Gamespot Chief Review Fired for low scores.

Jeff Gerstmann, the Editor in Chief of Gamespot was fired alegedly for giving out one too many bad reviews to games produced by sponser companies.

It seems like his lowly 6, for "Kane and Lynch" (compared to many other mainstream magazine's 8's) was the last straw for the sponser companies and they threatened to tear up contracts for future advertising. Rather than lose the money they decided to sack the editor.

More here.

Most people are aware (at least vaguely) that the magazine and review companies are in bed (to a greater or lesser extent) with the companies that make and distribute the games but this (if it's true) seems a step into a darker future.

Personally I'll miss Jeff's reviews which IMHO were some of the best on the web, particularly on his video reviews, the enthusiasm and passon for his work clearly came through as well as his experience and accumen. I don't doubt he'll be back pretty soon working for some other company.

Darkheart

Guess I wouldn't have lasted long then. I thought Kane and Lynch was the hands-down worst game I've played this year. Wretched graphics, awful controls, rotten AI, the only thing it had going was the semi-decent, if Tarantino-inspired storyline. Anyone who produces dross like that and expects a good review needs psychiatric help. I'm not even sure I can put into words the kind of brass ones required to turn out such a pile of garbage and blame someone else because it isn't selling.

But yeah, it's kinda bound to happen, and GameSpot is the one it's gonna happen to first/most. They've been swallowed up into this whole CNet conglomerate now, which leads to an unfortunate couple of problems. They have a lot of power, and at the same time the network has cost so much to put together that there's got to be huge pressure from up-top to monetize their position better.

It's a shame because GameSpot was one of the few sites I actually used to trust for reviews. They've been considerably patchier the last couple of years, and it wasn't hard to guess why, so I suppose we can expect it to just get worse from now on.

GameSpot is really gettin short on reliable reviewers nowadays, Greg Kasavin left earlier in the year (my favourite game reviewer, he ran along the same wavelength as I), Rich Gallup also left for reasons I can't recall (whom hosted 'On the Spot', as to which Alex Navarro took over), and now the oft-called 360 fanboy (can't blame him, hard to look at most Wii games after playing Gears of War at full resolution) gets booted for what, giving a game the review he believes it deserves?

GameSpot lost its credibility for me that day when I heard the news (JoyStiq's been keeping good track of this btw), firing a guy just because your advertisers didn't like what he had to say about their product............

This pretty much leaves just Penny-Arcade (which will never suffer from the ad problem since they handpick only ads of products they like) and Zero Punctuation (funny as hell, and delivers spot on reviews) left on the table of places I can trust.

Even if his being fired had nothing to do with advertising bucks, the timing of his firing was for shit: It makes gamespot look soooo bad.

I never read reviews. Its what demos are for.

Thats why they don't have car shows like top gear in the US. The NY Times gave one of the big 3 auto makers new models a bad review a few years ago and lost several million in advertising over the next couple of years.

It's what big business does to protect their assets and it sucks. These days you pretty much have to skew game reviews and read 50% as the bottom line, unless its a little known game but a nobody publisher. These days a commercial game has to score 80%+ or more to make me show much interest. Occasionaly I'll give a game the benefit of the doubt if it looks interesting, and is in a genre I'm particularly fond of.

At least gamespot has the gamers rating to balance out the review. I remember Amped 1 got a terrible review for Xbox and it was the best snow boarding game I had ever played at the time. User reviews gave it the score it deserved :).

Something like this happened with Assasins creed on the PS3. Some review mentioned the slow down and freezing of the game in the initial review, the comments were removes, the gaming news media noticed and started asking questions, next thing you know the review was put back to its original form.

Well, kind of sad but you know what? You never get much love from the vendors if you're not making nice reviews. Either you're important and big enough so that it doesn't matter or you just have to life with the consequences.

I find reviews quite helpful because they can give you a rough idea of what to expect. If something is reviewd high it might be worth a closer look. Making your decision just based on a demo would involve quite some heavy downloads which you can reduce based on reviews and much more time.

As for Kane and Lynch all i needed was a video of the game to know that i won't like it. This saved me the time to download, install and try it out on my own. Big plus for such a timesaver.

Best way to demo a game is download it, test it and buy it if it is fine or just kick it again of the harddisk.
This works best and helps to take care that only devs that really are worth it are supported instead of anyone that can push enough money up a mags pooo.
As I am swiss, I am allowed to download it but not upload it. (and no, this is not fun, we finance that with any data storage device and disk we buy which is why they cost 1.5 - 3 times as much as in the surrounding countries)

the german game related mags have been like this for years now, which is the reason I don't waste money on it.

the only somewhere usefull reviews I normally check are GameSpot and IGN (the later thanks to the fact that there is the "average press score" and the user score - reviews)

Gamespot's management can say what they like but Jeff's video review for "Kane and Lynch" has been pulled from Gamespot's site and Jeff was scheduled to make a TV appearance on the day he was sacked.

Darkheart

Yeah demo's are always best, luckily internet is fast enough and cheap enough to be able to download 1.5+ GB demos within a few hours.

Dammm....

Too bad the NYT (New York Times) doesn't have a videogame review section. If it was anything like the Restaurant review section then nobody would mess with the reviewers.

An independant, user fee driven only, review site/magazine is probably the only way to get unbiased reviews.

perhaps yes ... but only perhaps