Total lack of editorial integrity. Reviewer gives a 6/10 to Kane and Lynch by Eidos, Eidos makes threats to pull ad money, reviewer gets fired. Looks like I know where not to go any more, good fucking job. I hope they fucking burn. Hopefully the internet communities will be roused off their collective asses and make a fuss.
Link?
Yeah, I saw that from Penny Arcade earlier. It’s seriously messed up, and pretty sad.
This is the guy who gave the notorious 8.8 review for Twilight Princess, and as much as a fuss that raised he still had every right to do it, despite objections from fanboys who were obsessive enough to be offended by what was still a pretty good score.
Dunno if it’ll be enough to get the internet populace off its collective and proverbial asses, but hopefully this story won’t just fall to the wayside and set a precedent for it to happen again in the future.
To which the internet communities say, in perfect unison, “lol, butts”
It shouldn’t happen, but when it’s a site that’s partly sponsored by the company making the game, it’s pretty much unavoidable. Sort of like political fundraisers. 
I’ve actually played the game in question. It sucks. Seriously. It’s just another third person shooter, only really short and having damn near nothing to distinguish it from the other three hundred entries into the genre this year. This wasn’t another Twilight Princess (although I felt that review was 0.2 points too high), this was an honest review of a horribly average game that really, REALLY isn’t worth blowing $60 on.
And yet, the guy gets fired. Thank you, Eidos, thank you so very bloody much! You can jut forget about me buying Deus Ex 3!
…Well, I probably won’t. Maybe. Erm…
Users spammed Eidos’ forums enough to make the mods temporarily close it so that they could remove all the offending threads. NeoGAF has a thread with over 2,000/180,000 posts/views topic on the matter while Gamespot has one with over 7,000 posts.
In addition to the Penny Arcade strip, Destructoid has updated their banner to fit the occasion.
The guy was 11 years with them and they fired him over an Eidos game? I mean, quality isn’t the first word I associate with Eidos.
And yet people think that the news on television is totally objective when their networks get paid for MUCH more advertising than a website like Gamespot makes. I believe that this is not just indicative of what’s wrong with Gamespot, but what’s wrong with our media in general.
Yeah, I saw this earlier in PA too. Let’s just hope this raises as much shit as the EA employee letter.
Haha, man this one’s priceless.
I had heard it from 1up, but yeah its time to file the Gamespot website along with the bulk of G4 under unreliable corporate whores.
Gamespot ued to be good. When they were new… about 12 years ago. I remember they used to have contests you could enter weekly for a chance to win your choice of game (Descent 2, Stonekeep, Command and Conquer, just about anything that was relatively new). Now they’ve sold themselves out.
I read about this a few days ago. Being a person with largely unpopular perspectives on video games, I sympathize. …And of course, also because firing the guy (Jeff Gerstmann) over something like that is a load of fucking horseshit.
Their goodwill was only worth a few hundred thousand dollars.
Haven’t read Gamespot for years. First, their crappy cluttered site was too much for my home’s 56k connection to handle (you know, like 6 years ago, before I went to college). Half of the good stuff is subscription-only, then. Lastly, I hate having ads load up in place of a page for half a minute. So it’s prettymuch bad all-around.
I figured that the people on this board would have figured out that the reviews on those sites are ad driven and thus disregardable long ago. Something like this is hardly surprising. Want to know if a game is good? Ask people who aren’t payed to play it.
I’ll use Tales of the Abyss as an example. Game Informer(AKA that crappy magazine Game Stop gives you for buying their discount card) gave it a 7/10(or something like that). It never had a ton of press, thus a casual gamer like myself never heard about it. Yet I played it and loved it based on how highly it was regarded in these forums alone.
Trust your peers. Not that guy.
It’s a shame that guy lost a high profile job, but he should have realized his place was not to speak his mind, but to speak the words that please both the readers and advertisers.
That’s not his job, that’s just what they wanted him to do. His job was to rate games fairly based on how much he’d enjoyed them as he played them.
It’s simply they didn’t like the way he reviewed.
Sarcasm and dry humor is lost when put in text form.
Use /sarcasm tags.