Publicity only works for short-term sales so in the end the bad product would suffer because of it's own lack of quality. Best to make sure you make a good game, instead of trying to get magazines to report on how bad it is, your image as developer suffers bigtime, eventhough such publicity could temporarily boost your sales.

It's tricky to get more attention than a product deserves and not all good critics will mean more sales, but it's definately untrue that you'll be getting 3 times more sales because your product was rated and burned to the ground by some magazines,

Cheers