Jeff Gerstmann fired from Gamespot, a sad day for game journalism

Much beloved Gamespot editor Jeff Gerstmann was unceremoniously fired on Friday, apparently over his low-scoring review of the console title Kane & Lynch. Evidently the publisher, Eidos, was running an expensive ad campaign on the site when Gerstman’s 6.0 review was published — much to the embarassment of advertisers and the Gamespot marketing department. While Gamespot executives have niether confirmed or denied that this is in fact the case, rumors have been circulating on the web from various insiders who believe this was the real reason Gerstmann was canned.

Personally I have always associated Gerstmann with the Gamespot brand, so this news comes as a bit of a shock to me. Despite some occasional discrepancies, I always found his reviews to be thorough, informative, and fair. Hopefully he will find another employer soon, and I expect that with a resume as distinguished as his he will be fighting off the job offers over the weekend.

This episode also highlights a major difference between large corporate gaming websites and small, independent blogs like PVG. Since we rely on Adsense revenue rather than corporate sponsorship from large developers (we wish) there is no pressure to give a game a high score just because the publisher has purchased a major ad campaign. You won’t see us giving mediocre games artificially inflated scores, at least not until that dumptruck full of money that EA promised us arrives.