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According to the rumor mill, reports have surfaced that CNET is being targeted by a consortium group (with a 21 percent stake) seeking to establish majority rule over CNET's board and to remove the company's directors in a hostile takeover bid.

This consortium group, led by Jana Partners and Sandell Asset Management, has been heavily criticized by Wall Street analysts with CNET stating the group's intention to control the company's board to be in direct violation of its bylaws. CNET has not commented on the specific details at this time.

CNET is the owner of the Gamespot and GameFAQs websites.

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At long last, GameSpot has issued a full Q&A regarding Jeff Gerstmann's firing and the swarms of conspiracy-theory rumors surrounding it, his Kane & Lynch review, the many edits to it, Eidos's reaction to it, and what really motivated the firing.

Unlike the last statement, this post contains significantly less legal stonewalling and seeming coverup.

Q: Why was the Kane & Lynch review text altered?

A: Jeff's supervisors and select members of the edit team felt the review's negativity did not match its "fair" 6.0 rating. The copy was adjusted several days after its publication so that it better meshed with its score, which remained unchanged. The achievements and demerits it received were also left unaltered. Additionally, clarifications were made concerning the game's multiplayer mode and to include differences between the Xbox 360 and PS3 versions of the game.

Q: Why was the Kane & Lynch video review taken down?

A: Both the text and video reviews of Kane & Lynch went up on Tuesday, November 13. The morning of Wednesday, November 14, the video was taken down due to concerns of quality. Specifically, its audio was deemed inferior due to a faulty microphone. There were also concerns about the limited amount of footage, which was unrepresentative of the game in the review.

Q: Why wasn't the video immediately reposted?

A: Due to the crush of high-profile games being released the following week, there were insufficient resources to reshoot and re-edit the video review.

And...

A: It has been confirmed that Eidos representatives expressed their displeasure to their appropriate contacts at GameSpot, but not to editorial directly. It was not the first time a publisher has voiced disappointment with a game review, and it won't be the last. However, it is strict GameSpot policy never to let any such feelings result in a review score to be altered or a video review to be pulled.

Q: Did Eidos' disappointment cause Jeff to be terminated?

A: Absolutely not.

Q: Did Eidos' disappointment cause the alteration of the review text?

A: Absolutely not.

Q: Did Eidos' disappointment lead to the video review being pulled down?

A: Absolutely not.

Q: Why was GameSpot "skinned" with Kane & Lynch ads when Jeff was terminated?

A: Due to design and development considerations, media buys on GameSpot are made weeks in advance. The timing of said ads was extremely unfortunate but was purely coincidental and determined solely by the game's release date of November 13, 2007.

It seems like a rather thorough squelching of the fires. It was just a fantastic series of coincidences all happening at just the right time in just the right order to completely throw several companies' credibility into question. Happens all the time.

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We all knew that shortly after Jeff Gerstmann was fired from GameSpot, some changes were made to his Kane & Lynch review. What we didn't know was how extensive those changes were.

Going off of a Google cache of an EB Games page that featured the original review, Joystiq was able to piece together all of the edits made to the original version.

Basically, it was heavily toned down in attitude. The wording of several complaints goes from active to passive neutral, such as the line:


...being changed to...

And...


...to...



The whole thing seems watered down to remove some of the "bite." It makes you wonder, if GameSpot actually had a problem with it, wouldn't they have changed these things during the pre-publishing process where nearly everybody on the review team looks over and makes changes to a review? The fact that the changes were made after publishing makes it seem like the changes were done at the request of an outside party.

If Jeff was fired for submitting an angrily-worded review instead of a nice, casual, everbody's-a-winner one, the review either wouldn't have been published or the changes would have been made before publishing. Making the changes after publishing means somebody saw it and decided it needed to be changed, be them from CNet management, a GameSpot manager who didn't see the review pre-publication, or someone from some outside party like a game developer or something.

The full body of the review with modifications highlighted by Joystiq is included after the jump.

Continue reading...

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Though rumors and questions have been spiraling out of control for 4 days now, including proposed boycotts of GameSpot, all of their advertisers, and Eidos, GameSpot has only now issued a statement regarding Jeff Gerstmann's departure from the company.

The article is carefully worded and includes no mention of why Jeff left, or even whether he was fired or not. Although, it does include this:


(Emphasis added.)

Greg Brannan, CNET Networks Entertainment's vice president of programming, is quoted as saying, "The accusations in the media that it has done so are unsubstantiated and untrue. Jeff's departure stemmed from internal reasons unrelated to any buyer of advertising on GameSpot."

Comments posted to the article seem to be largely of the opinion that GameSpot's statement is too little, too late. There is still the question of why Gerstmann's video review of Kane & Lynch (a game I wasn't too impressed with) was taken offline along with all Kane & Lynch advertisements immediately after Gerstmann's departure.

According to GameSpot, several staff members will be posting tributes and farewells in the coming week.

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Several staff members from Ziff Davis Media (owners of, among other things, 1UP and EGM) put together banners and marched down the street from their San Francisco offices to CNet's office where GameSpot is based and held an impromptu support rally from the street.

This whole fiasco has really brought everybody in the gaming media together in communal outrage. I'm sure that these folks, CNet and GameSpot's largest competators, are genuinely showing support here, but the whole thing was recorded and could very well be a bit for the 1UP Show. Either way, I applaud the notion.

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According to a post by a moderator at the linked page of the GameSpot forums, if anybody at the GameSpot (not Eidos) side of this issue is to be blamed, it's CNET, not GameSpot itself. CNET handles advertising for GameSpot and all other property sites, and they handle hiring/firing.

From the thread:
This makes sense to me. CNet, as owners of GameSpot and damn near a thousand other websites, would be the ones handling HR and marketing rather than having each individual property doing it themselves; that would be redundant.

So who should we blame here? Eidos for pressuring CNet into firing Gerstmann over a bad review of a game they've been paying CNet to promote, or CNet for caving to pressure and firing a journalist for doing his job?

UPDATE: However, there would of course be people within GameSpot's management that can fire people. Complete control wouldn't be handed over to CNet.

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