http://www.shacknews.com/onearticle.x/50134
Quote:
Rumors have been swirling today that Jeff Gerstmann, executive editor at CNET-owned major video game site GameSpot, was fired after giving a generally unimpressed review of Io Interactive's Kane & Lynch: Dead Men. Gerstmann awarded the game a 6.0. (Though Shacknews does not score its reviews, our own Kane & Lynch review was similar in its verdict.)
According to the reports, the layoff came after Kane & Lynch publisher Eidos took issue with the review and threatened to pull its considerable ad contract. GameSpot's front page is currently almost entirely re-skinned with Kane & Lynch imagery.
The rumor began bouncing around various industry circles over the past day, and this evening was reported by Kotaku. Popular webcomic Penny Arcade posted a strip about the alleged incident tonight, outside of its normal publishing schedule.
Shacknews can confidently confirm via its own sources that Gerstmann was indeed fired yesterday from his position at GameSpot. The source declined to comment as to whether the firing was directly related to the reported Eidos situation, but the circumstances are suspicious at the least.
Gerstmann had been an employee at GameSpot for about a decade, and took the place of former executive editor Greg Kasavin when Kasavin left the company to work for Electronic Arts as a producer.
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It was only a matter of time before something like this happened. While I had always considered Gamespot to be one of the better reviewing sites, it's obvious that many other sites are heavily influenced by companies that pay for advertising *coughPCGAMERcough*. I can recall a two week long promotion for Black and White on IGN which had a new blurb about the game every day, switching from the black to the white side halfway through. Do you think after that they would give the game a bad review? Hell no, it got a 9.7 Anyone that played the game can tell you that's completely ridiculous, even people that thought it was a great, which I personally did not, didn't think it deserved an almost perfect score. Anyway, it's a real shame how these sites are becoming shills, you can't trust any of the big names out there anymore. Now I get all my reviews from word of mouth and perhaps metacritic.