Tom Mcshea and Carolyn no longer work for gamespot.

Why ?

These layoffs have been in the works for a while Randolph, i already knew something was up back when Johnny stopped feedbackula and Danny moved to the US office, and Gamespot uk was closed down, even though that went quietly and no one even noticed they were gone.

Trouble is it wasn't about good critical analysis or detailed opinionated pieces, instead it was to stir up controversy and gain more traffic because really that's all they want, actually that's what anyone in the business wants but it doesn't make them good at the job. For example the second opinion reviews was just click bait material and if you read through the contents of it you can tell. I'm not even a big fan of Bioshock Infinite for example. I'm fine if he wanted to give it a low score but I and many people think he didn't justified it and of course most people just clicked on it and hated it because he was bashing a well received game.

Same with Carolyn who was just bad at explaining her points aswell as forcing a particular agenda that I didn't really give a crap about but apparently alot of people do. I'm not saying I'm glad they lost their jobs in my honest opinion I don't care it's just business (I'm sure they'll be employed soon anyway). But Gamespot is a terrible site for game journalism anyway I just stick around for the forums which also have gone to crap.

I quit reading Gamespot reviews years ago.

Hey moron , whose ALT are you BTW ?

Says the 19 post only user =P

Well that's just stupid. Hint: site traffic affects cost per ad...which is money. In fact...the few users still here are what is keeping the site going. But enjoy your ignorance.

Was kidding , i know that but unlike you i kinda wasn't on the same page with their reviews overall , ppl have different opinions after all and we gotta respect them ..

Yes I played both GTA V and TLOU. GTA V was an average game. I had much more fun playing San Andreas, I was also pretty dissapointed with rockstar claim that the GTAV map would be bigger than all the gta maps plus RDR combined. The city was extremely small. Most of the time it just feels like there isnt anything to do.

Tlou was great, which is why I didnt mentioned Tlou, I would of given it a 9, a 9.5 on a good day, but I didnt made any comments about it because I think its perfectly fine that she gave it an 8. While I do find it really annoying that once again, she gave left behind a 9.0 because of the lesbian love story.

Carolyn's tweet was worded deceptively (just like her reviews) - Well, like I said, not the end of their lives. They can find jobs elsewhere, probably better ones.

Anyways, I'm sure a lot of people disliked them for their opinions on games. I didn't dislike them for that. I disliked Tom and Carolyn because of how they arrived at their opinions, and how they wrote their reviews. I take reviews seriously for everything - movies, speakers, games, etc. - gaming is the only industry to get reviewers as poor as the ones they do. Tom and Carolyn frequently didn't know how to measure the objective aspects of games which were more important to the majority of gamers as opposed to their personal nitpickings and opinions. There's a certain way you must approach your content material if you're going to call yourself a critic, and you shouldn't approach the content as if you're an average-joe gamer like Tom and Carolyn often did.

Kevin V is often guilty of the same mistakes but he's a lot more professional and lot more respectable with how he carries himself, arrives at his opinions, and explains them.

I miss reviewers like Greg K. His reviews were excellent.

It seems pretty apparent that as far as the forums go, it's the community that killed them. The tou change revealed the faces under the masks and people left because of it. Now we aren't good enough to encourage people to come back

Gamespot's staff killed this site, not the users.

The users killed the community though. Staff killed the site in general.

They killed themselves, Dave. This isn't on the community. The community didn't force Tom McShea to say stupid shit. They also didn't force Petit to review her games in certain ways.

I'm gonna exercise what my momma always taught me "if you don't got nothin' nice to say, then don't say nothin"

so there.

Agreed. This site become the laughing stock of the gaming community for their reviews.

@airshocker: I am not talking about the topic we are in

But yeah,

Peeps seem awfully quick to defend these reviewers as these beacons of truth and validity and dismiss critics as subnormal heathen versions of peeps that only want validation of very surface ideas of why they like the games they like.

Both sides have some validity though. And there are some users who hate the reviewers for silly reasons. But many have valid points to make

Shame to hear about someone losing their job but they had it coming for awhile. I hope they find employment soon and learn from their mistakes.

If GS pulls off a coup and gets Greg Kasavin again i will believe there is hope for this website. He was the reason i decided to try out FFX and making it my favourite game of all time.

I stuck around for the writing over the videos... if video reviews are going to be the content for Gamespot, I'm not sure how they're differentiating themselves from Giant Bomb? Ryan MacDonald I haven't seen around for years and I hate to see Justin Calvert being let go but I haven't seen a review from him in any games I've been interested in lately either.

I think I'm done here now though. As others have said the reviews themselves have gone downhill, GS has lost all personality in the past 5 years and both the revamped site and forums are a mess.

Carolyn gave Gone Home a 9.5.

She did this because its a game with LGBT friendly themes and female empowering themes, which she loved.

She herself said that the review was biased as **** because the game fitted her personal views down to a T.

Gone home is a "game" about walking and listening to a (very poor) story about your sister and her fight against the patriarchy and heterosexualism. There are literally no puzzles, no replay value, it lasts 2 hours as much (most people average one and a half hour) and it costs 20 bucks, since launch, giving it nearly a criminal value. User reviews for the game are ridiculously bad while the "professional" reviewers lauded the game with 9.0s and above because of fear of being prosecuted by LGBT activists, or just to push their own personal agendas.

It's also not the first time she did something like that, Carolyn's reviews were always affected by her own personal views about political or social subjects.

All reviews are biased.

Light leggy, mayhaps peeps legit like gone home and the praise is not out if fear

Pretty much.

This thread is fucking weird, users here don't seem to understand what a review is. also LOL'd hard at people talking about being "objective". Hilarious

also, Gone Home has an 86 on Metacritic. So trying to single out Carolyn Petit makes no sense.

Can't say I'll miss Tom "it feels like a video game" McShea's dipshittery.

@Aljosa23: agreed

@Aljosa23: to be fair to lightleggy, he seems to be holding his silly ideas at most of the critics that liked gone home

Personally I think it's asinine to give numbers, stars, thumbs up or whatever else to reviews. What the **** makes a game a 9.5 or a 9.0? What does it matter really? I enjoy reading reviews because I enjoy reading other people's thoughts on the game (or movie or whatever), but I couldn't care less what score they give it (this isn't grade school).

Wonder what's going to happen to the Gamespot Gameplay podcast. Will definitely miss McShea being on that.

Yeah. I've said it before and will say it again, get rid of numbers. Let the content of the review speak for itself. Numbers are just subjective emptiness

Is nice having the numbers for aggregators like metacritic so that you can see an overview of what reviewers think.

:thumbs_up:

BINGO

I agree with this. That's essentially what video game reviews are: the reviewer's thoughts on the game (and just about any sort of review, though book reviews are much more broad). The confusion in this thread seems to stem that users think reviews are "objective" (lol) analyses of games, which is is just factually untrue. There are more than enough sites out there that fill the need for glorified PR pieces, such as IGN. McShea and Petit will be missed because even if I disagreed with a lot of their opinions, they backed up their thoughts (most of the time, they've done a lot of reviews) pretty well, and it's refreshing to read someone's thoughts on a piece that differs from mine.

@chessmaster1989: that is a valid point. I guess I just wish more people wouldn't give so much value to the number. Or take the number into the context of what the game is trying to do.

Personally I thought Tom's reviews were often ridiculous because he seemed to often criticism a game not for what it was, but for what he thought it should be*. I also thought he could be downright insulting (like in his interview with Greg Goodrich over 'Medal of Honor: Warfighter').

(*It's kinda like criticizing 'Star Wars' for not having hard science, when it's meant to be fantasy rather than hard sci-fi.)

All three of these. You have to be careful over in the SW thread, with the mods lurking in the background in the stickied thread. You either have to say how much you are going to miss them or fear mod retribution.

To a certain extent, yes, like for example if the person reviewing it likes certain mechanics, say, covering mechanics, to put an example, then yes, maybe it will influence the score.

But it's a completely different thing to judge games for something outside of their gameplay or visual presentation. Carolyn did this all the time, dissing games that didn't fit with her personal views (female empowerment, lgbt rights, anti-liberal messages) and praising those which did. Without taking a look at the gameplay.

Yes, and look at the discrepancy between the user and critic score. When it's that bad, you know something is up. And this isnt a DmC/CoD metacritic bashing where users just universally give the game a 1.0 to screw the MC score, these are people who are actually complaining about the ridiculously positive reviews this piece of shit of a game got.

Go check the steam reviews page for Gone home

http://steamcommunity.com/app/232430/reviews/

GS as well, or IGN, or giantbomb, WHICHEVER site you want, go check it and you'll see that the user score is always 6 or lower while the critics score is 9.0 or higher. Discrepancies like that aren't coincidence. There's nothing silly about it, have you played the game? The game is literally sold at 20 bucks and it lasts less than 2 hours, without ANY replay value, gameplay consist on walking and listening to audio cues and the visual presentation is pretty terrible. The plot itself is paper thin, the entire script would take less than 8 pages and every aspect of the story is incredibly predictable. The ending also sucks balls and it's completely detached from reality as opposed to the rest of the story.

The thing is, many reviewers were either afraid of being tagged as "non-progressive douchebags" or they just wanted to be "cool" by liking this "intricate piece of 21st century art" (The most common argument that GH fans have against those who disliked it is literally "You weren't smart enough to understand it") They wanted to be *that* reviewer who discovered this hidden gem in gaming.

I Also read a rumour about fullbright company (the devs) staff being acquainted with some prominent reviewers (Carolyn included) who said they would help them with their game reviews.

You may call all this silly, but I think its even sillier to deny the discrepancies between the user reviews and "professional" reviews for this game. Gone home is a shitty "game" and most people who played it think the same, its the ultimate depiction of "biased reviews".

@lightleggy: Okay first of all; do you know what a video game review is? It's the writer's OPINION and experience on the game. I'll type the main word in caps again if I have to: OPINION. You have a neat opinion about Gone Home too, okay, that's no more valid than Petit's review. You are taking this way too seriously and getting hilariously butthurt over someone's god damn opinion on a fucking video game. Do you know how absurd this is? You generalizing the entire gaming media isn't scoring you any points, either.

Also: user review? Who the **** cares? How many user reviews are written anywhere near as well as Petit's on Gone Home? I'd wager not even 5% are as detailed as hers. And yeah, reviews are all biased... because that's the entire nature of opinions. You are also placing way too much importance on the numerical value of a review. God, this is so retarded. How old are you?

You seem like you value "objective" (LOL) games criticism, in which case here you go.

Also yes, this is REALLY silly.

I was on the mod "team" when Johnny stopped doing feedbackula. It was because, well, they were flaming and making fun of users in those videos, and when those users gave as good as they got, they were being moderated. Even an admin staff as inexcusably lazy and absent as the one we have here realized the hypocrisy of that situation, and eventually that led to the show being ended.

Why you say GTA V was average ? It improved upon previous game ( GTA IV ) by combat , driving , graphics. Playing as three protagonists , and switching characters whilst in a mission was a nice change. Trevor is one one of the greatest GTA chars till now in terms of pshycotic. Weapons or cars upgrades were also nice change from GTA IV. Map was certainly large , they coverered city , desert , sea all perfectly but they left out strip ( which you may have been dissapointed ). Nor that game was buggy. Is your main gripe over its single player or multiplayer ? I hated its multiplayer ( server issues ) , but single player rocked in every sense. If Carolyn gave GTA IV a 10/10 i wondered what stopped her giving GTA V a 10/10 also as it more better , diverse and rich in content. I'll not argue about San Andreas as its still best GTA game for me.

EDIT : Tom reviwed TLOU not Carolyn =P

Yeah, that's pretty aggravating. I didn't dislike Tom and Caro's reviews because they underscored a game I wanted. It was the content of their reviews that I disliked. Hell, the first review by Tom that made me start disliking his work was Infamous. The first game, not the second one. He gave the first game a 9.0 and glazed over some pretty serious issues that really hurt the game for me and made it a super frustrating experience. It was just a poorly written review. Then of course you have all the super awful click bait editorials he wrote.

And Randolph was never heard from again...

They both did. Tom reviewed TLOU and Carolyn reviewed TLOU:remastered

Nice to see those two trolls hit the street.

Yeah , i thought lightleggy was talking about original game lol.

I guess that this is a good bit of news. Gamespot has to remain fresh. Get rid of the old and bring in some new people.

Yep, but the show didn't end before after Johnny had left Gamespot, apparently he had been a freelancer for quite a bit before and was just hired for that show and other fun tidbits. But i am surprised at how quiet they closed down gamespot UK and people never seem to even question where they all were

But i agree the show despite it being ok fun, was clearly escalating the troll comments because after i ended i haven't seen nearly as many truly bad comments. If thats because people were just acting up or because Feedbackula actually brought a lot of traffic to the site,, only Johnny can tell.