. The message? "Give us better scores, or we won't support you."
Whatever.
We're heading down to the store this afternoon to pick up a copy of the game to review, and we'll give it a fair shake based on its merits. We just wanted to let you know what's up".
Withholding review version from a reviewer means that players will get the game before the reviewer gets to review it, or (more likely) they would pursue the review at a competitor.
This is still a one sided story and we are still waiting for Midway's response. We’ll let you know as soon as we get it.