Goodbye to Jeff Gerstmann, and to Gamespot

If you don't know the story and have a passing interest in the gaming industry, you owe it to yourself to get aquainted.

Jeff Gerstmann was Gamespot's senior review editor until late last week, when he was canned after giving a high-profile game -- Kane and Lynch: Dead Men -- a woefully mediocre score of 6.0. I've read the written review and watched the video one, and I can tell you that the man doesn't pull any punches.

Prior to the game's release, its publisher, Eidos -- of Hitman, Tomb Raider, and Deus Ex fame -- had invested quite the pretty penny in a sitewide marketing campaign, one that featured Kane's and Lynch's ugly mugs (arguably, Kane's is uglier) smeared up and down Gamespot's bookends and across the top as an integrated banner. Users were given the option to 'skin' the site to display three variants on the theme. Naturally, it was expected that the community would be eager to climb aboard the K&L boat and set sail for Eidos' pockets.

Alas, as has sometimes been known to happen, Eidos ended up releasing what can with only slight hyperbole be referred to as a piece of trash. All the marketing dollars in the world haven't been able change that reality -- although though they should have, according to the business-school mindsets of the Eidos people. Jeff Gerstmann gave K&L exactly the review it deserved, and Eidos objected not to the score per se, but rather to the review's tone, which was admittedly of the scathing variety. The publisher's reaction was to pull hundreds of thousands of future advertising revenue from Gamespot.

Following this, Gamespot's business arm had a reaction of its own: to fire Jeff Gerstman, one of their most senior editors with ten years experience at the company and in the process send a message to the rest of the staff: give AAA games the reviews their publishers pay for.

(To make matters worse, Jeff's Myspace page lits him as a fan of MSTRKRFT and Justice, thus making his termination doubly heinous.)

Of course, none of this can be confirmed. CNet (parents company of Gamespot) isn't saying a thing about the matter, and Jeff most likely was compelled to sign a non-disclosure agreement upon his departure, one that, undoubtedly, his severance package was contingent upon. There isn't any real, solid proof that Jeff was fired over a bad review, but none of that really matters now.

As I write this, Gamespot is enduring a lynching of its own. Gabe and Tycho posted a comic offering up their take on the issue. About sixty percent of the threads posted over the weekend to Gamespot's general discussion forums have been on the subject of the scandal -- you can tell just by checking the boards; they're the threads that the moderators have locked. Community backlash has sent Kane and Lynch's user average score down toward the 2.6 range, prompting Gamespot to disable user reviews as well -- but don't worry: you can still post your own review on Metacritic, where K&L user reviews now sit at 2.2. Needless to say, Eidos has pulled the K&L advertising from the site, and it now appears that the formerly ubiquitous Mountain Dew ads have vanished as well. Over the weekend, GameFAQ's (a subsidiary of Gamespot) polls were appearantly hacked. As of now, there are no banner ads being displayed on GS, and at least one insider has come forward with information that certainly paints CNet in a very bad light. Want more? Stories like these have been hitting the front page of Digg all weekend.

Gamespot is in a free fall, and personally, I don't think anyone over there can see the bottom yet. It's a shame, because GS is the first place I've turned for my reviews in almost every case, thanks to their knowledgable, professional, and talented editorial staff and their reviews that I have -- for the most part -- found myself unable to really disagree with. In nine out of ten instances, if I liked a game, it turned out that a Gamespot reviewer liked it too, and about as much to boot.

Unfortunately, it now appears that all that's under the bridge. The community has spoken. Regardless of what exactly went down, credibility has been compromised. That little voice in the back of my mind may have not been being so paranoid when it cleared its throat upon my noticing that Assassin's Creed had been given a 9.0, one of those one out of ten scores that I did not agree with -- at all.

Welcome to the New Games Journalism. This week has been a sad time.

Let's hope that the industry learns something from this. Meanwhile, have you checked out 1UP?