Over at 1up, editor Sam Kennedy has blogged his thoughts on the GameSpot/Jeff Gerstmann drama.

The post goes beyond just skewering the CNet management, however. Kennedy goes into deep historical detail, chronicling a series events that led to GameSpot's increased dedication to advertising. He also touches on the unprecedented community reaction and support for Gerstmann. He includes Dtoid's CashWh0re review of Kane & Lynch as an example.

I won't copy-pasta the whole thing, but here are a few choice quotes:

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"On the surface, it's harmless tool that's great for advertisers to obtain valuable data surrounding its products and purchasers. But it had the potential to be abused. Here's a little primer on how it works: as a visitor to Gamespot, everything you do 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.

And while that might sound very big brother to some, the program itself wasn't the problem -- again, on the surface it's a rather useful tool -- it's what could be done to influence it. 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. 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.

Essentially, the thing was designed to be gamed."
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"Running this whole GameTrax operation was a guy named Josh Larson. But after Broady, Kasavin, and others left GameSpot, Larson took over the editorial aspect of the site as well. So here you had Josh Larson -- the man behind selling sponsorships of editorial -- now placed directly in charge of the editorial itself. You tell me if you see any potential conflict of interest there.

Around the same time, Steven Colvin, known for having launched such publications as Stuff magazine, took over CNET's entertainment and lifestyle group, of which GameSpot is a part of. I don't know what his editorial influence has been on GameSpot, if any, but his track record didn't exactly point to editorial integrity as one of his prime values. Stuff magazine, for example, used to run game reviews that were written based off of screenshots and fact sheets, before the games were even playable to the press (I knew several freelancers who made lots of easy money from this). So yeah, you had the guy in charge of GameTrax and the guy who launched Stuff overseeing all editorial on GameSpot.

And so the stage was set for the events of last November to unfold. Eidos paid a substantial amount of money to have its ads point to the GameSpot review of Kane & Lynch. The Kane & Lynch review wasn't very favorable. Eidos freaked. GameSpot caved. Internet exploded."
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I know this issue has been discussed to death, and the blog is a fairly long read. But it is well worth your time. Read the full article here.


Edit: Apparently arktherobot had already covered this story with a lengthy writeup of his own.