Tag Archives: gamespot

Just in case there was any doubt left in anyone’s mind that Gamespot ed ex-chief Jeff Gerstmann came to any mutual understanding about his position at Gamespot last year, consider it put to rest. In the words of the man himself, he was sacked.

“I was fired, and kind of went home, decided to sit on the couch and just mope for a while I guess, because, you know, it’s a pretty soul crushing thing to have happen, to lose your job,” he said in this Gamesradar interview. “And then, you know, [I] just kind of got up and checked email and saw that the internet had kind of exploded over that stuff. In the wake of that, yeah, a lot of people reached out, both with well wishes and also with job opportunities and stuff like that.”

Gerstmann refused to detail his departure further however.

“Not legally, no,” he said, when asked if there was anything left to say on the matter.

Gerstmann was sacked from Gamespot after 11 years last November, allegedly over commercial friction between the site and Eidos related to his 6/10 Kane & Lynch review.

Check out the rest of the interview.

Kotaku’s reporting that Josh Larson, CNET’s VP of games, will be leaving after some “restructuring”.

While never officially implicated for the firing of Gamespot’s Jeff Gerstmann last year in the now infamous – and nuclear – Gerstmanngate Kane & Lynch review scandal, insiders have made it clear that Larson was responsible for blurring the line between editorial and marketing teams at the site.

According to an internal memo, “new management structure means that Josh Larson’s position as VP, Games is being eliminated and Josh will be leaving the company.”

His last day will be April 9.

Want to work for Gamespot? Have a definite love for Eidos games? Then take a look at this. Following a string of departures since last November, Gamespot is now on a major recruitment drive to plug the gaps. Do bear in mind that Gamespot editors face “a hefty and steady stream of review work each week.” We could be “funny”, but it’s a little like shooting fish in a barrel.

As you can see here, Gamespot decided not to change the score on its Lost Odyssey review, as reported here. Instead, the reviewer took a look at the load times on the retail version, agreed they were shorter than had been pointed out in the original review, made an edit and turned the light out.

Editor’s note 02/19/08: After posting this review GameSpot found that load times in the review version of Lost Odyssey were significantly longer than those in the retail game. We have amended the review accordingly and regret the original error.

And that’s that.

Jeff Gerstmann and Ryan Davis, the two high profile departures from Gamespot after last year’s Lynchgate review horror, have launched a new podcast called Arrow Pointing Down. We’re going to listen to it later. Apparently the audio quality’s terrible, but the kids don’t care. Have a listen.

Both Gamespot and IGN have posted extensive playtests of Mario Kart Wii today, so if you’re up for ploughing through about 20,000 words on a Nintendo racer, you’re in luck. Gamespot got very excited about the whole thing, saying it was “pleased” with the game. There’s no solid release date from either site other than “later this year”.

According to this, Gamespot may change the score on its Lost Odyssey review because load times in the retail version may differ from those in the review code the site was given by Microsoft.

“We will be purchasing retail copies of Lost Odyssey this morning at our local EBGames,” said the game’s reviewer on the site. “I plan on replaying a good portion of the game this weekend and into next week to determine how great the differences are.”

“Possibly,” he said, on the subject of whether or not the review could be changed. “What happens now is based entirely on whether these improvements exist, and how drastic they are. If there are differences, the text of the review will likely be altered, and the editor’s note will be adjusted to reflect that. The score is a different matter, simply due to the rigidness of our .5-based system. I do not know whether or not these differences can turn a ‘very good game’ into a ‘great game’ based on loading times. As soon as we have invetigated the issue and have made an office-wide decision, I’ll let you know.”

There’s no stopping “the Academy”. The Academy of Interactive Arts and Sciences, organiser of the self-styled videogames Oscars, has confirmed that US retailer GameStop is going to badge games with the awards they won this week at DICE in Las Vegas at the 11th Annual Interactive Achievement Awards.

This means CoD4 will now carry a badge saying “Game of the Year”. Expect this to spread outside the US faster than aggressive foreign policy.

Speaking in a Gamespot interview, Nintendo president Satoru Iwata has revealed that 10 million games have been downloaded from Wii’s Virtual Console system, but that he doesn’t believe downloaded content will replace retail discs in the current console cycle.

“The current state of affairs is that the Virtual Console saw over 10 million downloads by the end of last December,” he said. “That’s the total number of titles people paid to download. I think that selling over 10 million classic games in that price range stands as proof that there are great possibilities with the download model. Since that’s the case, I feel that WiiWare is one answer to a lot of the problems that I perceived even back when I was still a developer myself.

“However, I don’t think that packaged, retail games will be replaced by downloads over the next three- to five-year cycle. Packaged games have a number of advantages, from the guarantee of a certain amount of sales volume to the firmly established buying habits and infrastructure that I think should be preserved in the future.”

You should definitely read this. Looks like they got very good access. Iwata always gives a good interview, and rounds off this one in trademark style when asked what sort of 2008 he’s hoping for.

“One where I can still be smiling come 2009,” he said. “I sure hope I won’t be crying.”

Gamespot staffer Ryan Davis has said that Jeff Gerstmann’s sacking from the site last November signalled the end of his time at the site, at which he’d worked since 2000.

“Jeff’s firing just destroyed me, and I think it shed a light on the other stuff that I had been kind of rolling along with,” he said.

Davis quit yesterday.

In a Joystiq interview, Davis said he wanted the people left at the site to be seen by readers as the real deal.

“I want people to have some faith in the editors that are still there,” he said. “These are honest people doing honest work that honestly isn’t being mangled by marketers and salespeople. I just don’t think I have it in me to try and repair the damage that’s been done in the process.”

Required reading.

Long-time staffer Ryan Davis is to leave Gamespot, says this, the reason apparently being the November departure of Jeff Gerstmann following a 6/10 review for Kane & Lynch. The news brings the tally of lost staff due to the incident to four, if Gerstmann himself is included.

New editor-in-chief Ricardo Torres confirmed the decision.

Davis wrote in a blog post last December, “It’s been almost 8 years since I started working at GameSpot, and Jeff was there for nearly all of my fondest and most memorable experiences on the job. Simply put, I would not be in the video game business at all were it not for Jeff Gerstmann, and I am loathe to imagine what I might be doing with my life right now without the focus I’ve earned from having this ridiculous job. But now, Jeff’s gone, and I’m not afraid to say that it absolutely breaks my heart. I felt the departure of Rich Gallup from the site earlier this year in my bones, but this goes deeper. Jeff was a rare constant, and this marks the end of an era for both GameSpot and myself, a fact that doesn’t seem to be getting any less upsetting for me.”

Hardcore. Good luck to you, Ryan.

In his first interview since being promoted to editor-in-chief of US site Gamespot, Ricardo Torres has admitted that the high profile departure of long-time editorial boss Jeff Gerstmann could have been handled “differently”.

“We were all pretty taken aback and surprised by how it all went down,” he said, speaking in this interview. “Hindsight’s always 20/20, and I think we’ve made it clear that we would have loved to have done things differently, but dwelling on it isn’t going to help things… Our goal really is to just acknowledge what happened, that we’re bummed about it, but we do still need to take GameSpot forward.”

Gerstmann, as you know unless you’ve been living under a rock for the past couple of months, left Gamespot last November after internal friction over a 6/10 score for Kane & Lynch. Torres admits the entire farce was a shock to the site – one of the “big two” in the US alongside IGN – but things are moving forward.

“From the outside, because we were quiet and because of how things got painted, the assumption is everyone’s really anal right now and very down,” he added. “But people are coming to work, we’re putting out content, people are getting back into the swing of things. Everybody’s human and this was a shock to the system. Everybody’s working through it. Everybody’s moving forward in their way. People are going to get back up to full speed in their time. I’m kind of the caretaker; I’m here to help people any way I can.”

Take a look at the full thing.

Ricardo Torres is to be Gamespot’s new editor-in-chief, the US site has announced, replacing Jeff Gerstmann after a torrid departure last November. Torres was previously editorial director for the site (isn’t that a step backwards?) and has done loads of awesome stuff, like being “instrumental in bringing the GameSpot audience groundbreaking live coverage of the PlayStation 3 and Wii launches on the East and West Coasts”. Seriously, he’s well experienced. Good luck to you, Ricardo.

“I’m excited to have the opportunity to help further GameSpot’s position at the forefront of the industry,” said Torres. “I’m eager to continue the site’s tradition of excellence and I’m confident we can move forward into 2008 and set a new industry standard for how video games are covered.”

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.”