GameSpot reviewer leaves for IGN
Category: Industry, Posted: 03/02/2008 at 07:30AM CST by Andy Groen, Contributor
The exodus from GameSpot continues. It's becoming increasingly obvious that the gaming enthusiast crowd is not the only group that thinks Jeff Gerstmann was fired because of pressure from major advertiser Eidos. One by one employees are leaving the company in the months following the Gerstmangate controversy.
This time it's veteran reviewer Jason Ocampo who has jumped ship. Unfortunately, Ocampo isn't saying what we all want him to say. He's remaining tight-lipped about why he left Gamespot. We do have one interesting nugget of information about his departure, however.
Unlike the other departures who vanished without a trace, we know precisely where Ocampo is headed. The latest episode in the IGN podcast, Game Scoop!, reveals that Ocampo will be heading up IGN's PC division as their new PC Editor-in-Chief.
Let this be a lesson to all you employers out there. If you're going to fire an employee for controversial reasons, make sure you do a decent job of covering it up. Otherwise your website could end up falling from grace with no one to take your lofty place except for a certain plucky, orange-tinted independant site.
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Wooooo!!! GN ftw!
What ever you do, if you do run an Eidos ad, don't open the file they send you.
filename: soulsuck.exe
It's great to see Jason landing so securely on his feet. Hopefully we see more GameSpot luminaries popping up on other websites. Man, the execs for said websites must be having a FIELD day.
Whoever gets Jeff is going to win the lottery.
I reckon the change has got more to do with a bigger wage packet. It's been a bit long to see this as a firing related walkout.
"I reckon the change has got more to do with a bigger wage packet. It's been a bit long to see this as a firing related walkout."
That's a good point, but money is seldom the most important thing in the games journalism ring. He was a gamespot veteran, and IGN would have had to offer him a lot of money for him to want to give up his status at GameSpot. Not to mention, at GS, people are dropping like flies so he would probably want to stick around and work for promotions.
In all probability, he has just been looking for a suitable place to work after he left GS. Remember that the hiring process takes a long time, and the job search process takes even longer, so he probably started looking for a new job over two to three months ago. Gerstmanngate was around four months ago.