The “Break it Down” Blog

Kotaku reports on the “gamespot” insider giving the scoops over to Valleywag on what the firing of GameSpot’s leader editor, Jeff Gerstmann, meant to the GS team. More specifically, that over the last few years, the separation of the sales team (that lands the huge advertising deals) and the editorial team (that writes the reviews) has gotten smaller and smaller. The marker in history of the change over was when long-time editorial lead “Greg Kasavin, left to go to EA, and he was replaced by a suit, Josh Larson”.

“gamespot” says at that point shit started to change, with rules like “any review for a big title with a score of 9 or higher, can go out early… anything lower has to be held back until the game is on store shelves”. This has been obvious to me as an ex-subscriber as I waited a week after the releases of some of the poorer titles we had all been waiting for to finally see the review. In the mean time GameTrailers and IGN had no problem putting up reviews of the games early.

“gamespot” also mentions that this firing wasn’t so much about Jeff as it was a message to the entire editorial team: All your base are belong to us… bitches.

And the message was received loud and clear… throw on some knee pads and start popping out 9/10 reviews. “gamespot” goes on to say that during the company meeting where the firing was “explained”, Larson did nothing but dodge the questions asked about Jeff’s termination while the underlying message of “money is the name of the game you idiots” was loud and clear.

The other beauty about all this, as reported by “gamespot” was that the timing of Jeff’s firing was intentional. All the triple-A titles that would need to be reviewed would be released before Thanksgiving. After Thanksgiving no big titles come out until January. Knowing that the reviewers would likely strike at the firing of the most senior person on the team, they waited until all the big titles had been reviewed and then fired Gerstmann, giving themselves some leeway to work with if they needed it… getting new reviewers in or pacifying the existing editorial team.

It’s no surprise that “gamespot” claims we should be seeing a slew of “Editor’s Choice” and “Game of the Year” awards being thrown around ad-naseum now from GameSpot as they try and re-secure more and more advertising deals and become a shill for the big publishers own advertisement companies.

To top it all off, in closing, “gamespot” does confirm again that Kane & Lynch was a shit title… more or less a good idea, executed poorly and completely undeserving of the big-bang press it’s gotten. Sporting an average score of 67% it’s not too much of a surprise that Jeff was right… that game was a stinker.