There are claims that the unflattering comments made in Gerstmann's review of Kane & Lynch resulted in Eidos threatening to pull hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of adds from Gamespot. If this is the grounds upon which Gerstmann was fired for, then Gamespot has just thrown all of its integrity and credibility out the door.
The lack of any response from Gamespot or Eidos or Gerstmann addressing the terms of termination only seemed to further fuel the conspiracy. Their official response on Monday did not satisfy the gaming community (as you can see from the comments) and so they have just released another official response.
I personally don't think that anything Gamespot does now will convince the gaming community of Gamespot's innocence (if at all). The coincidence surrounding this issue is more than enough to convince the community of a conspiracy:
- Gerstmann was fired right after he released his unflattering review (note that his review score coincided with the average review score that other critics have given)
- All the Kane & Lynch ads on Gamespot were removed.
- The video review was removed
- The content of the written review was changed (although the score was not)
Although Gamespot's newest response seems to address these questions, as with most believers of conspiracy theories, it won't be able convince them otherwise, especially when they have already made up their mind that Gamespot is in the wrong.
NOTE: In Gamespot's defense, some gamers have pointed out that Gerstmann's XBox Live gamertag doesn't show a logical number of achievements to prove that Gerstmann had adequately played Kane & Lynch before reviewing. In a later statement, Gerstmann claims that achievements are a poor indication of game completion percentage. He states "For the record, I saw both endings in Kane & Lynch before writing about it." (seeing both endings != finishing the game, since he could have just watched those endings off of youtube)
No comments:
Post a Comment