GameSpot layoffs

That's it: the industry needs a better revenue model. Or maybe the economic model needs a better...model. Anybody know how the patron system during the Renaissance worked? Because other than that, I've got nothing.

If you did have the answer I doubt you'd be on here talking to us, you'd probably be rolling in cash. A lot of very smart people have not been able to figure this out yet. Seems like most of the big time media companies are experimenting with paywalls/subscription models but I don't think that will work for everyone. It could work for Gamespot though if they get their primetime personalities like O'Dwyer, McDonell etc established a bit more.

re: Renaissance- Isn't that what patreon.com is basically to recreate (crowdfunded though)?

Not really sad to see the one's going go. Glad to see the ones I care about (Kevin, Chris Watters, Danny, and Jess) are staying. As pointed out in several news articles, this business is changing, and is becoming personality-driven. Writing doesn't cut it any more, and while it's good Patrick gets to keep doing it here, it could never be the only thing he does here. Some of the personalities really bothered a lot of people, namely Carolyn (for obvious reasons) and Tom (for bad reviews, being awkward, and having zero camera and voice over ability). Some of the names I recognize, and they weren't complained about, they were just kind of there and boring. Some names I don't recognize at all.

It's a bummer for those involved to lose their livelihood. Perhaps they could get together and start something new and different from the direction they were taking at GameSpot.

I hopped onto the GameSpot thread again to see what the general climate was after a few days. Honestly while there is the occasional simple "good riddance" post most of it is that tired false dichotomy between "objective" reviews and "biased" reviews which is really just shit people disagree with. I don't think the "not objective" review accusation has rarely if ever been leveled when someone was in agreement with the review(er). A vast majority of the time it's a roundabout (although likely not deliberate) way of saying x, y, or z is shit I don't agree with and therefore doesn't "belong" in the review and following the logic from there must reflect the individual and therefore isn't "objective" enough.

I think part of it is the somewhat binary and scattershot introduction of definitive views on society into reviews that indeed aren't relevant to many games but that's larger than Carolyn or any one reviewer at the moment. Still, a lot of it is that aforementioned logic which is unfortunately too common not to be a factor in the profession as a whole when coming up against the fanbase and particularly incidental readers.

I wonder how much the presentation of "a definitive source for video game coverage" that many sites and magazines have had in the past are coming up to roost with this stuff. How much of that perception of the reviewer as a definitive, and therefore "objective" in following people's logic, voice for this one publication encourages these outcomes. After all, the format has largely been "this one game gets this one person's evaluation" and that's it. Therefore it stands as a seemingly permanent statement by GameSpot dot com that this game is x score or flawed because of y and not an individual writer/player's experience with the game. Money and structure has seemingly been the reason multiple reviews aren't done and I don't think that's a solution if one could help it given that the better answer is in more nuanced supplementary avenues and emphasis on individual personalities as the core to how the site evaluates games.

It's hard and arguably mature lesson to learn that unfortunately many gaming communities are not up to task with handling much at all. Even the Giant Bomb and Idle Thumbs communities, both renowned in the industry as exceptional, have had their uneasy moments for sure.

Meh. Never agreed with any of Tom's reviews. Which doesn't have to be a big deal, I also often disagree with the GB crew, but I found McShea's criticism to often be ridiculous. He almost always made a hard case for 'issues' that weren't even there and ignoring the ones that mattered. There is something to be said for a dreamer that doesn't look at a game for what it is, but for what he thinks it should be in his mind. But that stuff is completely useless for me. Hands down the worst reviewer I've ever known by name and on a major site.

Not to say I'm glad he lost his job, but I'm also not disappointed he left. I do wish he gets a job elsewhere soon, but once he does I'm glad this happened to be honest.

That's the exact problem facing (for lack of better wording) the modern world: the best content is not always the most profitable content, and vice versa. It's what made Gilded Age journalism the worst, and what's making today's journalism the worst. Maybe the problem is that we're starting with the goal of making money from this, and not the goal of making the best content we can? But then the economic realities get in the way...

This is sad/bad/scary news no matter which is your favorite gaming site, or whos tastes line up with yours.

Also, whatever happened to Homer from GS? I remember him kinda lasting a long while after classic GS broke up after Kane & Lynch but he wasnt mentioned in this firing round.

I wish the best to those who got laid off. For me Justin Calvert is notable, because he goes back so far. Another is for C. Petit because of the class I saw in her tweet posted in this thread. Surprised me a little. And I liked that art design behind it. My best to all of them.

My problem with G.S. is when they ruined redesigned their website. Though I had been a member since early Greg Kasavin days, suddenly I could not log in anymore. Also New/Future releases was something I checked often, and then stayed for the many hooks. But New/Future Releases is a buried mess now, and the whole site strikes me that way depending when and how I look. Occasionally I see something I like there, but the logging in issue puts me off.

That is...actually the saddest part of this whole thing. You know, thanks to the trio Mary, Chris & Danny I watched dozens of their shows. Now fans just don't know yet that the most of the people are gone. No more Maxwell and his random fighting game streams. No more GamePlay podcasts. This is also going to affect the whole site & content for months to come.

Thanks for the entertainment GameSpot. Thanks for making videogame coverage awesome again. Thanks for the laughs.

I'm gonna say something crazy. But building a site around those 3 and Kevin Van Ord can be something as strong as Giant Bomb's original 4.

You got Danny, the charismatic host (shades of Ryan).

You got Mary, the loveable video person (shades of Vinny).

The grizzled vet, Kevin Van Ord (Jeff?)

Then Chris Waters, the jack-of-all-trades (Brad, who does whatever the hell he wants).

It's a reductive comparison, but what I'm saying is that it's a hell of a core to build around if they're taking the site in a new direction. Gamespot had a very large staff, which fit with their coverage. But if they reduce the scope of what they do, the remaining staffers are very capable.

I'm curious to see what happens next with Gamespot. With Danny out for 3 weeks, it'll be a strange transition for now. But I'm sure they can do it.

What the fuck? This SUCKS!

Oh, wow. I COMPLETELY forgot about the site redesign. That is literally the reason why I stopped ever visiting Gamespot. It hasn't been one of my go-to web sites for gaming for many years now, but I would still occasionally go and I very often used Gamestop as THE best site to look up old games when doing research on old games or building a list of games for old platforms I missed out on. When the redesign occurred, the site was basically unusable to me. It was outrageously slow (the worst offender), almost impossible to find what you wanted if it wasn't on the first page, that's if you could even find something that was on the front page dominated by massive pictures and charts. Worst of all, the search function was no longer reliable to find what you wanted. I couldn't even find the sections for older platforms, nor find those awesome lists of all reviews for a platform which you could filter.

The same thing (but not nearly as bad) happened to GameTrailers. They screwed up the redesign of the site, making it slow and complicated to find what you were looking for with features being completely removed. I pretty much stopped going to GameTrailers for good after that and lo and behold, a year or two later a big round of layoffs hit the site with most senior staff being removed and virtually all personalities besides Bosman (who doesn't do much for me because I'm not that into Japanese games) being gone.

This isn't an excuse, but I think that major hiccups in the redesign of GameSpot were inevitable. They basically built an entirely new site from scratch based on code use for Giant Bomb and Comic Vine to house content and data from the existing GameSpot site, which over the many years had become a mountain of spaghetti code. I'd honestly have been shocked if everything worked as it should have after the data transfer, particularly after the Giant Bomb redesign encountered its own share of issues; a number of which were only resolved once they pulled devs away from the GameSpot redesign to focus on bug squashing.

:(

Homer left GameSpot a year or so ago, alongside some other old time video producers like Tyler. Said he was working freelance now when I spoke to him at E3. Seemed to be doing well.

I hope not .

It's always a bummer when talented people get fired through no fault of their own, but when I heard about the Gamespot layoffs I thought it might be more minor employees being laid off or newer people I didn't know, but these are bigs names. Carolyn Petit, Tom McShea, Ryan MacDonald, Justin Calvert. I wish these guys the best of luck finding work in the future because they really deserve it.

I think this is 100% correct. When I looked up each of those laid off, I realized I could only even recognize 1-2 of the faces - even though I had heard almost all the names. It seems like Gamespot is moving in a different direction. Freelance writers will probably fill the gap for less money. The sad reality of modern games coverage.

Feels more and more like they looked at the competition and saw that maybe they didn't need all "this" and "that", had to act quickly. Low-effort blogs and thirteen a dozen youtubers getting the money and visitors they no longer do. Giantbomb stepping up in the ranks majorly, personality-and-videodriven.

Visiting the Gamespot forum threads on this topic continues to be a major bummer. You have these people with thousands, sometimes tens of thousands of post, that have clearly been around the site for years, yet are openly cheering the staff being gutted. It's such a weird thing thing to watch and makes me appreciate Giant Bomb all the more.

I'm fairly sure Jess and Zorine's horror game streams bring in a way bigger audience than a proper news story write-up for a variety of different reasons. Who can really blame management, when you have Pewdiepie earning millions of dollars alone for daily Happy Wheels videos that last less than 10 minutes, and as you've both mentioned, traditional ad-revenue is starting to peter out. On paper here is easy to create content that doesn't require much effort or even skill really - and on the other side here we have all these writers with college degrees and whatnot eating up the bottom line profits. Get some fresh camera friendly faces that will be excited enough to break into the gaming industry to forego a decent salary or benefits, sit them down in front of a camera and squeeze out some video features.

Hopefully they'll all land on their feet, But this megasucks

Alexa is complete garbage, you shouldn't be using that site to get an indication of the traffic a site gets. The way they measure numbers is so flawed it's not even funny, and it's considered as a joke among people who run websites. Shame that some advertisers still use it as an indication of anything, really. But that's besides the point, I agree with what you're saying here.

How many viewers do those streams get live? It's clear that they struggle to get viewers for their streams, The Lobby has about 200 people chatting on the site and at most 1500 people watching on Twitch, and I'm sure the horror game streams get far fewer views.

For my money, this is a bet that the future is in video, but they're not close to having a big audience for that stuff yet because the site doesn't really have a community anymore. First step is that they need to surface the live streams way better than they do now on the site.

@amyggen: They'll build a community with video. I used to never visit GameSpot. Now I go each Friday to watch The Point and on Sunday to see the new releases. I used to watch the news with Jess but something about that started to rub me the wrong way and I stopped.

Sometimes I watched their video reviews - which in a way proves the whole video part. I'd never really just read their reviews. Watching them let me see the games in action and I got a second opinion of sorts. I wish Tom Mcshea all the best but I have to admit that whenever I actually read any of his reviews I had a hard time understanding what he actually thought of the game. He's a talented writer, just maybe not the greatest fit for this sort of writing.

Sometimes we forget how important some people are to a site just because we don't see them on camera. So thought I'd post these tweets about how important Justin Calvert was to Gamespot as Editor-in-Chief.

@tournamentofhate: Yeah, I've always had respect for Calvert. Any word on who's gonna be EIC over there now?

@amyggen: I dont actually know, but based on whos left, if they even consider it an EIC it will probably be Kevin.

Just a guess, though.

Kevin would be my guess, too. I'm pretty sure that there will still be an Editor in Chief position, but the hierarchy has completely shaken up. I can't imagine how this transition is going to play out.

Yeah, he's the most senior guy left there at least. And I'm sure they'll have an EIC, there's not many sites out there without one.

Eh, Alexa and Compete.com are the only free resources I know of and I don't care to pay for quality information for the sake of a forum conversation. It doesn't surprise me that their methodology is flawed, it's free info after all. That being said as a rough proxy for traffic in a very informal conversation between amateurs I don't think it's a big deal, I think it served its' purpose with the point I was trying to make.

Just curious, what do you use?

That's my guess too as I THINK Kevin was the one right under Calvert before this. But like, one in office guy in charge of reviews and a whole bunch of freelancers that live out of town/work from home. I would imagine it would be difficult to lead a reviews team when you hardly ever seen them.

I'm sure it could be done over e-mail and Skype, but yeah, watching over a team of freelancers is not the same thing as working with a team in-house. On the other hand, it's not nearly an impossible task to handle, either.

@slag: I don't really use any of them, since all the free tools are really, really bad. Stuff like Alexa can be a decent indicator of trends, but not always, but as a measurement of traffic it's terrible. Alexa get their data from random users downloading their toolbar. There's no real random sample there, just people who choose to download their toolbar for some reason.

But that said, you're right that Alexa, Compete etc. are better than nothing.

I'm not quite sure why they would even need an Editor in Chief at this point since they're clearly moving away from that style.

Homer was hanging out with the Comicvine crew during SDCC so he does indeed appear to be free lancing

Their is almost no connection between community and staff on GS. GS staff stopped being involved with the community on the forums years ago, and most of us who have been on GS for many years got involved because of the community on the forums. That and not everyone is HAPPY they got laid off, many people are happy they (and when I say they I am speaking specifically of Tom and Carolyn) won't be reviewing for GS anymore because they considered them terrible reviewers, and no, you can't just casually claim it's because "they gave a game they were hyped for a low score".

Their is some of that going on, but that's mostly in the comments community on the main site, not the forums. You have to understand that GS is an incredibly fractured community consisting of several different communities with loose connections to one another at best. The forums community, (which represents a lot of old guard who still view the forums as the main method of interaction on GS… a standard set by GregK and others being a very big presence day to day in the forums) the people who use the main site but not the comments OR the forums, (they use twitter, facebook, etc.) then the comments sections of articles. (which represents the majority of the worst of the worse, the people who threatened to kill Tom, and the people who harassed Carolyn)

But really, my main point is that you can, in fact, be glad these two are no longer working for Gamespot and not be a soulless monster. I'd rather they had both left because they simply found work somewhere else, but that's not how it ended up happening. So I'm not glad they got laid off, but I am glad they won't be reviewing for GS anymore. To go back to the point of how bad the communication between staff and most of the forum community is… a lot of us didn't even know Ryan M. still worked for GS. We thought he left years ago when Ryan D. left to help found this place.

this is *slightly* crazy but definitely not *batshit* crazy. I really like and respect all these four people (especially Danny and Mary who regularly crack me up with their shenanigans). I'm curious to see if we don't get even more site - crossover in the future with these four and others appearing on GB more frequently and vice versa.

How does that sort of confusion even arise?

@hailinel: Frankly, like most editors he stopped engaging the community there. I can't remember the last time I saw his name before he was laid off. I just assumed he had quietly left long ago. The average response to his name being on that list the other day literally was "wow, had no idea he was still here"

Holy shit I'd never have seen them getting rid of Tom, Justin, or Carolyn. I really like Maxwell and Ryan. Not really familiar with the others.

This is some crazy news.

@james_hayward: Speaking of crossovers, Dan and Brad are on today's The Lobby playing The Swapper. Hopefully GS gets things back to business as usual: as much as this news sucks, they "have" to keep making content.

@gaff: yep it's on in a few mins & will be watching

I wonder if they'll even mention the layoffs since it has been eerily quiet.

You mean there are still people left to talk about it?

Brad looks thoroughly uninterested in everything going on.

I think it's pretty shitty of Brad and Dan to make content for gamespot when they just gutted their staff. They are enabling those job losses. If gamespot had nobody to make content then they'd have to hire someone to do it. With Brad and Dan doing it then they don't need to. This is likely also delaying the bombcast.

^what world do you live in?