GameSpot’s Sad State of Affairs

I hadn’t planned to post anymore GameSpot-related news items here, but there is just way too much interesting information about the website’s editorial and marketing practices to be found in the latest blog post of 1UP’s Sam Kennedy for me to pass up. For the sake of exposing such practices (which are probably used by others, including 1UP), I thought I’d at least quote a few paragraphs:

…something else had been brewing at GameSpot: a program called GameTrax. On the surface, it’s harmless tool that’s great for advertisers to obtain valuable data surrounding its products and purchasers. But it had the potential to be abused. Here’s a little primer on how it works: as a visitor to Gamespot, everything you do gets tracked. Every story you read, every screenshot you view, every video you download — it’s all followed by the system and compiled into behavioral data. It’s kind of like Amazon, except instead of showcasing stuff you might like on your homepage, your behavioral data is being sent on to marketers.

And while that might sound very big brother to some, the program itself wasn’t the problem — again, on the surface it’s a rather useful tool — it’s what could be done to influence it. Retailers would pay attention to the “buzz” a title was seeing on GameSpot and, in theory, place unit orders based off of that data — after all, the retailer could potentially sell more units of a title seeing increased momentum online. But by spending money with Gamespot, it was possible for game publishers to raise the buzz ranking of their titles; publishers could make it appear as though there was a larger interest in their product than there perhaps really was.

Essentially, the thing was designed to be gamed.

As a marketer, if you recognized you needed more traffic to your product, you could buy it. You could even buy a top placement for your title on the GameSpot homepage, pretty much assuring clicks to coverage on your title, regardless of whether there was organic interest or not. And we’re not talking about just banner advertisements here — we’re talking about buying one of the top stories on the front of the site.

…

Running this whole GameTrax operation was a guy named Josh Larson. But after Broady, Kasavin, and others left GameSpot, Larson took over the editorial aspect of the site as well. So here you had Josh Larson — the man behind selling sponsorships of editorial — now placed directly in charge of the editorial itself. You tell me if you see any potential conflict of interest there.

And if not for Gerstmann’s firing, the general population may have never known.