14 DAY TRIAL // Jeff Gerstmann is the number one person in the gaming community at the moment - it seems that most of the gamers take Jeff's side, while no official clarifications have been made by either site, except from the vague comment from a CNet spokesperson who stated: "we do not terminate employees based on external pressure from advertisers".
Things have gone up a level, from the gaming community right now, with two major acts. First, in an already implemented measure "in support of Jeff Gerstmann and in protest of the alleged wrongful termination", neogaf.com will filter all CNet and Eidos websites for the rest of the year. This form of protest requires that no members start any threads about any of these websites, unless it's related to the controversial conflict between Jeff and Gamespot.
But the community of gamers believed it should do more than that and a "Petition to Remove GameSpot and its Sponsors from Metacritic " has been made and is currently awaiting signatures (already over 1000 people support this idea). Before starting to comment about such a radical decision, let's see some excerpts from the petition:
"We as gamers can not, and will not tolerate shady business practices in the video games industry as in the end that ruins gaming for everyone who will not tow the line. We will waste no time to point out that many reviews on GameSpot reflect a biased slant which no one can trust, where the game is physically reviewed too high or reviewed too low on purpose." And further on, we can read: "The only thing that matters is our entire Games Journalism community suffers as a result, and we aren't going to tolerate it anymore! We want GameSpot entirely removed and gone from Metacritic, we the games community. Gaming journalism belongs to the gamers, not to the publishers! We will further send a message to GameSpot's owners, by delivering this to every single gamer we can and having them cancel all services or subscriptions associatied with GameSpot and GameSpot's sponsors. We will do so until the sponsors give up, or GameSpot shuts down. The integrity of our video game industry is at stake."
This petition is, as they call themselves, from "The Gamers". Pretty scary, isn't it? But... should this kind of things really happen? I guess it's just a matter of personal taste and everybody might have a different answer. The 1073 signatures the petition has at the moment prove that quite a number of people support the idea. Could one of the "giants" when it comes to websites fall down after such a happening? We don't even try to think about an answer, but if things go as "The Gamers" want, it will definitely be considered a David vs. Goliath fight.