GameSpot layoffs

Right because Jeff himself does not complain about the insanity of intrusive ad's now a days.

Oh no...not Mary Kish! NOOOOOOOOO! Just say you're okay. :(

Have you seen some of the stuff on YouTube? Also people watch this: http://www.twitch.tv/cyborgmatt/b/552039832 which is basically a person looking at text and going through files for 10,5 hours. Watching other people work while you do nothing is the new hype in procrastination.

Oh man, they really kicked out some old classic names too. Best of luck to all of them, hope they land on their feet and find success somewhere else.

I'd disable AdBlock for that.

Winegarner left ages ago, he put a video or two up on tested actually. To be honest, GameSpot has been adding more click enticing stuff recently, I mean that Aim Down sights show with the ex Xbox live video guy is pretty shameful.

This is insane. I hate the general direction that games media is heading towards these days. Internet seems to be focused on knee-jerk reactions (kind of like this thread post ho ho ho!), first impressions, let's plays and so on. No one wants a proper fucking critique anymore; it's terrible. I know I am posting on this on Giant Bomb, a site that focuses on video content, perhaps that makes me a hypocrite but man, it really stinks seeing really talent writers getting shat on. Ryan Mac Donald as well man, he's a hero. Crazy news.

The site is moving more towards click-bait CONSOLE WARZ~! content and away from genuine editorial content and has been for a while.

They thought he was just the work experience kid.

Yep, they have been doing this sort of stuff for the past few years but I guess it was easy enough for me to ignore. It's really fucking bad though. Yikes.

I've been trying to tell some of those people for so long to get their faces in front of cameras more often, too often you forget they even work there because you never see them. On that note, Gamespot does a horrible job of letting viewers know that they're livestreaming, too often I'll go to their site and can't find anywhere on the front page that there's a stream going on, and on twitch they'll be lucky to have even 100 viewers watching. It's really hard to believe that it's still a problem that they haven't fixed yet, they bury their own content all the time.

Also you'd think that Jeff's ideas about where the industry is going would have rubbed off on them more than it has, this past E3 Kevin VanOrd had a list of previews he wrote up for the games, and I asked him if anybody was actually reading them. So much of the way they do things is still stuck 10-15 years in the past, and it's really sad because the amount of talent they just lost today makes me ridiculously sad.

Man that was brutal. I don't go to Gamespot as much as GB, but I still enjoy some of their content and these people that got laid off are really talented ones. But yeah, seeing that list, there is definitely a pattern there.

Well best of luck to all of them and kudos to Carolyn Petit, for even after so much crap she had to put up with everyday, I felt her writing/reviews were only improving by the day. This sucks...

She wasn't on the list of layoffs that I've seen, but I certainly hope she stays on. Those Lion King and Aladdin streams were amazing!

I guess maybe what we are seeing with Gamespot and even with Polygon is that while traffic and being big is important, having a really dedicated and passionate community might be even moreso.

I wasn't aware that Gamespot's videos suffered from such small audiences. It is sort of baffling that Giant Bomb's twice weekly morning show routinely has more viewers than such a huge website like Gamespot can get for their featured livestreams. It also makes me think back to what I saw a few weeks ago when I visited Polygon. There was barely any activity on the forums. The most recent posts were hours old and threads last participated in days ago were still on the front page.

It kind of makes you wonder.

To lose so many people is soul crushing for Gamespot, CBSi, and the whole industry. I really hope these people get hired somewhere else very quickly.

I guess it only pays to be these folks...keep 'Developing those Products' you two Vice Presidents of Product Development.

@excast: Yeah. I hate calling it "loyalty," because that seems to imply people following regardless of merit, but Giant Bomb certainly has... passion from its fans... much moreso than sites that seem to target more of a general audience.

@monkeyking1969 Wow. Fucking ridiculous.

Wow this is really sad. Those layoffs are like 99% of the Gamespot editorial staff! Does anyone know if this is happening for all of Gamespot or just the Gamespot US office? Those cuts seem pretty deep. I have to say though, I'm not surprised. It seems like everything having to do with journalism these days, video games related or not, seems to be going over to video content so staff writers are usually the first to go. It really sucks but times are a changin'. I hope everyone involved finds a new job quick!

@excast: Hey, System Wars is still really busy!

http://www.gamespot.com/forums/system-wars-314159282/

Its the same with Polygon recently. I dont believe the click-bait will save them for too long.

@superfriend: I don't think anyone at GameSpot has a passing interest in video games.

Is there even real discussion about this on Gamespot's site anywhere? Or a mention? I looked around and the most I could find was a forum thread with a grand total of 8 posts.

I don't know why anyone would want to be a games journalist these days. It's nearly impossible to get a full time staff gig, and even if you do win the lottery and get one, you hold your breath every year and hope you aren't made redundant.

Hell, I think I'd extend that to any form of journalism.

Man, Ryan Mac :( guy was OG. Him, Jeff and Rich made most of what GameSpot was back in the days, and ultimately is nowadays.

What a real bummer. I still have fondness for those big, juicy editorials, and it looks like these layoffs are symbolic of those going away. There has to be a way for someone to be a video personality and a writer, right? We have Patrick, so it isn't like other sites couldn't try it.

Pretty strange that Jeff's old dream of creating a website that would "take on Gamespot" is coming true, but in a completely different way.

Ryan Macdonald too? Fuck. This is bizarre.

http://www.gamespot.com/forums/system-wars-314159282/seven-editors-laid-off-from-gamespot-so-far-31468614/#213

This stood out to me when I visited a page for The Besties on Polygon (their podcast). There were 5 comments after a couple days, but you go to the Bombcast and get 50 comments in like 10 minutes.

The fact that there are more posts about this on Giantbomb then on Gamespot seems super weird to me. A site we are told is super popular traffic wise just got absolutely gutted, yet only 200 posts?

I feel like everyone talks about Polygon a lot so I guess I expected some kind of thriving community when I visited their site. What I saw was an absolute wasteland.

I'm sure lots of the post got deleted for one reason or another.

Aside from the impact this has had on those who have been laid off, this is a validation of the business model that GB is built on and presumably purchased by CBSi with the intent to emulate it.

The death of long form writing in nearly all media has long been forecast in print media, especially newspapers, and the way people consume information now is to put it politely, economical.

Yeah that is weird.... I guess they really don't have that much traffic as it seems. I remember back when Gamespot was the biggest site about games in the world, and then IGN came along a took some of that away. Of course a lot of your more hardcore Gamespot users left and came here after Gerstmanngate in 2008, but even then Gamespot was huge. It seems like it hasn't been until the last couple years that things started to drop off.

I'd be real interested to see what Giant Bomb's traffic has been over the last year compared to other gaming sites. It seems like they've been killing it recently!

Some of y'all are being ridiculous. Giantbomb is still a separate website to Gamespot, and has a different avenue of monetizing. As long as subscriptions continue to be good then Giantbomb will not have to worry about these kinds of layoffs. Basically, if people stop paying for subscriptions in droves then Giantbomb will go down. So to break it down even further- if Giantbomb no longer has fans the site will dissipate naturally which means no one would even care by that point.

Gamespot got rid of their subscriptions. They are currently running solely on ads. To top it off they have been consolidating a world wide network of multiple offices around the world (China, Australia, UK, and US that I know of). They have what you would call "bloat" for the amount of money the site takes in- even if they get 5 million unique visits per month. GS got overly ambitious with it's infrastructure at some point and now it's time that CBSi consolidates because it, frankly, isn't working out (except China, which is still kicking I think and I believe gets high traffic).

I mean seriously- did no one think it was weird when UK, Australia and US offices were recombined into one site? Gamespot.co.uk no longer exists as a separate website. There have been several things that have happened to Gamespot within the last 2 years indicating this was coming. This is not out of nowhere.

I'm sorry to the people who lost their jobs- it really sucks. However, this is not some conspiracy, it's not out of nowhere, and it won't affect Giantbomb. The signs were there, but no one cared until it happened.

That's just how business works- if consumers don't care about your product you restructure.

Jesus fuck...they're pretty much gutting Gamespot out! Justin? Carolyn? Ryan Mac? Holy crap...

I don't know the peopel who MAKE the money should be well paid. My point is these top folks hold the lives of THESE people in their hands

...so f-ing earn it. All these sites have people in five or six cities across the US, and they need those top people to make it happen. So earn it like that Berkeley degree matters for something. The person who makes the money for us at my work place earns twice as much as I do...but she earns it like a champ...so that is okay with me.

Thanks for typing this. This is exactly what I'm thinking right now. Of the Gamespot crew, these two definitely represented the more intellectual and diverse voices of the editorial crew. It says something about the management how they are first to be fired, especially Tom McShea was actually quite an old timer.

@cornbredx: You have to remember that a lot of people are doom and gloom about this kind of stuff. Remember how many people were sure that GB would merge with GS within a year of CBSi buying GB? I do. Fact is that it makes zero sense for CBSi to merge the two sites under one banner even if they should begin doing much of the same stuff (GS will continue to cover "everything" like they do now, but with more freelance - they get a huge amount of their traffic through random Google searches, and wouldn't want to give that up by stopping reviewing man games). CBSi will never give up the GS name because it's incredibly valuable: It has a lot of history, and since it's a old website that has been popular for years, the Google search engine loves it. So merging GS into GB would not make sense.

On the other hand, GB would lose the subscription model if CBSi merged into GS. So that's a no-go too. And GB is running so lean that it wouldn't be much gained in terms of salaries by merging the two sites either: GB is editorial with two producers in SF, one in NYC (and vinny is half editor anyways).

I expect more crossover between the sites if they become similar, but I have absolutely no problem with that. Merging though? Makes no sense.

@themangalist: Except it wasn't only those two, and they weren't "the first" to be laid off. It was a bunch of people at once, those two were just the first to tweet it.

Very sad news today.

I'd love to see some of these people start up a site/mobile app similar to The Magazine or The Loop Magazine that offers quality long-form editorial content at an attractive price. Both those ventures seem to be going well for their creators, and I think that gaming editorial would fit well into the "micro-subscription" model. It has its audience, but isn't necessarily marketable on mass-appeal gaming sites. I think some of that writing would go over fairly well here, but there are definitely a lot of people who are just looking for more and more video content that isn't challenging or diving very deep into their topics.

I'd gladly pay a couple bucks an issue if I could know I was going to be getting high-quality writing. It's part of why I pay for my subscription here. While it's great fun watching the guys, a lot of the people here know a ton about games; far more than I ever will. It's that depth of knowledge that encourages me to pay for the site and makes it valuable to me (in addition to simply really enjoying the personalities here).

Layoffs really suck and whether they're personal or driven by the cold, heartless and mechanical business machine, are a miserable situation. I really hope those affected can bounce back soon.

The redesign about a year ago fucking destroyed what was left of the GS community. Look at the forum over there, it's still a mess a year later. The GS community is gone, what's left are people drive by commenting on articles and videos. And if you're trying to focus your site more on live streams and video, and you don't have a community? You're in deep fucking shit my friend. The Lobby, their most popular live show, gets at most 1000-1500 people watching on Twitch, and 2-300 people in the chat on GS. GS has STILL not been able to migrate people over from Twitch to their own player. The Mario stream yesterday, which was for Premium members only, had about 3000 people chatting (and thus more people watching), to put that in perspective.

@monkeyking1969:

Don't forget that also have a responsibility to shareholders (remember they are actual people with families) who put their own cash into the company with the intent to make a profit.

It's unfortunate. Regardless of whether you liked the people affected by this or not these people have been put in an incredibly crappy position. Think about what would happen if you lost your job? In a world where YouTuber's are gaining popularity more and more of these jobs are disappearing. I really hope all the people let go can find something fairly quickly.

Many have also mentioned that there isn't much discussion on GameSpot's own forums. From what I've seen they seem to have a... "different" type of community over there. This one of the many reasons I stopped frequenting GameSpot once Giant Bomb came along.

@amyggen: I never said, or implied, the sites will merge (just for clarification on that haha).

Again they are two separate entities within the CBSi infrastructure. That is the point I am trying to make.

Gamespot is it's own thing, and Giantbomb is it's own thing.

Gamespot covers broad gaming and culture. Giantbomb is considered more niche coverage. I hate to use the term, but I am not the first. It is said that Giantbomb covers the "core" gamer. Gamers that actually care enough to participate in the gaming community and discuss gaming fervently (and for the most part respectfully).

Slightly Off Topic but is there even an active General Discussion forum on Gamespot, or are their forums primarily just System Wars now?

@mb: Seems like mostly System Wars and Off-topic from just a glance.

@cornbredx: We should rename "core" to "enthusiast" when talking about gamers.

Truly. I can't really fathom the reasoning for why the layoffs shook out as they did, other than cost-cutting. I imagine that Ryan was probably among their more expensive staff members salary-wise due to his seniority, but that's pure conjecture on my part and absolutely nothing I say regarding this should be taken for anything other than the speculation it is.

@talibanchic: Ya, I never know what to call gamers in our category.

Enthusiast is fine, sure. I'll use whatever term gets the point across. haha

It sucks to see people lose their job. Hopefully they land on their feet. Corporate restructuring is a painful, but necessary process.

@smcn said:

@koolaid said:

Maybe I'm a selfish person but I wish someone here at GB would confirm that no one here has been laid off instead of posting something vague and foreboding and going offline.

How about instead something vague and foreboding you might not have seen yet, posted yesterday on Patrick's tumblr?

EDIT: Though I guess it could just be a reference to the Max Temkin stuff.

I've been out of the loop on Chicago stuff for the past while. Any chance you could fill me in on what happened to Temkin? Is he doing alright?

@cornbredx: You know what, I have no idea either. Maybe obsessed?