Yesterday, I made the decision to cancell my annual subscription to Gamespot. Frankly, the main reason I was paying an annual fee was to support an enterprise that I thought should be supported. The 10% discount at EBgames doesn't work for Canadian stores (although it does work online the shipping costs are prohibitive); the DLX download service didn't work very well (it kept sending me the same files over and over even after I viewed them for months and months at a time ... a pain in the rear to say the least). But I figured with the death of Next Generation and a few of the online sites that I really enjoyed over the last few years (and more recently of XBN!) that I would support at least one decent site with my hard earned (if nominal) dollars.

Recently however, some of the reviews (particularly by Greg Kasavin, who for whatever reasons seems to get all of the high profile Xbox games to review) have ticked me off. I thought that the Halo 2 review was inconsistent with the scores given to other games (lower than Halo 1? How can that be ... barely higher than Chronicles of Riddick - which featured NO online play or any replayable value whatsoever ... what the **** is going on here...?); I thought other excellent games like Metal Gear Solid 3 were also rated very harshly (if you can call an 8.7 a harsh score - but then again when compared with other scores that have been given higher values by the same site - an 8.7 is very harsh for this game), and on and on ...

What "broke the camels back" for me however was choosing Burnout 3 on the Xbox ahead of Ninja Gaiden and Halo 2 as GOTY for the Xbox platform. It became clear to me with this decision that our tastes in games are so different, our ideas of what makes a GOTY so vastly apart, that I could no longer justify paying even a token amount of my hard earned dollars to support these characters.

Hence, yesterday I sent them that message, and cancelled my subscription. They responded with a boilerplate auto reply. Figures. I'll still visit the site, there is some value here, but I ain't gonna pay extra for it. These guys obviously need to feel that they are "different" and "independent" (you wanna be independent? Choose MGS3 over GTA: SA for GOTY on that platform, at least one could make a coherent argument for that point). Fine. Do it without my dollars.

Cheers,

Grazen