A Kotaku tipster said Gerstmann offended Eidos with the “tone” of a video review he did of the game. CNet allegedly fired him on the spot.

However, a Joystiq post said a CNet spokesperson provided a general comment that the company does not terminate people “based on external pressure from advertisers.” The company would not comment on Gerstmann’s specific circumstances.

Considering the opening minute of Gerstmann’s video, where he derides the characters and gameplay of Kane & Lynch, one would expect the game publisher to be less than thrilled with their huge ad campaign being undercut by the 21st Century version of the boy who points out the emperor is really in a state of undress.

But as the Rock, Paper, Shotgun blog noted, “there must be more to it” than what the flying rumors suggest. Unfortunately, Gerstmann isn’t talking yet.

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GayGamers was bullied offline over the weekend by a series of denial-of-service attacks, reports Kotaku, coupled with threatening emails and forum hate speech.

Brian Crecente reports, "The site deleted the offensive messages, but the continued DOS attacks lead [sic] to the site’s host taking GayGamer down until the attacks could be permanently blocked. De Marco hopes to get the site operational by Monday, but is having problems getting a straight answer from their host, GoDaddy.Com."

See, the puns are nearly unavoidable.

And "FruitBrute," (sigh) the editor of GayGamer, adds, "You can’t keep a good gay gamer down, so we’ll be back before you know it, serving up all the sassy game content you can handle."

Indeed, the attacks were, in the end, unsuccessful, and the GayGamer is back in operation.

It is kind of sad that people have nothing better to do than harass the gay community online, who, especially if you’ve never heard of them until this article, kept to themselves in their own corner of the Web.

By the way, there’s a link on the website to a listing of the top 20 gay game characters of all time, and I have to say, I didn’t know, but should have realized that Don Flaminco of Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out for NES was total flamer.

Or, as FruitBrute puts it, "In my opinion Don really walks that fine line between gay and Vain Latin Metrosexual Eurotrash."

Couldn’t have said it better myself.

The gaming blog Kotaku ran down a particularly juicy rumor about Playstation Home. They cautioned it was a rumor and ran the story:

Playstation Home sounds like it could be an interesting, lo-fi, killer app, as described by our source.

“Basically, you get to make an avatar for your console (like a Mii) and this avatar has a room. As you play games and accomplish certain tasks, you will receive items with which to adorn the room that are specific to the game (achievements). The kicker is that this is going to be a new requirement for every PS3 game…”

This also sounds kind of like it could fulfill the promise Sony made at last year’s GDC keynote to bring social networking to the PS3.

It’s a gaming rumor. That and a few dollars will get you coffee at Starbucks. Sony told Kotaku they don’t comment on rumors or speculation, a common practice in the tech industry. It sounded like they would just let this rumor pass by like a batter taking a pitch.

Sony came back swinging instead. Dave Karraker, Sr. Director, Corporate Communications for Sony Computer Entertainment America, dropped the hammer on Kotaku:

I am very disappointed that after trying to work with you as closely as possible and provide you and your team with access and information, you chose to report on this rumor…. I can’t defend outlets that can’t work cooperatively with us.

So, it is for this reason, that we will be canceling all further interviews for Kotaku staff at GDC and will be dis-inviting you to our media event next Tuesday. Until we can find a way to work better together, information provided to your site will only be that found in the public forum.

Sounds a lot like the Sony people came to know during the music CD rootkit scandal, where Sony ended up getting pilloried on the Internet, in the mainstream media, and by a few Attorneys General who felt the company may have violated a law or three.

It took a long time for Sony to make that situation right, though not everyone has forgiven them. The Kotaku kerfuffle has been resolved at lightspeed compared to the rootkit problem, as Sony and Kotaku talked things over:

He told me his take on the story and his frustrations and I told him mine, in the end we agreed to disagree on some level, but also decided that our readers and gamers in general would be best served if Sony and Kotaku could still play nicely together.

In a nutshell: The story remains up and Sony has re-invited us to the meetings and interviews initially scheduled for the Game Developers Conference.

The story demonstrates how something a company sees as inconvenient could really become so with enough people seeing what is happening. With the Internet, it takes very little time for a little corporate bullying to be turned against Sony.

That can happen to any company online. Not everything said about a firm will be positive, or even convenient. Businesspeople need to choose their battles a little more carefully in these situations. A simple “no comment” from Sony could have led to plenty of discussion about Playstation Home ahead of GDC. The publicity wouldn’t have cost Sony anything.

—

Gawker Media founder Nick Denton posted the news that a pair of blogs, Sploid and Screenhead, will be sold.

“The Gawker formula, of geeky obsessiveness, wasn’t appropriate to these titles,” Denton wrote. “Some other owner may make better use of them.” He noted Sploid draws 900,000 page views per month, while Screenhead gets 500,000.

While those numbers would look good to most bloggers, Denton noted the turned-around gaming blog Kotaku picks up five million page views per month.

It’s the potential for advertising to suddenly dry up that Denton listed first among his reasons for giving the two blogs the boot as well as the shuffling of editors at other blogs. From the post:

He also commented on the variety of personnel changes, which sees editors from Gawker, Gizmodo, and Wonkette departing:

One change, the departure of David Lat from Wonkette, was initiated by Lat. He will work for a former Denton protege, Elizabeth Spiers, who owns the Dealbreaker blog.

While Denton cited fears of an advertising downturn as partial motivation for the changes, he also noted increasing expenses in running the business. He describes the pay scale for editors as being “within the range” of mainstream media.

That may be a surprise to Nick Douglas, the blogger behind Valleywag, Denton’s Silicon Valley gossip site. A BusinessWeek report cited Douglas’ contract as paying him $550 a month plus expenses; we hope he’s getting a taste of that ad revenue as well.

—

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Lionhead has churned out some great, well-regarded games, like Fable, Black & White, and the Movies, and the (big-budgeted) support of Microsoft could be exactly what they need to get the monster hit all that hard work deserves. Without high enough sales, Lionhead has been suffering financially, and Microsoft could be their knight in shining armor.

(via Kotaku)

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Kotaku deleted eight posts from its servers after electronics retailer Best Buy had its lawyers send along a cease-and-desist letter, claiming the information obtained came from a “copyrighted document.”

All the stories deal with Best Buy’s plans surrounding the Xbox 360 launch coming on Tuesday, November 22nd. The document in question was one designated as for internal use only.

The site noted that since the posts had been up for “nearly a week,” they’d probably been read numerous times anyway. Gawker decided not to bother with the legal hassles and sent the stories to ‘rm -f’ land. At least, that’s what Kotaku said.

However, it appears that the stories still reside on the Kotaku servers. The sharp-eyed users on Digg found that the absolute URLs pointing to the stories still do work. This means that people can still find out Best Buy thinks Madden NFL ’06 and Call of Duty 2, both wildly popular titles on other platforms already, will be big sellers on launch day.

Gawker also has seen its Wonkette blog have a bad experience with Yahoo. The online portal just this week began adding content from five Gawker blogs to various places on the Yahoo network. But an expletive used in a Wonkette story about Vice-President Dick Cheney was replaced with asterisks when displayed on Yahoo.

David Utter is a staff writer for WebProNews covering technology and business. Email him here.

Already lots of blog posts about the interview, many focusing on Denton’s views about the development of blogging.

Sample:

[...] As for the blog revolution, Mr. Denton put it this way: “Give me a break. The hype comes from unemployed or partially employed marketing professionals and people who never made it as journalists wanting to believe,” he said. “They want to believe there’s going to be this new revolution and their lives are going to be changed.”

What I found more interesting, though, was this insight into the Gawker organization and how the bloggers are incentivized and paid:

[Lockhart Steele, managing editor], who joined the company in February, is the den mother for Gawker’s far-flung collection of bloggers and is in near constant communication with them throughout the day via Instant Messenger. About half of the editors live in New York. The rest are distributed around the country. In California, Mark Lisanti edits Defamer, the Los Angeles counterpart to Gawker, and in Colorado, Brian D. Crecente edits one of the newer sites, Kotaku, dedicated to video games. In New Orleans, John d’Addario edits Fleshbot, while Ana Marie Cox covers political gossip from Washington on Wonkette.

[...] Bloggers are paid a set rate of $2,500 a month.

It’s a good article, a lengthy one, and worth reading for commentary on advertising models and for other views, eg, by Stowe Boyd of the Corante blog network.

And what about Gawker’s closest competition, the Weblogs Inc network run by Jason Calacanis? The NY Times piece doesn’t focus much on that competitor (the article is about Denton and Gawker, after all), but there’s an interesting and readable article by Mark Glaser in the USC Annenberg Online Journalism Review last month.

Relevant snippet:

[...] Weblogs Inc. has ditched its original idea of splitting ad revenues 50/50 with bloggers. The company’s chairman and mouthpiece Jason McCabe Calacanis admits he was wrong about the concept, and that only 1 in 20 writers went for the deal. Now he’s paying a flat fee for bloggers ranging from $100 to $3,000 per month, and is signing up two to five people per blog because of the focus on part-time help.

[...] “I’d rather our bloggers focus on creating unfiltered, honest content,” Calacanis said. “It’s my job to make the money, it’s their job to make great content. Also, we don’t need to make a profit on every blog. … Chasing ‘nip slips’ is good for ratings, sure, but I wouldn’t build a brand around them. For a gossip or porn magazine, going for ratings isn’t such a major ethical issue, but it is a slippery slope like many things.”

The final word must go to Nick Denton, from the NYT article:

“There are too many people looking at blogs as being some magic bullet for every company’s marketing problem, and they’re not,” he added. “It’s Internet media. It’s just the latest iteration of Internet media.”

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Neville Hobson is the author of the popular NevilleHobson.com blog which focuses on business communication and technology.

Neville is currentlly the VP of New Marketing at Crayon. Visit Neville Hobson’s blog: NevilleHobson.com.