Tag Archives: dan “shoe” hsu

VentureBeat has acquired Bitmob, and its founder, as well as former Ziff Davis Media editorial director, Dan “Shoe” Hsu, has been brought on as GamesBeat’s editor-in-chief. Ben Popper, one of the founding editors of The New York Observer’s Silicon Alley blog, Betabeat, was also hired on as VentureBeat’s east coast editor. VB’s goal with the acquisition and high-profile recruitment is to expand its games channel, with Hsu overseeing the changes. Dean Takahashi, lead writer for GamesBeat, and Sebastian Haley, review editor and executive video producer, will report to directly to Hsu. Thanks, IndustryGamers.

According to Ziff VP Simon Cox’s blog on 1UP, Dan “Shoe” Hsu will be leaving the company and his editorship of EGM on April 25 for “change in his life.”

“I wanted to inform everyone who was not in the edit meeting that Shoe will be leaving us as April 25th” said Cox. “Sam Kennedy will become Editorial and Site Director moving forward.

“Though the timing is less than ideal, following the closure of GFW, the fact is that like Mark Macdonald before him, Shoe feels it’s time to take a break from work and that after almost 12 years at Ziff (with a year off on Gamers.com) it’s time for change in his life.”

So there you go.

EGM editor Dan Hsu (who recently spoke out about untoward treatment towards his magazine from Ubisoft, “Sony’s sport department” and Midway) has reached the common sense conclusion that there was more to the Jeff Gerstmann “sacking” from Gamespot than meets the eye.

“I’d be really surprised if what everyone thinks happened really happened,” he said, speaking in a GameTrailers Bonus Round interview (see below). “Because Eidos complaining happens all the time. That’s pretty normal… If they threaten to pull advertising, then it’s Gamespot’s duty for management to protect its employees and defend its editorial integrity. Jeff Gerstmann’s been there for so long, I find it really hard to believe that even if there’s new management… that it’s like, ‘You’re gone,’ and not think about all the ramifications of how’s it going to affect morale, how’s it going to affect how we look to our readers and our editorial integrity; there’s a lot of consequences from that. So I kind of feel there must be more to the story that we’re not hearing.”

Gerstmann left Gamespot last November, apparently due to friction over a 6/10 score for Eidos’s Kane & Lynch and the publisher’s subsequent threat to pull a large advertising campaign.

“The buzz seems to imply that he got fired for a negative review, but I don’t know,” said Hsu. “Maybe he was sleeping with the boss’s wife, or something… I think very few people know the full story.”