Honesty and integrity going to the highest bidder?
It is dark days indeed for the CNET-owned video gaming website, Gamespot. On the back of the Gerstmanngate incident in November 2007, in which a respected reviewer was allegedly sacked due to his unfavourable review of Kane & Lynch: Dead Men, long-term reviewer Frank Provo and reviews editor Alex Navarro have also left the company last week, citing this unsavoury incident as being the reason behind their departure.
In his parting farewell, Navarro wrote: "It's a crying shame that things went down the way they did...sometimes you just realize a place isn't for you anymore."
Despite staff members, and a large number of readers of the site, crying foul play, Gamespot has not held its hands up to any dodgy dealings and as a result of the whole debacle and subsequent Internet furore, it seems the site has lost the trust of a lot of its members who feel suspicious of the sites' reviews and apparently also the way in which they handle their advertising.
In an article written by 1up’s editor-in chief,
Sam Kennedy, he examines Gamespot’s alleged underhand advertising tactics in more depth and has unearthed some interesting details.
Through advertising software used by Gamespot, called Gametrax, Kennedy writes: “Everything you do [at Gamespot] gets tracked. Every story you read, every screenshot you view, every video you download -- it's all followed by the system and compiled into behavioral data. It's kind of like Amazon, except instead of showcasing stuff you might like on your homepage, your behavioral data is being sent on to marketers. “
Whilst this doesn’t sound particularly unusual, Kennedy then claims that the system can easily be exploited by the site in order to rake in the cash:
“Retailers would pay attention to the "buzz" a title was seeing on GameSpot and, in theory, place unit orders based off of that data -- after all, the retailer could potentially sell more units of a title seeing increased momentum online, he explains. “But by spending money with Gamespot, it was possible for game publishers to raise the buzz ranking of their titles; publishers could make it appear as though there was a larger interest in their product than there perhaps really was.”
What’s even more intriguing about Gamespot’s Gametrax system is that its run by a guy named Josh Larson, who also has some sway over Gamespot editorial and has been labelled a ‘money hungry piece of scum’
by one website.
One Gamespot employee claims that he was in a meeting with Larson and “was trying to explain this firing and the guy had absolutely no response to any of the criticisms we were sending his way. He kept dodging the question, saying that there were "multiple instances of tone" in the reviews that he hadn't been happy about, but that wasn't Jeff's problem since we all vet every review. He also implied that "AAA" titles deserved more attention when they were being reviewed, which sounded to all of us that he was implying that they should get higher scores, especially since those titles are usually more highly advertised on our site.
Shockingly, the same source also claims that, “publishers have started giving us notes involving when our reviews can go up; if a game's getting a 9 or above, it can go up early; if not, it'll have to wait until after the game is on the shelves.
The Gamespot employee’s full rant can be found at Valleywag.
The integrity of Gamespot has been severely questioned by the original Eidos debacle.
Some sources suggested (PlayTM, The Funbucket) that Eidos may have paid up to US$2 million to advertise on the site and therefore expected a better review for a mediocre game.
The sad fact of the matter is that the dust will eventually settle and Gamespot will continue to trade as normal and build up that user base once again. But whether it can gain the respect from gamers any time soon is highly questionable. However, as long as the bigwigs are raking in the cash, will they really care?
As Kennedy writes in his excellent article on the subject, "...this whole issue puts a dark cloud over the entire industry -- it puts all of our work into question."
Website advertising space is now being sold for huge amounts of money and, fuelled by greed, the rich (the big gaming websites) will undoubtedly want to get richer - that's just business. If sites can get away with giving the likes of Kane & Lynch Dead Men an 8 or 9/10 rating rather than the 5/10 it actually deserves - and they probably can, since all reviews are only supposed to be the writer’s opinion - can we really trust video game reviews any more?
Turn overleaf by clicking the drop-down bar to read the HEXUS.gaming editor's opinion...
