First, Gerstmann was let go, which kicked off “Gerstmanngate.” Not long after, freelance reviewer Frank Provo ended his 8 year run at Gamespot. Who’s next? Long time staffer and lead reviews editor Alex Navarro.

According to Kotaku, Alex Navarro gave his notice January 10th, so his last day in the office will be on January 24th. It’s unknown at this point if Navarro’s departure has anything to do with Jeff Gerstmann getting canned, but Navarro has been showing up in Gerstmann’s blog and webcast as of late, so the two are obviously friends.

I don’t think it would be far-fetched to speculate that Gerstmann’s termination was a factor in Navarro’s decision to leave, but it’s still nothing more than speculation at this point.

When asked about the site’s waning staff, Editorial Director Ricardo Torres replied by saying that they’re going to be realistic about their output and that they’re looking to fill positions as quickly as possible.

Almost six weeks later and we’re still feeling the effects of Gerstmanngate. Do you think this is going to die down any time soon or will it culminate in the destruction of games journalism as we know it? The internet? The world?

Post-apocalyptic dystopia, here I come.

An insider at GameSpot has come forward today claiming he worked on the Kane and Lynch ads. He put in his two cents regarding the Gerstmann firing. Read his thoughts after the jump.

This is what I came here to say.

I worked on the K&L ads personally, and I had a front-row seat to the whole debacle.

The ads were originally supposed to point to the GS review page, as they sometimes do. When the review came out, Eidos was understandably upset, and yes — they did threaten to pull the whole campaign — but they eventually simmered down and kept the campaign. They had us change the clickthrough URL from the GS review to the official site, but other than that little changed.

The ads went up and the Eidos brouhaha was settled over two weeks ago. Jeff got fired yesterday. Furthermore, I’d heard a few people tell that he’d already been skating on thin ice for “unprofessional reviews and review practices.” I don’t know much about that, though, so I can’t say one way or the other.

My gut tells me that he got canned for larger reasons. Maybe the Eidos debacle was part of it — I don’t know. But I sincerely doubt that Eidos made Gamespot fire him. CNET doesn’t kowtow to its advertisers, and I’ve more than once seen the higher-ups turn away big advertising dollars for the sake of the company’s integrity.

I think the whole thing is likely a combination of factors, the biggest being poor timing. Gerst gets canned just two weeks after the K&L incident, so people blame it on that (especially when backed by PA, the gaming journalism equivalent to The Daily Show).

It’ll be interesting to see how everything pans out, but I’m definitely gonna keep an open mind about it for now.

In addition on the 1up message boards Mr. Sam Kennedy previously of Gamespot, now site director at 1up chimed in claiming he never received pressure due to advertisers.

Jeff’s been overseeing GameSpot’s reviews for over a decade, and publisher complaints (of which there have been many — I would know, I worked there years ago) never affected policy.

Sam Kennedy also shared with us a link showing the Yahoo article where Stephen Colvin was hired to oversee GameSpot, as well as other C|Net publications.

SAN FRANCISCO–(BUSINESS WIRE)–CNET Networks, Inc. (NASDAQ:CNET – News), a leading interactive media company, today announced that Stephen Colvin, former President and CEO of Dennis Publishing, the publisher of Maxim, Blender, Stuff, and The Week magazines, is joining the company as executive vice president. Colvin will be dedicated to overseeing the company’s entertainment and lifestyle brands, which includes leading properties such as GameSpot, TV.com, MP3.com, FilmSpot, CHOW, and UrbanBaby.

The launch of the Penny Arcade strip all but confirmed to us that these accusations were real. Here is what the comic writers had to say about the situation as a whole.

It’s been a couple weeks discussing reviews and reviewers around here, but somewhere along the way I neglected to mention that their job is essentially impossible. The 7-9 scale they toil under is largely the result of an uneasy peace between the business and editorial wings of the venue. No matter what score they give it, high or low, they’re reviled equally by the online chorus. Apparently, even when they do it right they’re doing it wrong.

Jeff Gerstmann is no stranger to controversy. In general terms, Gamespot can be relied upon to give high-profile games scores which are slightly lower than their counterparts elsewhere. It’s almost as though there is an algorithm in place there to correct the heady rush associated with cracking open an anticipated new title. Gerstmann’s 8.8 review of Twilight Princess cemented his reputation as a criminal renegade with no law but his own, even though he gave the game an 8.9 – a nine, essentially – out of ten.

I will tell you the Gerstmann Story as we heard it. Management claimed to have spoken to Jeff about his “tone” before, and no doubt it was this tone that created tensions between their editorial content, the direction of the site, and the carefully crafted relationships that allowed Gamespot to act as an engine of revenue creation. After Gerstmann’s savage flogging of Kane & Lynch, a game whose marketing investment on Gamespot alone reached into the hundreds of thousands, Eidos (we are told) pulled hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of future advertising from the site.

Management has another story, of course: management always has another story. But it’s the firm belief internally that Jeff was sacrificed. And it had to be Jeff, at least, we believe, precisely because of his stature and longevity. It made for a dramatic public execution that left the editorial staff in disarray. Would that it were only about the 6.0 – at least then you’d know how to score something if you wanted to keep your Goddamned job. No, this was worse: the more nebulous “tone” would be the guide. I assume it was designed to terrify them.

For Gabriel, this tale proves out his darkest suspicions. People believe things like this anyway, but they don’t know it, and the shift from intuitive to objective knowledge is startling. I think it rarely gets to this point. The apparatus is very tight: there are layers of editorial control that can massage the score, even when the text tells a different tale. A more junior reviewer might have seen their Kane & Lynch review streamlined by this process, divested of its worrisome angles and overall troubling shape. It was Jeff Gerstmann’s role high in the site’s infrastructure that allowed his raw editorial content to pierce the core of the business.

Could all of this be a case of money hungry CEOs wanting to bathe themselves in swaths of money? Or could the Kane and Lynch review serve as a figurative last straw for Jeff at Gamespot? Regardless, this is all part of a larger trend of review scores becoming hostage to the same negative focal point that games were held to for so many years. Let Mr. Gerstmann become a catalyst for change, because this industry doesn’t belong to overzealous publishers, it belongs to us– the gamers.

via 1up, PennyArcade, Forumopolis, Yahoo News

For over ten years, Jeff Gerstmann ruffled the feathers of sensitive fanboys with his controversial reviews on Gamespot, which is why it’s ironic that he’s been fired for giving a mediocre game a score it deserves. At least, that’s what we’ve heard. You’re going to read this here and you’re going to read this at other sites in the coming days. The fact of the matter is that we have no real “facts” yet, but information taken from several sources seem to be converging on the idea that something rotten is going on.

The news that’s been making the rounds is that Gerstmann was fired by Gamespot’s parent company C|Net for an unfavorable review of buddy actioner Kane & Lynch, a game whose anti-heroes have been part of an on-going advertisement campaign on the website. Go look at it right now. It’s so oversaturated with the kowtowing that it almost overwhelms the actual content.

Apparently, the pressure to sack Gerstmann came from the marketers themselves. Whether it was an issue with the score or the tone of his review, we aren’t sure, but the absence of the “On The Spot” podcast (which Jeff normally hosts) this week is suspicious in and of itself. Add to that fairly credible reports from both Kotaku and Shacknews, as well as a highly suggestive Penny Arcade comic (shown below), and you’ve got a churning pot of truth.

This sets a dangerous precedent for gaming journalists themselves, as well as trust issues with their audiences. It’s something we talk about happening a lot, but rarely does an occurrence like this come to light or go this far up the ladder. It’s the kind of thing that we, as people who bring you the news and information, try to avoid.

For the time being, I’d keep a packet of salt handy. Nothing has been absolutely confirmed from a named source, let alone the full scope of the motives behind Gerstmann’s leave, but we’ll bring you any more details as we get them.