March 16th, 2012
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Back in 2007, then GameSpot writer Jeff Gerstmann was reportedly fired from the site for giving a negative review to IO Interactive’s Kane & Lynch. Today, Gerstmann confirmed that sadly, this was the case…
Oddly, the confirmation comes via a video revealing Gerstmann’s present employer, Giant Bomb, will be joining GameSpot’s parent company CBS Interactive.
Gerstmann says he was “called into a room” by CBS management and was “terminated” because he “couldn’t be trusted” as the editorial director due to his poor review of Kane & Lynch.
However, Gerstmann makes it clear that the blame for the whole mess did not lie with GameSpot’s editorial management, nor with Kane & Lynch developers IO Interactive. Gerstmann also notes that the management responsible for his firing are now no longer involved with GameSpot.
Even more interesting is that Gerstman revealed Sony made a similar move by threatening to pull advertisement money from the website if Ratchet & Clank Future: Tools of Destruction received anything other than a near perfect score. GameSpot awarded Tools of Destruction a 7.5.
Source: Kotaku
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That last paragraph gave me a good laugh.
just goes to show u can’t always believe what u read. I go based off of what my friends thought. if my friends haven’t played a game i’m lookin into, then I’ll rent it from gamestop. if ya don’t like it, take it back. that simple
i already read this on N4G, i thought they meant RAC:A41, which is understandable. I thought tools of destruction should have got a 9. it was fantastic. Insomniac are EPIC. wasn’t it also running at 60FPS, with beautiful visual artstyle to boot?
anyways, just goes to show with the Kane and Lynch thing, that reviewers aren’t so professinal afterall. most of them are dumbasses who think they are smart, making small critiques that serve no purpose, just so they can act like they are doing something.
but then, who didnt already know that a lot of reviews are bought? case in BEHEMOTH POINT: GTA4.
You can trust “professional” reviewers because they’re all bought and sold. You can’t trust casual user reviews because most people are uninformed retards that think a specific game is either the worst ever made or the best ever made. I just buy games based on my personal likes, and hope I picked a winner.
The year 2007 called. They want their old ass news back.
This article reminds me of another similar incident that no one seemed to catch. When THQ’s “Homefront” came out a couple of years ago the early reviews pretty much indicated the game sucked. IGN’s review of the game was unusually late, while most other outlets had reviews posted. The day the game launched, not only had IGN not posted a review, but their message board page for the game had been suspiciously pulled down (and to this day, still exists as only an error message). And while all of this was going on, there were banner ads splashed all over IGN’s site for – you guessed it – Homefront.
My guess: THQ was bullying IGN to give this game a high score, lest they lose ad revenue, early access to game build, blah, blah, blah. IGN’s management didn’t want to look like idiots, giving the game a 9.0 or 9.5, while the average review gave it around a 7.0. They probably cut a deal with THQ allowing them to score Homefront fairly (IGN did give it a 7.0), but in return, they delayed the review publication and crippled the message boards so gamers couldn’t publicly bash it.
Maybe I’m being paranoid (in fact, I was called “paranoid” while being featured in one of IGN’s “Review Comeback” segments), but the whole situation seems too suspicious to me. What do you think?
pretty scary…
but uncharted 3 really deserved 10/10 from IGN right?…riight???
Pity it wasn’t the douchebag from ‘honestgamers’ who gave Uncharted 3 a 4/10. while ALL the others are around 8-10.
If it wasnt that for that drongo Uncharted 3 would be at like 97% rather than 92%. could have been the highest rated game
Drongo? I love it! Mind if I use that?
luckily the honestgamer review didnt make it to metacritic, at least last time i check’d
Well the moronic honestgamers review didn’t, but the review by the dumbshit at Onion AV who couldn’t tell the difference between the square and circle button (he literally proved this in his asinine review) DID make it to metacritic. And the equally dumbass metacritic system translated the “C” from that review into a 50. I guess in the universe all of these morons come from, squares are circles and Cs are 50s.
Well it’s good a 50 for a C, the only game reviewed with a D grade is Amy in their list, and you know that game, right ? To be honest Unch3 IS the very same old soup even if it’s not a complete crap.