Simple solution to Gamespot scoring dilema

Gamespot needs to make money to stay in business, and advertisers don't like paying for a site that ranks their games badly. I understand how that works.

So here is a simple solution for you guys: when you post a score, also tell us if you are taking ad money for that particular game. Maybe you can even tell us if it is a "large" ad that takes up half the site (worth ~2.0 inflation) or a "small" banner ad (worth ~1.0 inflation). We can do the math ourselves to get the accurate scores while the game publishers still see the inflated scores that they paid for. Wink wink, nudge nudge.

The advertisers wouldn't like that either. They want you to believe that the score is the honest, unbiased opinion of the editor who wrote it. Its not worth their money if you think otherwise. Also, this stuff happens all the time, its just never as big as an EIC getting fired. If you want to be a savvy consumer you'll have to read multiple reviews from different sources and know to take a positive review less seriously if its publisher bought, say, a four page ad in the magazine you're reading or skinned the entire website.

I would like to add that in general GS does seem to be trustworthy. Their reviews usually match that of the user score and the average score. In fact, GS's reviews tend to be the harshest out of the major reviewe sites/mags. While the whole Gerstmann debacle does hurt GS's reputation now that we know its editors are under heavy influence to grade advertised titles well, I wouldn't exactly panic until you start seeing the GS review score being higher on average than the user score and scores from other sites.