A little over a week ago, I found out that Jeff Gerstmann, Gamespot’s editorial director, had been fired from his job. The reason for this was supposedly because he had given the game Kane & Lynch: Dead Men a score of 6 out of 10, and Eidos, the game’s developer, had threatened to pull their advertising from the site unless something was done, leading CNet, Gamespot’s parent company, to dismiss Jeff from his job. Earlier this week, they said that he had been fired because of an “internal review”, which, to me, sounds fairly unlikely. Jeff had been working at Gamespot for over 10 years, and it would be extremely unlikely for him to be fired at this point unless he had done something to make his corporate overseers angry. I can’t say that I always agreed with Jeff’s reviews; I often thought that he sometimes had given some good games lower scores than they deserved.
However, judging by all the reviews of Kane & Lynch that I’ve read, Jeff was right on the money this time. Eidos’ website certainly gives the impression that they were pissed off about this, because most of the scores on the official website for the game have been made up, and they took comments from game previews instead of reviews, which had been much more positive.
The question for me now is, what’s the point of focusing on reading Gamespot reviews in particular anymore? The two best people over there (Greg Kasavin left earlier in the year to work at EA) are now gone, and some of the new reviewers seem as though they don’t spend enough time playing the lower-profile games before writing their reviews. This incident will probably also lead to their giving higher-profile games high scores, even if they don’t deserve them, just so that they don’t risk going down the same path as Jeff. It’s just a shame that Gamespot succumbed to a threat that many other gaming media outlets have managed to weather over the years. I can only hope that the boycotts that people have started will convince the company to bring Jeff back so that things can get back to normal over there.
