3. The Firing Of Jeff Gerstmann
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GagFPnSG0j4 There's not a lot of trust for many of the dedicated game reviews sites these days, and much of this air of cynicism towards major gaming sites can be attributed to an incident involving one Jeff Gerstmann. Gerstmann was Gamespot's editorial director when he wrote a review for Kane and Lynch, giving the mediocre game a
perfectly average score of 6/10. But Gerstmann was seemingly unaware of the arrangement between the game's publisher, Eidos, and Gamespot. Eidos was paying the gaming site a ton of ad revenue, for which it was apparently assumed that Kane and Lynch would get a good score. When Eidos saw the score for Kane and Lynch, they put pressure on Gamespot to sack Gerstmann, which duly happened soon after. The full details of this unsavoury business were revealed when Gerstmann's vow of silence about it expired in 2012, with Gerstmann confirming that it was due to his low scoring of Kane and Lynch. He then went on to set up the hugely successful site, Giant Bomb, which has since been acquired CBS, the same company that owns Gamespot. The hatchet between Gerstmann and Gamespot appears to have been well and truly buried, as Gerstmann was finally allowed to reveal the details of the scandal in an interview with Gamespot, of all places.