Jeff Gerstman fired from Gamespot

[Blarg]

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Reviews are usually a joke, it's hard to find good ones.

[/ QUOTE ]I don't agree with this. Most of the reviews I have read for games I have most recently played have all been pretty spot on.


The big issue here is that it now throws the legitimacy of any review in question.

FWIW, this has been a problem with music reviews as well. Several record labels have threatened to pull advertising money from magazines or websites if they get bad reviews from them.

I say [censored] that [censored], [censored] POS companies. You think this is communist Russia? Worried about bad reviews? THEN MAKE GOOD STUFF!

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Since when haven't reviews been questionable though? This has been an ongoing problem since gaming mags and websites started. It's not new and it will never go away.

[AceLuby]

I've adopted the notion of reading the article and seeing if I would like it based on what they wrote. It's usually pretty objective. The number has really become useless IMO.

[Dire]

Another problem that hasn't been mentioned is that it's not only publishers who want inflated reviews. Many times it's also the readers. For example, when the extremely hyped Lair received a 4.9/10 from PSM - readers (who obviously had never played the game) were completely outraged and on their site there were numerous posts of people flaming and stating they were cancelling their membership. Obviously there's no way to know if anybody actually did (or if they were even subscribed in the first place), but it still shows the mentality - and yet another problem reviewers/sites have.

[Jack of Arcades]

If you count up every game rated "good" or better that has another game in the series rated "good" or better, you end up with 377 games from 112 series.

If you just look at those as part of a big series (With 2 or more other games rated "good" or better" it's at 295 games from 70ish series.

So there's about 250-300 games "good" or better that were stand alone games or with [censored] sequels. A couple of more games are in series that cross platforms. Some others are debatable (ie, Bully, Arena Football). I'm going to attempt to make a final list of all ps2 games that fit a certain criteria of stand-alone games.

[scotchnrocks]

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Since when haven't reviews been questionable though? This has been an ongoing problem since gaming mags and websites started. It's not new and it will never go away.

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I agree. Video games reviews are a subjective thing. The reviewer is basically reviewing a piece of art. There's no hard quantifiable data to assist in balancing things out, it is purely the reviewer's opinion.

With cars there is horsepower, lap times, etc. Video cards have specs on their hardware that can help differentiate them, etc.

There will never be a perfect system for reviewing video games, our best hope is an impartial reviewer.

[ThaSaltCracka]

Dire, DVaut, you two Gents are correct.

In some ways this is like the rating scale for women.

Clearly 5 is the middle of the ground, completely average, etc... blah blah blah. But most people seem to say 7 is average, 8 is great, 9 is amazing, 10 is perfect. Its like numbers 1-6 are thrown away, or have equal value, which isn't true. So, yeah, those average games should be a 5, but come on, when they say 7, we know what they mean. Its average.

A rating on a scale means what people want it to mean. In this case, 7 out of 10 means average.

[vulturesrow]

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Dire, DVaut, you two Gents are correct.

In some ways this is like the rating scale for women.

Clearly 5 is the middle of the ground, completely average, etc... blah blah blah. But most people seem to say 7 is average, 8 is great, 9 is amazing, 10 is perfect. Its like numbers 1-6 are thrown away, or have equal value, which isn't true. So, yeah, those average games should be a 5, but come on, when they say 7, we know what they mean. Its average.

A rating on a scale means what people want it to mean. In this case, 7 out of 10 means average.

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Flawed analogy IMO. You only need a 3 point scale for women:

0, never; 1, after a few beers; 3, yes.

Questions? [img]/images/graemlins/grin.gif[/img]

[Senor Cardgage]

Yeah, the tension between 5 or 7 being average seems to stem from school grading, IMO. When you're used to thinking of anything 60% or below as failing, it kind of makes sense.

I do wish the games were more spaced out, with 5 being around the mean. When the average game is around a 7, there's not as much space to differentiate between the good and great games.

[Blarg]

I like the 7 being construed as average because it applies so well to so many things in ways that actually matter. Though there may be large variations in the disgustingness of food or the unattractiveness of women, for instance, it doesn't really matter. The numbers lower than 7 are functionally identical if we discount the influence of alcohol. At which point we're past the ability to argue fine distinctions anyway.

[zyrrth]

Tycho (Penny Arcade) who got the story out:
It's been a couple weeks discussing reviews and reviewers around here, but somewhere along the way I neglected to mention that their job is essentially impossible. The 7-9 scale they toil under is largely the result of an uneasy peace between the business and editorial wings of the venue. No matter what score they give it, high or low, they're reviled equally by the online chorus. Apparently, even when they do it right they're doing it wrong.

Jeff Gerstmann is no stranger to controversy. In general terms, Gamespot can be relied upon to give high-profile games scores which are slightly lower than their counterparts elsewhere. It's almost as though there is an algorithm in place there to correct the heady rush associated with cracking open an anticipated new title. Gerstmann's 8.8 review of Twilight Princess cemented his reputation as a criminal renegade with no law but his own, even though he gave the game an 8.9 - a nine, essentially - out of ten.

I will tell you the Gerstmann Story as we heard it. Management claimed to have spoken to Jeff about his "tone" before, and no doubt it was this tone that created tensions between their editorial content, the direction of the site, and the carefully crafted relationships that allowed Gamespot to act as an engine of revenue creation. After Gerstmann's savage flogging of **** & *****, a game whose marketing investment on Gamespot alone reached into the hundreds of thousands, Eidos (we are told) pulled hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of future advertising from the site.

Management has another story, of course: management always has another story. But it's the firm belief internally that Jeff was sacrificed. And it had to be Jeff, at least, we believe, precisely because of his stature and longevity. It made for a dramatic public execution that left the editorial staff in disarray. Would that it were only about the 6.0 - at least then you'd know how to score something if you wanted to keep your Goddamned job. No, this was worse: the more nebulous "tone" would be the guide. I assume it was designed to terrify them.

For Gabriel, this tale proves out his darkest suspicions. People believe things like this anyway, but they don't know it, and the shift from intuitive to objective knowledge is startling. I think it rarely gets to this point. The apparatus is very tight: there are layers of editorial control that can massage the score, even when the text tells a different tale. A more junior reviewer might have seen their **** & ***** review streamlined by this process, divested of its worrisome angles and overall troubling shape. It was Jeff Gerstmann's role high in the site's infrastructure that allowed his raw editorial content to pierce the core of the business.

(CW)TB out.