Errr doesn't this happen all the fucking time?
So, I'm not sure what you're asking in saying "doesn't
this happen...", but the reality is it actually does, though not in gaming media (or just general enthusiast press) as much as I know of.
When I was a cub journalist for gaming sites in the late 90s/early-2000s, I would get calls from PR saying, "We appreciate the review, can we talk to your Sales dept for usage of a quote?" My boss was from magazines and explained that it was part of the publishing business to monetize quotations; even though the content is available publicly,
they want to profit off of it, and
your company owns those words (they also have intellectual property rights to protect, and letting anybody do whatever with their content diminished their business value,) so there is an expectation of exchange for usage. "Two Thumbs Up" is a registered trademark for a number of reasons.
That said, all of the companies I worked for granted use of quotes without ever charging for them even way back then, and the "inherent value" of a journalist's work has gone real sideways since then (especially now with social media and with embedded content; if you retweet a tweet, are you using that tweet for yourself or are you just helping to distribute the original material?) So I don't know how much charging for quotes exists today?
Quick side-note: it could well be that Kotaku quotes rates that are generic to parent company Gizmodo Media Group / Univision, which has a lot of old-media business and protocol behind it. So even if a journalist doesn't care or even would like for their quotes to be used (and to be clear, AFAIK the journalist does not see any of that money nor do they solicit it, it all goes upstream to the main coffers and I have never heard of a "bonus" or kickback for being the one creating the quoted material,) their boss's boss's boss's boss sets the company terms.
Usually it's the other way around. The publisher would ask permission to use a quote. And they don't pay for it.
If this is the same Manabyte from ages and ages on the net, you know well enough as somebody experienced in journalism how it works versus the rumors and trolling and all that. (Btw, I'm not sure if you're taking Spukc's comment as "aren't all journalists taking payouts", which is not how I took it, but I guess I should have.) So I'll just back you in saying that yeah, even the hungry journalists I knew didn't go out and actively solicit their quotes to be used in advertising. (And you and I were active back far enough ago that we remember "quote-on-the-box" review pulls, which I think are a thing of the past even for movies?) They cared about the site/mag that they wrote for and the profile/visibility they had in the industry itself; that was your job, and everything else was the responsibility of some other department in the company that wasn't your concern. You actually had to be careful with who you let use quotes, because that's your name they're out there using to sell their product and their use of the quote is missing all of the context of your long review text (or now video.) Sales departments for a site/mag then and apparently now are still interested in the value of their content as it is repurposed, so probably somebody is very active in the "Peter Travers business" (assuming RS charges for quotes), but, like, were you were ever asked to go ask PR to get your words out there? I wasn't, and that was never anything asked of anybody I've talked with.
Quotations were actually a pain in the ass for me, because I'd get requests for abbreviated quotes to make it sound as nice as possible, or quotes from middling reviews that singled out one good thing (this was back when they only had so many reviews to choose from and were looking for anything kind to spin into a positive possible.) And then sometimes an ad or product would come out, and your quote with your name on it used totally without permission, and you'd have to figure out if it's worth going through Legal to do anything about that (there was never a case where I cared to do so, but it did suck when a
preview quote was pulled, and either your final review doesn't match that enthusiasm or, even worse, your boss assigns a review to somebody else because they need somebody without their name on the box to handle the site's score.)
...That was all back when journalism mattered, of course, to the audiences and to the businesses that ran the market; not everything has changed since then, though.
