Gamespot says goodbye to some of its staff

https://twitter.com/TomMcShea/status/494585135182778368

https://twitter.com/carolynmichelle/status/494570256241684480

There are also some others aswell. I wonder if they are searching for new people or if they were let go

Update:

Justin Calvert and Maxwell McGee have also lost their jobs. Calvert has been on this site for over a decade

That sucks. Those were my 2 favorite reviewers here.

I wonder where they'll end up.

Hmm, looks like gamespot is gearing down and sliming their game division, first the uk office and now Caro and Tom.

Even though they had some strange tastes they were always part of my favorite staff members.

i say good riddance, it sucks more that Justin Calvert lost his job

Shattered. A very sad day for GameSpot.

When it happens like this and almost 10 gamespot staff suddenly leave, its not good news for gamespot.

And despite me not particular being a fan of some of Caro´s and Tom´s reviews they were a great part of gamespot and its sad to see them go.

Gamespot has a reputation of cleaning house often. It goes way back to the Greg Kasavin years.

Here's a list of who was let go and who is still there so far. Apparently it was ambush layoffs so there may be more in the future.

• Justin Calvert
• Carolyn Petit
• Tom McShea
• Maxwell McGee
• Benito Gonzalez
• Ryan Mac Donald
• Wernher Goff

The following staff will remain:

• Jess McDonell
• Danny O’Dwyer
• Justin Haywald
• Chris Watters
• Kevin VanOrd

Ya that is some layoffs

Think they are going to move a lot of the GiantBomb staff over since they just hired two new.

But darn what a cleanout.

yeah as long as we have kevin van ord I'm down

Well that's very unfortunate news. I hope that they find work again very soon.

Darn, I really liked when Tom McShea wrote up reviews for platformers, they were always great. Was funny on the Gamespot podcast too, compared to the others.

But I am guessing gamers who liked the Skyward Sword, Infamous and The Last of Us are happy that Tom lost his job. /rollseyes

Yep, pretty much. His reviews were the worst on this site.

I've been visiting GS for over a decade and this is a fair whack of staff. Ryan MacDonald and Justin Calvert are some of the last remnants from GS's glory days; I wish them all the best.

Is this clearing the way for new blood? I'm all for fresh faces.

My thoughts go out to those affected by the layoffs. I hope they land on their feet quick!

At the same time, I can't help but feel like people are going throw a huge party because of Carolyn and Tom's departure. After all, not a lot of people were happy with their reviews.

Just a friendly reminder to keep it classy people. Do not use this to celebrate people being fired or such.

Hopefully the people who have left will be able to find new jobs soon, so all the best to them and same for the staff still here, hopefully things will settle down as it will not be fun to be around the site at the moment with all this uproar.

We cannot be happy those people lost their jobs regardless of our difference of opinions. Those were great editors. Plus, I believe they were have fired because they were the people we least saw during video streaming. Gamespot may shift to a all video streaming site someday and to be fair, Chris Watters, Shaun McGinnis and Danny ODwyer are more at ease in front of the camera but Mc Shea, Caro and Maxwell all were super editors and I loved to read their reviews and articles. What a shame...

I think you got that backward, both Caro and Tom and many of the others let go were part of Gamespot's "on the spot" days with Ryan Davis also, so i think this is a move away from shows, video reviews and towards a more "polygon" style site where its all pretty much written reviews, except of course for a few regular shows like The Lobby and The point, but it looks like Gamespot is gearing down to be a site handle by a lot less staff.

@Garfield360UK: Oh nah dude. It is sad over all, just fuels that idea of instability, when layoffs hit so suddenly, and the same old personalities aren't around anymore. Sucks that Maxwell got hit too. Whose gonna be our eye in the sky for fighter interests now?

Now if Kotaku or Polgyon try to swoop down and catch em. I'll be like *rolls eyes*. If they do feel like continuing on in games media though I'd hope it be on a publication that while politically open and aware, remembers to make it about the games first and foremost.

I quote :

"No reason has been given for the layoffs, but the market has shifted dramatically over the past few years with the rise of video content, which has placed pressure on high-traffic. Interviews and gameplay on YouTube began to shift the attention away from editorial, shortly before livestreaming, particularly Twitch, arrived on the scene. Twitch.tv has surged to a global rank on Alexa of 238, beating out GameSpot and IGN, in terms of total traffic.

Although GameSpot and others sites have adapted to include video content as part of their weekly production, it’s been a difficult battle to compete against the likes of YouTube and Twitch.

Google recently acquired Twitch for $1 billion, a move that appear to be right at a time when livestreaming has become mainstream with its addition to the console and mobile markets. How the move will affect the site is yet to be determined.

It is unclear if GameSpot will replace its employees, or if some sort of merger, potentially with affiliated site Giant Bomb, will be made."


Have you seen Carolyn or Maxwell in recurring live shows ? not that much, maybe an appearance or two in Multiple Players or the Lobby but the main protagonists of these shows are the ones staying on board.

I'm not. I'm just stating a fact. Not many people were happy with Tom or Carolyn's work when they reviewed certain games here. It's been talked about a lot, both positively and negatively, moreso negatively than positively. People will be celebrating, for sure, so if that happens, nothing we can do about it.

There is no reason to repeat yourself because the outcome will stil be the same.

Looking at Gamespot now compared to just a year ago, i think its pretty clear that the gamespot staff is not the ones who will be doing the video shows, except for the few during Lobby and Danny´s The point.

But it seems to me like they will go with Giantbomb perhaps because they already have a excellent premium service running and they dont have to fight with us over the absolute idiocy in having to pay to watch their shows.

@Metamania:

I was not picking out people on individual level, just a broad statement as I noticed a few comments were starting to go negative. Just a warning to all posting in this thread so do not worry.

On a strictly personal level I wish all those affected the best. On a more professional level, to be brutally honest, Tom and Carolyn especially just weren't very good at their jobs. When you are not good at your job, no matter how nice a person you are, you shouldn't be shocked when you get let go. Those two specifically were actively driving traffic away from the site.

i can't stand those two, so i say good riddance. Maxwell MacGee also lost his job

Agreed, wholeheartedly.

did the person who was in charge of the holocaust that was the website redesign lose their job too?

I would like to thank the staff for what they have done and wish them the best luck in the future. Layoffs are never fun.

yup and making people question the quality of the site aswell

As an owner of both the PS4/Xbox One, I really think GameSpot lost a lot of traffic over 2013 E3 and during the next gen launch. Before then, I visited daily. Since then, maybe once a week.

But I can still remember some of the most outrageous, mostly speculative articles that came from this website around that time. Just pure nonsensical fanboyism, and it was downright embarrassing. I wonder if the traffic loss caused layoffs, because I do think a lot of people left the website around that time.

This sucks to hear. I actually enjoy hearing them on the various podcasts. I loved their distinct personalities and actually not being dry and boring :(

I'll miss Maxwell McGee. He was the voice of fighting games and was maybe the only one who covered them. Sure some will say he was easy to please but he was pretty much spot on with his fighting game stuff.

Oh man that's a total bummer for me. :(

I thoroughly enjoyed reading their reviews. I guess it's okay if Kevin stays, but man it won't be the same.

I stull can't wrap my head around them firing Tom

That's like killing the goose that lays the golden eggs. His reviews and editorials get a buttload of clicks and he's built up a persona about him that extends even outside gamespot

Gamespot is falling apart.

Those kind of click bait spikes are temporary. They bring in lots of clicks from new people, but they leave immediately afterwards. (and over time you get the law of diminishing returns kicking in on that) Those same articles then cause long time users to leave over time, so it can end up costing the site more clicks long term than it ever gained. One of the biggest problems, as I see it, is how cold and distant GS staff are. The GS homepage proper and the community feel like separate websites nine times out of ten.

Gamespot has forums, so why do GS customers have to go to Neogaf to actually interact with GS staff?

ever since the redesign the activity and traffic went downnnnnn

As much as i loved to troll Carol & Tom,i still wanted them to stay... They gave this "ICON" to "NEW" GS.

KVD is one of the classic bhois like Jeff AlexN GregK and the late RyanD era (after 2000s) so good that he is basically GS's only reason to stay.Guy is great,also a motivation to workout to lose dem weight,he did a GREAT job on that

McShea and Petit were a distaster for the site

Yes twitch and youtube personalites took off with popularity, (especially twitch) its kinda like "adopt or die" in gaming scene right now.

I am sad that people lost their jobs, its hard to find new job in current market. But gamespot needs to make these changes to stay in business.

There's a reason why McShea and Petit were let go. I'm sure they are not bad people to talk to or hang out with, but their reviewing skills left a lot to be desired. As I said, people are probably having a field day now that both are gone. Sad to see Maxwell McGee go, he sounded like a guy that knew his fighting games quite well!

Thank god! I was so sick of Tom Mcshea's bullshit on gamespot, always scraping for attention! Aslong as we got Kevin Vanord, Danny and Chris, thats all that matters!

I agree on McShea at least. I'm not overjoyed that they lost their jobs, but in McShea's case, the avalanche of politically correctness in his articles, being a social justice warrior/twitter activist and having issues with any and everything that he believed wasn't up to social standards (everything from the latest Tom Clancy's "disturbing portrayal" of women, violence in games, Tomodachi, FC4's boxart, or the amount of "white straight males in games) was something he took beef with, despite almost everyone refuting his so called claim on these topics. I'm not attacking him, and he's good he had his...views...but he never quit with all the oversensitivity to political correctness on anything he find, no matter how small. And it pissed off a lot of people, particularly some of his twitter posts that slammed anyone who wasn't up to his politically correct standards.

Again, not happy he lost his job, but I'm seriously not surprised in the slightest, with all the bull coming out of him.

Whatever you guys do, never, never let Danny O'dwyer go. He's my reason for staying here.

I'm not going to deny anything you're saying here, but you're making some bold suggestions without backing them up. Why weren't Caro and Tom good at their jobs? What is professional conduct in this context? And how do know for sure they were driving traffic away from the site? It seems like I could just as convincingly argue that apparent loss in traffic is due to the new site design and the search engines being very tedious to use.

I never felt like any of the stuff Tom or Caro wrote wasn't about games first and foremost. And besides, who cares? Let them talk about their politics, social justice and personal feelings. I can find the standard boring game focused crap everywhere else. Oh look, another video speculating release dates. And here, an interview with a developer repeating his rehearsed and uninformative lines. And this, the fourth review that pretty much repeats what the previous review described.

Honestly, I've been giving these two more attention than they deserve recently as is, so I'll keep it brief. The injection of irrelevant social justice warrior drama, neo feminism, nitpicking, and general blaring double standards. Carolyn reviewed TLOU: Remastered and said Joel is not capable of love because he killed so many people. She also reviewed Tomb Raider, where in Lara Croft kills MORE people, and at times can do so in a much more brutal and vicious way. At one segment Lara was mowing down her (all male) enemies in numbers twenty or thirty in a segment and screaming "I WILL KILL YOU ALL".

Yet she had no issue with that. That sent a pretty clear message. Joel is bad for doing that because he has a penis, and because he had a penis he should have engaged in friendly dialogue with all those cold blooded killers who wanted to kill him and Ellie just to take the contents of their backpacks and pockets and maybe get their shoes. Lara was fully justified because all her enemies were men, and they triggered her or something.

Will I miss this kind of garbage in reviews here? Absolutely not.

Maybe the site redesign had as much to do with it as anything else, but the bottom line is that GS doesn't have a super large staff. The people chosen to be laid off were not chosen at random. Their was at some point a judgement on the quality of their work and whether they would be an asset going forward or a liability. The fact is, they aren't here now, and that says it all. (by here I mean that other site, gamespot.com, not the gamespot forums… staff abandoned this dead zone over a year ago now)

Fair enough. I still think you're too easily seeing your suspicions being confirmed by them being fired. In the end the actual reason they got fired is because GS probably had to cut down on staff. They would have stayed on if GS had the actual resources to do so. If they actually did a crappy job, I don't think they would have stayed on as long as they did. There might have been meetings about this, discussions about the fairest way to settle the issue. If Caro and Tom so obviously lost their job because of being crap at it, then all those people who got fired must have done a crappy job. I find that hard to believe. Sometimes it's simply about letting experienced people go, because they have a greater chance of finding a job elsewhere, or because experienced people can sometimes be more expensive to maintain, or because younger people are simply a better long term investment, or because certain contracts have simply expired and those people are the first to go. It's not just because they were supposedly crap at what they did.

I'm not going to deny instances of social justice promotion or even double standards (although I do feel it has been far less pervasive than some people make it out to be), but I've always felt that the gravity of Tom's and Caro's conduct was negligible and harmless and that in some cases they made me think about particular games in a different and valuable way (which was not provided by other writers), even though I did not always agree with them. I still think that a lot of people take issue with the fact that Caro and Tom feel strongly about certain gender and social/cultural subjects and that if they would have had strong feelings towards some specific game mechanic instead, everything wouldn't have been such a big deal. This isn't about people being against bias in general, it's about people being against bias towards issues they don't want to hear anything about, like politics, gender and social perception. Otherwise I cannot understand why people make such a fuss over something that exists (and will always exist) in the periphery of the gaming press as a whole.

You guys seriously think gamespot cares what constitutes ad a "proper" review?

You're giving them too much credit tbh, it's all about clicks and controversy these days. That's how gaming journalism has been working ever since it jumped on the SJW bandwagon a few years ago

Kevin and Danny are pretty far removed from being controversial. Danny has a really great personality and comes across super well on camera, Kevin is and has always been pretty much Greg Kasavin 2.0

Tom and Caro were the cheap heat controversy click bait article writers, and they are unemployed.

Punches a pretty big hole in your assertion, don't you think?

I agree with that, i don't like people losing their jobs. But McShea was a keyboard warrior with political correctness while Petit was so bias in the GTA V review that it made a shitstorm because of her mentioning it. Again, i do not have an issue with the scores, it's just them not being consistent and being bad journalists

I would have made my peace with McShea's 'Nintendo Guy' image, (which he wasn't) if he just bought a Wii U. Instead he spoke out about the consoles and wanted nintendo to scrap the 3DS and the Wii U. I couldn't take Tom's reviews and editorials involving Nintendo and Wii U seriously after I found that out.