Actions speak louder than words

While cnet has said that they do not let advertisers have any say on editorial content, it is interesting to note that their gamespot site has re-posted the kane & lynch review with the content edited to remove some of the legitimate criticism that Jeff made about the game. To me this just confirms the fact that cnet is a sellout.

The bigger issue is how did this situation happen? My personal view is that there is a cycle of greed. Sites initially start off small with only a few people working for them. The only thing they have is their integrity. As a result, they have honest reviews. As they start to grow, they start needing to hire people and spend more on their structural costs. This costs money. As today's generation don't want to pay for anything, the only real choice is to have advertising. Some sites have subscription services that don't have ads, but too few people are bothered enough by ads to pay for such a subscripion. This means that the bulk of their money must come from advertisers. While this does not have to be a problem, far too often the advertising department, which is bringing in the money for the company, gain too much power and slowly editorial integrity is forgotten in favor of appeasing advertisers. This is when people who care about integrity have to find new sources for their information.

As there are no reviews on Blazing Games, I don't really have to worry about this issue. What would I do if Blazing Games somehow managed to grow to the point where advertisers wanted to control the content of my games? If advertising is the only real revenue stream it is a very tough decision. I am sure I have a price, and that price is probably a lot lower than what I think it would be. That, however, does not change the basic fact that if advertisers can dictate the reviews that their games get, the reviews are no longer worth the electricity that transmits them across the internet. What is sadder still is the fact that this will continue to get worse until people decide that content should be paid for which would decimate any say advertisers would have as then they would be only a small portion of revenue. After all, it is the content that drives traffic.

Has gamespot becomes a whore?

I use to like the gamespot site but with my favorite reviewers leaving the site I was finding the site to be less and less reliable. Today I found out (thanks to the Penny Arcade comic http://www.penny-arcade.com/ ) that my favorite reviewer, Jeff Gerstmann, not only was leaving gamespot but was being fired for writing a negative review of one of their larger sponsor's games. If this turns out to be true, this act alone means that no gamespot review can be trusted. They have gone from a trusted semi-reliable source to a site to be avoided overnight.

Apparently gamespot is claiming that it was the tone of the review that got him fired. Having watched the review, which now seems to have vanished from the site, I can only say that the review was very well done. Any site that would let let advertising revenue determine the rating a review receives is clearly not worth bothering with. I should probably point out that gamespot is owned by cnet and that I will have to assume that all cnet owned sites are tainted likewise. I should also mention that eidos is the publisher of the game being reviewed, though as they haven't made a good game in a long time there is not much to boycott.

I am still holding out hope that this is all one big misunderstanding. Game reporting has been steadily dropping in quality everywhere so seeing my last semi-decent source of gaming news vanish is a sad day. I guess editorial integrity is a thing of the past. Sadly, other than not visiting or supporting the sites above, the only other thing I can do is show my disrespect of them by purposely not capitalizing their names, which sadly is only going to be noticed by English teachers.