GameSpot posts official Gerstmann firing notice

How did Jonah set the text in his posts to really light gray? Is there some special code? =^u.u^=

Wow, I'm more so shocked at this troll than I am at the Gerstmann fiasco. I wish I had that much free time to waste; I'd apply for a job at Gamespot, I hear they're hiring.

Sorry but I can't buy that. I mean if it wasn't for the reasons many people are claiming are, then why would they pull the video review and make changes to Jeff's written review? I mean they can't say that it didn't meet the "standards" of gamespot because we know that all reviews are checked by fellow staff members before the article even appears on the site.

A letter I sent to sales@gamespot.com (don't think I posted it at Joystiq yet)

To whom it may concern,

I am writing on behalf of Pixelmagic Gaming, an up and coming development house based right outside of Dallas, Texas. We are currently developing a new, original flight fighter game, tentatively titled "Twin Tigers".

What we're looking to do with this IP is to bring back fun to flight games, hearkening to the days of Afterburner and Starfox. So many modern day flight games are either too technical or too "kiddie" for our tastes.

That said, we would like to run a series of banner ads on your site next year closer to our game's release, most likely Q3 2008.

Please let us know what kind of payment plan you have. I am pretty sure we can get some kind of banner for $10k, but does that include a couple points? For the review, I mean? How much would, say, 3 banners w/video, and a guaranteed 8.0 or higher score cost? Our company has unlimited funds at our disposal, so just name the price and we will send all manner of money, swag, and women of ill repute to your headquaters.

Now keep in mind if you post a negative review of our game, we WILL pull all advertising funds. So make sure you get someone disposable to handle the review.

Please contact me at your earliest convenience with your preferences (blonde, brunette?) and your payment plan. If necessary we will pay in cash, unmarked small bills.

Sincerely,
Everyone on the Internet Hates You Now

PS: Next time just wire funds directly to IGN and 1up, it will be less painful.

It took them 4 days to tell us what we already know? Why wasn't this mentioned on day 1? day 2?

Something is not right. I'm not sure I trust GameSpot anymore. And they've done NOTHING to reassure me.

Ummm yeah right like Gamespot is actually gonna say "Yeah he was fired because the company didn't like his reviews and our company is a sell out..."

Gimme a break Gamespot!

Jonah, Judging by the amount of post and time you spend here defending GameSpot, either you are a shill or someone who's dream job is to be a shill... either way your nose is permanently stained brown and you probably can't stand to look at yourself in the mirror... no self pride will do that.. your case appears to be terminal, sorry for ya buddy. We can't all be winners...

I'm glad I stopped reading GameSpot months ago.

No matter how you guys cut it some of the reveiws he posted were unprofessional. When I heard the video review even I thought that he went to far. It is one thing to provide a professional and unbias reveiw and it is another to downright delever insults the entire reveiw.

First of all, Gamespot has sucked for sometime. I have not gone there in years basically because I hate everything about the place from the site layout to the actual content. For reviews, I generally use metacritic to get an average and make my opinion off numerous reviews.

But I digress.

Eidos has made a game that isn't terrible. However, they have also made a game the feels very unfinished and rushed which is a shame because if everything worked the way it should have this game could have easily been a favorite in my book. It's still a fun game, it just isn't a masterpiece which I don't mind since I don't expect every fucking video game to be a perfect 10 like most of the fickle gaming public. It definitely could have used a couple more months in the oven though. Also, Eidos has been responsible for some of my favorite games including Fear Effect and the Hitman series so I'm not going to chastise them.

But I digress.

Gerstmann definitely didn't deserve to be fired, especially after being there for that long. However, I kind of have a feeling in my stomach it just wasn't this review that got him fired. Just a hunch, I don't know anything for sure which brings me to my last digression.

None of us knows what happened. It's all speculation. Therefore, people should stop arguing on here like its fact over fact. Yeah it's a shitty situation and it's a shitty thing for the gaming industry but if you buy games just based on reviews anyway then I don't know what to tell you. The whole review system is fucked for the most part. A 6 is considered horrible by most people which is pretty lame.

In conclusion, Gamespot has always sucked, Eidos is still cool in my book although this game didn't realize its full potential by being rushed and therefor buggy, Gerstmann didn't deserve to be fired, reviews suck for the most part anyway, and you guys probably hate the word Digress now.

does this make anyone curious to see how shitty kane and lynch is?

Thought I might throw my opinion into the ring. I recently wrote about this incident at my entertainment blog http://www.staticechoes.blogspot.com
I'd love to hear what you guys have to say in response.

That's why PC accelerator was a great magazine, they had special words to describe games like this: Craptacular, Craptastic, etc.... They would tell you a game straight sucked, but alas, they went away after a little over a year, leaving us with the types of magazines that hype EVERY game like it's the greatest ever in previews, then review it completely differently.

They think it's cool to include a 30 page cellphone ad in the middle of your PCGAMER or OXM because you know what? Fuck the people BUYING the magazine, they care more about the people advertising in it. These companies need to realize we can get our entertainment news in a variety of places, and if they are going to continue to treat us like assholes, it won't matter how much advertisers love them, because they won't have anyone to advertise to.

Too often consumers are being treated like we owe something to the people making these products instead of the other way around.

Jonah Falcon is a undercover Cnet PR.

Since Jonah loves to end most of his posts with a parenthetical, pathetic emote, here is my hot new impresison of him. Check it out! (wiping ass with all of Jonah's comments; smirk; laugh)

Still not reading any explanations. Rumor or not, the silence is deafening. Company policy, especially when probably the company and the firee could probably work out something, doesn't cut it as an explanation.

I honestly don't think the business leaders of CNET and Gamespot really understand the implications of the accusations. They are being accused of being bought off. That, thanks to this, the signal is out to advertisers that reviews can be bought off.

Sure other gamespot employees will so no to this but you can't tell me that this hasn't impacted how they do their jobs. That they don't get permission for a review, don't sniff around the sales people just to make sure there will not be blow back. Like it or not, the non business employees of gamespot and CNET have to be crippled by this out of simple fear for losing their jobs.

Until something is explained, we will always wonder...was that 9.0 because it earned it or because they paid for it? That front page article...bought? Wow that long article in the magazine, wonder how much that cost. Their credibility is shot because the alternative is to "trust" them. Based on what exactly?

I've got something heavy to lay on you all so... squat down.

Where are our priorities? A man who writes opinions on our avenues of escape from reality is deprived of his job due to the power and influence of the bottom line in our corporate controlled world, and will probably profit by it and get a job in one of gaming journalism's many cushy jobs as a result, granting instant credibility and fame to whoever snatches up this gaming journalism superhero for truth. For that we have your innate sense of justice and a great community's willingness to circle the wagons around the weak against the incredibly incompetent yet rich in wealth and influence to thank. But where is this keen sense of wrongdoing when it comes to issues like the real world? Any idiot can see that the moneyhats influenced and warped that situation to lead to the loss of thousands of lives (and for those 'other people,' tens of thousands of lives) in order to secure cushy contracts for the friends of this administration, and more oil for this country, which is a finite resource which we should be thinking about living without, since it is going to run so thin to be a complete economic and social disaster within the next 50 years. We are gamers, a lot of why we game is to escape the crappy realities and reality shows that victimize us on a daily basis, but how can such a more important reality completely escape the average American than whether or not our suspicions of corruption on gaming reviews being finally confirmed? Maybe its the vigilance of the gaming press, and the fact that it doesn't truly matter enough in the great corporate and political scheme of things to be shouted down as irrelevant ranting by Bill O Reilly and his cohorts at faux news, that this nugget of cold hard corporate bs got through the meat grinder of what you and I consider reality. I guess wrong person helmed things at Gamespot and they took us for the stereotypical mid teen idiots that will do what we are told if its trendy as if it is 1992 again and some weak ass 'blast processing' argument is going to work. They didn't handle it with the same sophistication that the mainstream press keeps from most of you the fact that farmers in Guatemala aren't allowed to stop working picking the fruit you eat when the planes fly overhead and drench all of them in pesticide, and anyone with the audacity to utter anything about a union is gunned down. A country where it is widely believed a journalist, who was no leftist or right winger, one who just wanted to repair the horror in her country with the truth, was killed by the government that our own CIA aided in installing.

http://www.drclas.harvard.edu/revista/articles/view/808

This country elected a socialist government in the western hemisphere, and paid dearly for it, heres an excerpt from our own state dept official... "Vaky argues that the Guatemalan government’s use of counter-terror is indiscriminate and brutal, and has impeded modernization and institution building within the country. Furthermore, he writes, the United States has condoned such tactics. "This is not only because we have concluded we cannot do anything about it, for we never really tried. Rather we suspected that maybe it is a good tactic, and that as long as Communists are being killed it is alright. Murder, torture and mutilation are alright if our side is doing it and the victims are Communists." Vaky urges a new policy in Guatemala that rejects "counter-terror" as an accepted tactic and represents a "clear ethical stand" on the part of the United States.

source http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB11/docs/

This was 40 years ago, yet clearly in the wake of Guantanamo and Abu-Ghraib the lesson is never learned if the average American cares less about it than the outcome of American Idol. The orders to torture people are still coming from the highest corridors of power and wealth, and many of those rounded up in Afghanistan were merely victims of the army's moneyhat to the northern alliance, the ridiculous sum of 3,000 to 25,000 dollars, even at the low point enough to live like a king in one of the worlds poorest countries, was offered for anyone who found some Al Quaeda, so any Notrhern alliance conscript lucky enough to find someone from arabic descent said "yeah he won't talk, but hes way up in the organization, waterboard him enough and he will tell you what you want to know"

I'm sorry, I know this is your escape from the real world, its mine too, but your sense of outrage and solidarity with your fellow man relates to one man's job, not the by far more important issues you should be educating yourselves about. And educate yourselves I sincerely hope you will, because theres not much media for whats really going on in the world outside of fluffy bs like Christina Aguilerra's bulge. I'm sure this won't mean jack in the grand scheme of money and power controlling everything, but I tried.

Great, so GameSpot put out a press release a couple days too late in a very transparent attempt at damage control.

They have still not stated any legitimate reason for Gerstmann's firing (or given him authorization to do so himself if it's just something innocent that has nothing to do with appeasing advertisers).

They have also still not given any legitimate reason for the removal of the Kane & Lynch video review from their site. As anyone who saw that video review (or who watches it now on YouTube) can attest, there was nothing out-of-line or unprofessional about it, nor were there any factual errors as far as I'm aware. The so-called 'clarification' on the text review doesn't appear to relate to anything that's actually in the video review.

The people involved in the Gerstmann decision at GameSpot should be ashamed of themselves. GameSpot's credibility has been destroyed overnight. I know that I'll never be able to read another review on GameSpot because I'd always have to wonder whether the review has been influenced in some way by the message about advertiser friendliness that GameSpot's management sent with the Gerstmann firing.

I know this was mentioned on page two of the comments (by Brandon), but this is an important development in the Eidos/ Gamespot scandal (even if this doesn't touch base directly with Gamespot...just peripherally).

If you head to either Kotaku.com or GameBump.com you'll see that Eidos had used blatant lies on their official Kane & Lynch site. They have quotes taken from experience withe previews (aka, far prior to the final build), but what's far worse is that they're listing every review as a five star score. They even went so far as to quote Kotaku.com as giving Kane & Lynch a five star review.

Yup, they've sunk that low.

"The accusations in the media that it has done so are unsubstantiated and untrue."

That doesn't mean it hasn't done its damage, as I have also joined the boycott now. In just 4 days, GameSpot ruined years of reliability.

Pathetic.

Zsavior wrote:
"Your wrong my friend,"

But we are both right, I have also heard of the atrocities of the Chinese against the Tibetan people and of the amazing sacrifice and hardship of these incredibly spiritual people, please see Tibet: Cry of the Snow Lion, at
http://www.stage6.com/Buddhism/video/1499784/Tibet---Cry-of-the-Snow-Lion

Yeah, these people don't care about their proprietary info as much about the truth, they are speaking to whoever has ears, a longstanding religious tradition, let the truth be told, not as some codified weirdness in some book, but the truth as it happens. Please listen to this for at least a few minutes, its some powerful stuff, the fact that the torture victim forgives, its amazing.

Gamespot is teh SUXORZZZ lol!

This will teach people to keep their pants on. Joystiq has been obsessing over this for days over circumstantial evidence and pure speculation and gotten you all riled up for nothing. You won't swear off CNET anyways, not with it owning GameFAQs.

Funny thing is, the news post is been taken down.

Still not worth my time to get upset about. I figured that even if they released details no matter who detailed or transparant or PR sounding or whatever, the rabid internet would call them liars and continue their vitriolic hate.

Yep, we gamers (I'm one too) are fickle. Everyone is a 6'4" body builder on the internet, don't mess with me flame boy!

The game is decent (6.5-7.5 on a 1-10 scale imo). Although it feels short, buggy and unplayable if you have certain hardware (check out the Eidos support forms, plenty more hate there by people who own the game including myself), and kind of unfinished, Lynch drops his bag at one point in the game, even if you look for it right away it is not there. So being smart and keeping an eye out for things doesn't help as it spawns on an event timer.

staxontoplyon23: You ever stop yourself from going to the toilet because U.S. interventionism is more important than your bowels?

Companies use words like this all the time to get out of saying anything that could incriminate themselves. It's called Damage Control. If they told the truth, they would go out of business within a year or two. Companies will never admit to doing anything wrong 98% of the time. Drug companies hardly ever disclose that their drugs could be dangerous, it takes a 3rd party research study for the truth to come out. The higher ups would never fire themselves or resign for something that they did. They think that they handled the situation properly and that nobody else would handle it better. Now, Kotaku is reporting that GameSpot could see mass resignations as a result of Jeff Gerstmann's firing. Here is a link to that report:
http://kotaku.com/gaming/gamespot-on-the-spot/gamespot-may-see-mass-resignations-over-dismissal-329822.php

Enough said.
Ben