Energy Drink Reviews You Can Trust
Many of you may remember November of 2007, and those of you who don’t you should probably put down that poor saliva-crusted toad already. One occasion from November 2007 that you probably don’t remember is in fact the topic of this post. Right around Thanksgiving time last year Jeff Gerstmann, a longtime senior editor at Gamespot was fired from his job. If you were a regular Gamespot visitor, you’d likely remember Jeff as a boisterous goofball, a funny guy to listen to on the Hotspot podcast, watch on the Gamespot video programming, or as a familiar editorial voice in game reviews.
At the time Jeff was let go, there was much speculation that his departure was related to mollifying a publisher (Eidos), which had bought a significant advertising campaign on Gamespot, after Jeff provided a mediocre review (6 out of 10, metacritic scores were in the same ballpark). “Gerstmanngate” received wider coverage in gaming industry press than many expected, and I recall hearing about this on several gaming podcasts as well as in online blogs. Ok, so posting about this almost eight months later isn’t exactly a scoop!
What’s interesting and perhaps surprising about this is that Gamespot has had significant editorial turnover since Jeff was fired. Frank Provo, Alex Navarro, Ryan Davis, Vinny Caravella, and Brad Shoemaker have all left Gamespot since Jeff was fired, and some have given clear indications that editorial independence was indeed being supressed. There had always been a base level of staff turnover at Gamespot, but this represented the departure en masse of many long time contributors.
For the past few months, Jeff and Ryan have been running a video game blog, Giantbomb, that is worth checking out. A staple of the site is an excellent podcast (the ‘bombcast’) in which the opening several minutes are usually spent sampling and discussiing various energy drinks. What really caught my attention, though, is that about a week ago I was listening to the bombcast and learned that both Vinny and Brad have now also joined on to the editorial team at Giantbomb, which is launching in expanded form “this summer”.
I doubt the departure of these senior editors has had a signifant impact on Gamespot traffic (although I have found that I’m just not interested to visit that site very often, and the Gamespot podcast isn’t nearly as interesting as the bombcast). But I wonder if we’re heading into a future where smaller communities of gamers proliferate at the expense of the communities at larger sites? In any case, I’ll be looking forward to more reviews and coverage from Giantbomb later this year and I’ve already found that since Gerstmanngate, IGN and Gamespot have received a lot fewer hits from yours truly.