As a Gamer, I'm Furious
OK, up until now I've only posted about personal stuff on here and have avoided news, but this one hits a little close to home. Apparently, Jeff Gerstmann has been fired from GameSpot for giving Kane & Lynch a bad review. Kotaku reported on it, and you can watch his video review here (the video was pulled from GameSpot, although his written review is still up there), but the essentials of it are that Eidos paid a lot of money to have GameSpot run advertisements, promotions, Kane & Lynch skins for the site, and so on. They weren't too pleased with Gerstmann's review, and something like this went down.
Now, the reason this pisses me off so much and I'm writing about it here is because, in addition to being someone who cares about video gaming more than your average Joe, I used to be a regular visitor of Gamespot, from the PSX/N64 to DC/PS2/Xbox/GC eras. I even had a paying membership from 2002 to 2006 and was fairly active on the forums there, with 3000+ posts. I trusted their reviews and could count on them for informative, funny, and accurate articles. Over the past year or so, however (which coincides with my entry into the Furry fandom, interestingly enough), I became less active on the forums (too much blind fanboyism), and started visting the site less often. The resignation of Greg Kasavin, another long-time editor, to leave for an opportunity to work in the games industry on the creation side of things didn't help much either, since I loved his writing style and found his taste in games closest to mine. It really wasn't the same without him. At the same time, it seemed that there was a lot more bias to their reviews than before (Xbox 360 games were "yay!" and Wii games were "meh" a lot of the time. One particular set of articles that got me was when they had an in-depth comparison between the graphics of multi-platform games for the PS3 and Xbox 360, where the 360 edged out. Later, when they found out some 360 games like Halo 3 and PGR ran below 720p and were just upscaled, they brushed it off in a small news article, saying that such small graphical defects weren't important. Right), and I found myself disagreeing with more and more of their review scores. At first I thought it was just my taste in games changing as I got older, but now I really think they've put their advertisers ahead of their ethics, and they simply aren't a reliable news source anymore.
It probably comes off as self-important to say that I don't plan on visiting GameSpot ever again over this, but a quick skim of their forums showed me that I'm not the only one. It's a sad feeling to have to throw away a group of people you've trusted for a long time (my first visit to their site was over ten years ago; that's nearly half my life), but if that's the way they want to do business, I don't want anything to do with them.
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chaos386) wrote,
enraged
