I have to wonder a bit at GameSpot's recent statement on Jeff Gerstmann's firing. Why did they wait so long to make an official statement -- and then say pretty much the same thing they said when pressed mightily by Joystiq a few days ago? At first, they wouldn't say anything: "our policy not to comment on the status of employees," et cetera, and would only deny the decision was pressed by Eidos when pursued. Of course, they've been enduring an epic backlash since then -- Destructoid, which usually gets snubbed in the linkage department by its fellow consumer sites, has been getting some recognition for its Cashwh0res stunt, there's a 1UP group devoted to adamant GameSpot expats, and perhaps most devastatingly, the seminal tastemakers of Penny Arcade, who maybe have got more respect and influence in the gaming audience than any of the above, weighed in (actually, they were one of the first to comment out of the gate). Obviously, if I were at GameSpot, I'd want to try and put out the fire -- but why do so by maintaining the bottom line? The initial refusal to address the issue at all on their part makes it look a bit tacky when they address it by not saying much more than what Joystiq had to wrench out of them.
Though they deny Eidos influenced their decision, they wouldn't tell Joystiq's Kyle Orland whether Eidos attempted to. But apparently, some people are reporting that on the official Kane & Lynch site, the company displayed a graphic showing the game had received five stars from GameSpy -- when GameSpy in fact gave the game three stars. Moreover, the five-star graphic was accompanied by a quote that allegedly doesn't exist in the original review (which I admittedly haven't read). Apparently, a similar "spin" was put on Game Informer's review, showing a 5-star graphic (Game Informer gave it 7/10) and accompanied it with a quote from an early preview, not the actual review. I am synthesizing info second-hand here, but if this is as true as the screencap would indicate, it's not too much of a stretch to imagine that Eidos has been willing to pressure the truth a little to make its score look better.
To be fair, I do not personally know anyone on GameSpot's staff, never met Gerstmann, don't know the situation. For all I know, it could have been a sensible firing coupled with some unfortunate timing and/or less-than-ethical (but unfortunately all-too-common) behavior on the part of a game company with some expensive ads. The whole thing just looks bad, though.
Silver lining? At the end of the day, sites and game publications won't make money if no one will advertise there -- and this debacle has demonstrated that losing ad dollars because you pissed off a game company may not be any more disastrous than the PR nightmare and reader exodus that occurs when you so much as appear to sell out. As much as I rail against internet gamer mobs, their backlash works in our favor this time around -- I'm pleased that the community has been so responsive in declaring, in so many ways, that they won't stand even for the appearance of compromised integrity. Would be nice, wouldn't it, if this results in some small sea change going forward?
15 comments:
The internet gamer mob is as wrong now as they always are.
They've been accusing us of corruption for years and now they think they can prove it. It doesn't matter that there's never been any confirmation, that this is all a rumour started by a misleading Penny Arcade comic. It doesn't matter that Gamespot deny Eidos' involvement, that Gamespot staff have said their review scores have never been influenced or that Gerstmann himself said the industry isn't corrupt. It doesn't matter that there's no proof of anything other than his firing.
The collective memory in years to come will be that we are all cheaters and liars, and that this is the time they caught us. Reactionaries and panderers like Kotaku and Destructoid aren't helping.
Graham,
You do raise a good point. I recall a similar issue at Destructoid when some readers didn't like a particular review of a major game -- I am 98% sure it was BioShock. By the by, they never like the reviews, and look for some small reason, whenever possible, to invalidate it.
In this case, Destructoid happened to be running some BioShock ads at the same time as the review and the commenters jumped down the reviewer's throat for "selling out." Meanwhile, the ads had been arranged by Dtoid's biz heads and that reviewer, nor any of the staff, had ever had any communication whatsoever with 2K related to the ads, and all of those ad decisions were made completely independently of the review staff and without any discussion with them.
Funnily enough, one idiot reader sent us an email at Destructoid when he happened to screencap an ad for a game running alongside someone's critique of the Gerstmann incident, and he seemed triumphant, as if he had "proved" something. Your accusation that they feel high on having "caught us" at something is not untrue.
In this case though, the vibe I'm getting is that the audience supports the reviewer, and that this backlash is their intolerance of dishonesty in favor of bizness. Does that dishonesty happen as often as the industry is accused of it? I certainly don't think so. And I think that reviews are just as likely to receive an inaccurate slant because of the reactions of the audience just as much as the game companies.
I don't work at GameSpot obviously, never have and do not personally know anyone who does. But from what I hear, the audience seems to feel it's sticking up for the individual reviewers and their right to be honest, in this case.
P.S -- Like you, I also don't think being reactionary helps (hence my tendency to distance myself from Dtoid periodically when they create episodes like this). But I think we can safely take for granted that those widespread, exaggerated reactions will happen among our audience, and expect them, and decide how to leverage that and what to learn from it.
The gaming mob doesn't know what really happened. If it was just a coincidence, then it doesn't affect me, if it was corruption, it still doesn't affect me. I don't ever base my opinions on one review. I read as many opinions as I can if I'm actually considering a game. There is no way that all of those sites are corrupt, Right?
Yeah, my stance is that I have no reason to believe this story. As far as I can tell people believe it because they want to believe it. It's not clear what gamespot could say that would appease people.
I mean, I'm a game industry professional (or I was?) and I have no freaking clue what goes on between publishers and journalists. Maybe this sort of thing does happen all the time. Or maybe the wall between editorial and advertising is super solid at the vast majority of places. Unless they don't take ads, there's not much way to be sure. (And even without ads, it's kind of weird. When the sony-blackballed-kotaku thing happen, I was puzzled at the fact that Kotaku relied on Sony for anything in the first place, since Kotaku isn't even primarily a review site. In the end I find this whole thing to be fairly gross and I mostly try to forget it exists. Not forget about the connection between publishers and journalists; I try to forget game journalism exists.)
Anyway, I was just saying I have no reaosn to believe the Gerstmann story, but to be clear, it could totally be true! I just don't have any reason to believe it. I'm particularly bothered by Penny Arcade's rumor-mongering. I'm supposed to believe there are sources inside gamespot who know for a fact that this was advertiser-prompted, that those people are willing to leak that information to penny arcade, but they're NOT willing to go public with it? Why, because they want to keep their jobs at a slimey company that fires journalists at advertiser's promptings?
Again, it COULD be true. Maybe they've got families or whatever that makes them not want to put their own jobs on the line. But wow, that's not a huge vote of confidence for the truth of the rumor.
And Gabe didn't help matters by posting the following quote to the forums (which was linked a lot as the firestorm started spreading): "The comic is true. You should see the news breaking soon."
Because, guess what Gabe? The news that he was fired BECAUSE OF THE ADVERTISER? Yeah, that news never broke. Just the rumor.
The reason we believe it is that it fits the available evidence. Do the major game review mags skew their reviews? Of course they do. Is it a conscious thing? Maybe, maybe not. I suspect that people predisposed to like a particular game get assigned to review it, or volunteer to review it, and this naturally increases the scores.
Reviews have two different scales. Major games are reviewed on a 7 to 10 scale, with anything under 7 meaning 'unplayably bad', because if someone predisposed to like a game won't give it a 7, you know it's bad. Non-major games, where the reviewer is less likely to be predisposed to like it have a slightly larger spread. So when a major game gets a 6, of course the publisher flips out and pulls the ad campaign. At which point, of course the suits are upset.
I'll give you a different example of review "corruption". When the 360 first shipped, Perfect Dark Zero came out at release, and all the initial reviews were glowing. Gamespot - 9 out of 10. Team Xbox, 8.8/10. Etc. On release day gamerankings had it as 88 or 89%, I forget which. But a funny thing happened - as time went by the gamerankings score went steadily down, until it ended at 81%. I own the game, played it a bit and realized 'wow, this is bad, bad graphics, stupid gameplay mechanics'. So it's pretty obvious on inspection that the early reviews were inflated. On purpose? Probably not. It's far more likely that the reviewers were Rare fans who liked FPS's in general, so even a bad FPS is tolerable.
I haven't played Kane & Lynch and probably won't for quite some time. And I can't pretend do have any real knowledge of Gerstmann's career.
I will say though that I watched his video review of K&L the same afternoon I saw a video review of Beowulf ... and to be honest, it made me think his video review had to be off because if I had read nothing else about K&L, I would almost think they were similar in complete badness. For some reason, he couched anything good about the game with furthering complaining about how ugly and stupid he found it to be - even when he gets to the multiplayer, which sounds like a pretty damn neat concept actually, he complains that he is still playing the same game.
Not that I'm saying that should lead to his ouster or anything, but I'm just not sure it was the greatest review in the world and seemed like it was trying to cash in on the "gamers find it funny when you bash something" mode of journalism.
As much as I hate to admit it, I'm with the Internet mob on this one. Sorry if I sound harsh, but there's no way Jeff Gerstmann getting sacked just after lambasting Kane & Lynch (which had full page ads on Gamespot) is a coincidence. Of course, I'm not saying Eidos told CNet to give Gerstmann the proverbial kick. They neither needed to nor cared about it. They just pulled their massive ad campaign, CNet got pissed, and they in turn blamed Gerstmann and sacked him.
Of course, there's the possibility that Gerstmann is, after all, being sacked for something unrelated. In that case, it's clear that the suits behind CNet have the worst sense of timing, EVER. Plus, it's really suspicious that Gamespot doesn't offer the tiniest bit of explanation about the alleged real reason for this decision. Not even an euphemysm-filled, vague explanation. Nada de nada.
Bottom line: the gaming mob, though stupid as always, is on to something in this case. Or so says my spider-sense.
And I won't even go into the part about Eidos faking the scores in Kane & Lynch's official site. I don't know whether to laugh or groan.
About that 7-10 scale everybody is always complaining about: isn't it only to be expected AAA-titles mostly score within this range? You can be as cynical about the industry as you like, but these games are multi-year projects, worked on by teams that more often than not are comprised of more than fifty people. Even if the game is rushed to release, you'd think that with the extensive QA most companies have to lavish on these expensive projects, there will most often be enough good material to at least give the game a rating of a 7.
I work as artistic director in a theatre, and I see maybe a hundred and fifty productions a year. Still, it hardly ever happens that I would rate a play lower than a 6 - most of the time, there's enough talent on display even if I don't agree with most of the artistic choices.
It's only natural that below-6 marks are usually reserved for shoddily produced or shoestring-budget titles. Besides, the 7-to-10 scale is a lot more nuanced than the either-1-or-10 scale most user reviews seem to use.
Anyone who is incredulous that people might leak information to the media rather than risk losing their jobs is really beyond belief, as such people must never pay attention to the news or politics or the real world at all.
Things much more horrifying and disgusting than a corrupt firing happen all the time. And people rarely blow the whistle.
Last time I checked, GameSpot was still skinned with Kane & Lynch ads. And Gerstmann was there for 11 years. The faith some have in the essentially goodness and incorruptibility of humanity is truly touching.
Hi, "anonymous", there are two differences. One is that the people who are the source of these rumors presumably are the media.
If they aren't happy with gamespot's journalistic ethics, and they're still working at gamespot, then what are THEIR journalistic ethics? And if their journalistic ethics are in question, why should I trust the rumor in the first place? (I.e. they're being insanely hypocritical!)
The bigger difference is that it's a fallacy to equate whistle-blowing with rumor-mongering. As noted, there can be little-to-no defense against rumor mongering; gamespot is judged guilty merely by being accused. There's none of the follow-up implied by whistle-blowing.
(How anyone can take "Gerstmann was there for 11 years" as evidence either way confuses me. I'm apparently supposed to believe that (a) this sort of advertising pressure is actually common and I'm a fool for not having any doubt, and yet (b) Gerstmann has been giving out negative reviews for 11 years but has never gotten the boot for it before.)
According to Kotaku's latest update on the matter, the possibility that it was a combination of bad timing and the idiocy of a higher-up (the substitute to Greg Kasavin, to be precise) is growing strong. Plus, it seems CNet is going to conduct an internal investigation on the matter, and Gamespot staff is going to release some videos offering their thoughts about the debacle.
Stay tuned for next chapter, and don't forget to bring your popcorn!
Gamespot has addressed the issue in more detail both in an article released today and their podcast yesterday. Both are worth checking into as it provides insight into the people who actually work for Gamespot, reminding you that Corporations and business are not people no matter how hard the government wants you to think they are.
This was a bad, BAD decision made by management, one of many. Josh Larson's name has gotten thrown around the blogs as being the antithesis of former Gamespot Executive Editor Greg Kasavin, and while I'm sure his presence has led to tension among the editorial staff, I am shocked that the gaming mob seems to have forgotten that Stephen Colvin, formerly of such worldly publications like Maxim and Stuff, was brought on to manage Cnet's Entertainment branch which included Gamespot. While I'm sure this debacle is not being stomached lightly by Larson, I also feel positive Cnet executives are breathing easier knowing that the game mob furor is completely misdirected.
I think a number of things went into the firing of Jeff Gerstmann, and not one of them had anything to do with Eidos or Kane and Lynch. I think Colvin was looking to make a change from the top down at Gamespot, and Gerstmann was the sacrificial lamb. He didn't fit in with the new management's "vision" and therefore got canned because he was A) not a hot chick and B) fat.
That to me is sickening but it's the kind of childish, petty bullshit that grown ups do. I was scared a shakedown was going to occur once Colvin took over and I bet you it was a combination of him and Larson that led to Rich Gallup leaving the site. The reason Cnet is being so cautious about this story is because the truth is uglier than the lies. Gerstmann more than likely signed a NDA and, as a professional, is upholding the agreement.
I don't have any insider information at all, but given all the information and listening to the outrage from remaining Gamespot editors, it seems reasonable to me that an 11 year employee was terminated because he didn't mesh with new management's myopia. And just because it may have been valid in terms of the lay does not make it any less bullshit.
And by "lay", I mean "law". Damn google and their no edit comment system.
sean, sorry for being rude. There's just a lot of idiocy on game boards and so you sometimes forget that you still have your sarcastic asshole wading pants on.
Anyway, I don't know what the mob is exactly saying: I suppose they want it both ways; reviews are corrupt and yet nothing's happened yet but this.
I just see it as extremely shady on GameSpot's part.
However, I do stand by the point that journalistic ethics are good and all, but health insurance and a regular paycheck is better. People won't report on police corruption, threats to public safety and health, etc, and if they do, they get movies made about them.
So staying silent about an editor's firing to keep a job where you play videogames and write about it for a living seems kind of like a no-brainer.
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