At CNET, the heads keep rolling, nearly a year after Gamespot editorial director Jeff Gerstmann was sacked. Stephen Colvin, an executive who oversaw Gamespot, is out of the company, a tipster tells us. Gerstmann's firing came after a negative review of an advertiser's game, which made him a cause célèbre among gamers. What Gerstmann's fans will say: That Colvin and other suits are getting what they deserved for ruining the CNET-owned gaming site's editorial credibility. Josh Larson left CNET, now owned by CBS, in April. Colvin, a former magazine executive who was Larson's boss, joined CNET a year ago, shortly before the Gerstmann incident. His exit comes as CBS rejiggers CNET's generous benefits, our tipster says:

GiantBomb is a new gamer blog edited by Jeff Gerstmann, the CNET GameSpot editor fired last November over his negative — or "unprofessional," if you want the official version — reviews of an advertiser's game. GiantBomb is part of WhiskyMedia, a small startup run by Shelby Bonnie, who himself was forced out as CNET's CEO two years ago, after an investigation fingered him in a stock-options backdating scandal. Bonnie told Bits that he's not out to build another CNET: “Our goal is we want to remain less than 10 people." Valleywag's publisher used to talk like that, too.

Who'll be the new man atop CNET's GameSpot come April 10, replacing newly fired Josh Larson? According to a tipster, it's Shawn Rose, currently at CNET's TV.com. And the description of Rose's leadership abilities don't exactly inspire confidence.

News flash: CNET's "ad sales team carries more weight than the editorial team," writes Alex Petraglia, editor of Primotech, a videogames-news site. In the wake of Gamespot editorial director Jeff Gerstmann's firing, should anyone find this shocking? No. But in an attempt to jump on the Gerstmann story, Petraglia has posted a long-winded rant about a new ad campaign plastered all over the Gamespot website.

Buried news in a long post by Amadeo Plaza at Gamer 2.0: CNET allegedly sells placement of articles, not ads, on the front door of its GameSpot site for about $3,500 per week. He's not saying advertisers can buy an article — rather, they can pay to have an article placed prominently on the front door. Imagine the makers of Cloverfield paying The New York Times to move its review of the movie to page A1 and you get the idea. I'm supposed to opine here about the evil advent of adverjournalism and its corrupting influence on my so-called career. But at $500 a day to override CNET's editorial judgement, my overwhelming reaction is that GameSpot is selling itself too cheap.

Jeff Gerstmann, the ten-year CNET GameSpot veteran believed to have been fired for negative reviews of advertisers' games, is now rumored to be starting another site with GameSpot founder Vince Broady. 1UP editor Sam Kennedy buried the news in an endless thumbsucker about the influence of advertisers on game reviews. No word on how the new site's ad-dollars-versus-reviews-quality policies will be any different from the rest. Jeff?

Mom, make him stop! As hopefully the last 3,500 words on Gerstmanngate, Newsweek's N'Gai Croal ponders What It All Means. Look, if you want to spend a half hour revisiting The Godfather, Almost Famous, Wu-Tang Clan and George Bernard friggin Shaw in the post-Metacritic era all applied to some game reviewer getting fired, knock yourself out with Croal's meandering rumination on why GameSpot editorial director Jeff Gerstmann was fired shortly after publishing a negative review of an advertiser's game. For the rest of us, I've trimmed the references to Faust.

Was CNET's firing of GameSpot editor Jeff Gerstmann a bizarre special case? Isn't it hard to believe Gerstmann was axed to appease an advertiser? Not at all, says a game reviewer who claims he's been pushed out by advertisers twice.

GameSpot, the CNET-owned videogame-reviews site, has officially acknowledged the canning of 11-year site veteran Jeff Gerstmann in a sappy farewell posted early this morning. The site begs off confirming whether Gerstmann's departure had anything to do with his critical review of an advertiser's game, repeating the party line that "his exit was not a result of pressure from an advertiser." CNET vice president Greg Brannan treads the same tone as CNET's official release: "Neither CNET Networks nor GameSpot has ever allowed its advertising business to affect its editorial content. The accusations in the media that it has done so are unsubstantiated and untrue. Jeff's departure stemmed from internal reasons unrelated to any buyer of advertising on GameSpot." There's a simple way to prove that, Greg: State those reasons.

If there's one lesson to be drawn from the CNET fiasco known as Gerstmangate, it's that honesty isn't always the best policy. Jeff Gerstmann's controversial departure from CNET's GameSpot, allegedly for his critical take on an advertiser's product, overshadowed another videogame industry exit. Game developer Harvey Smith, known for his role in the critically acclaimed Eidos Interactive franchise Deus Ex, has left Midway after giving what one executive referred to as his "public resignation" at the Montreal International Games Summit. Smith referred to his latest project, Blacksite: Area 51, as "fucked up" when explaining its poor reception. He said he wasn't excited about Area 51 and "with a year to go, the game was disastrously off rails." Far too honest an assessment for an industry which makes its living off fantasies.

GameSpot editorial director Jeff Gerstmann, if rumors are to be believed, may have been fired for expressing his opinion about a game heavily advertised on the CNET site. Although he's unable to comment his termination, this didn't prohibit Gerstmann from relaying his future plans to Joystiq. The top question for fans of his videogame reviews: Does Gerstmann plan to stay in the business? Here's what he said.

The chummy relationship between game-review sites and videogame publishers, the sites' primary advertisers, is drawing fresh scrutiny after the firing of GameSpot editorial director Jeff Gerstmann. Eidos, the publisher of Kane & Lynch, a videogame Gerstmann savaged in a review, is being singled out by the Internet lynch mob. Eidos had dropped a hefty sum — reportedly hundreds of thousands of dollars — to "skin," or redesign, the GameSpot site with promos for the title. Eidos has yet to make a public statement about the incident. But perhaps its marketers knew what was coming. At a preview event for the game, Eidos handed out Kane & Lynch T-shirts emblazoned with the words "I've seen the pain you've caused." After the jump, closeups of the shirt, soon to be a collector's item among Gerstmann supporters.

Commenter Bobby Bokista has pulled together a handy collection of posts by CNET GameSpot staffers upset over this week's controversial firing of 11-year reviewer Jeff Gerstmann. Executive summary: Blame the suits but don't get us fired, OK?

Remember SimCity? Remember what a joy it was to build up a fully functioning, living, breathing city, full of life and wonderment? Then, at some point down the road, after you've built up your city to the peak of its productiveness, you'd start mashing the disaster button and a wide variety of tornadoes, earthquakes, and fake Godzillas would come tromping through, laying fiery waste to every bit of what you'd worked so painstakingly to create? Yeah. It's a little bit like that. Except someone hit the disaster button for me.

Congratulations, Eidos: You're officially off the hook. Responding to rumors that CNET fired GameSpot editorial director Jeff Gerstmann for slamming a game heavily advertised on the site (check out the highlights in the above clip), spokesperson Sarah Cain told Joystiq, "We do not terminate employees based on external pressure from advertisers." We doubted that CNET would toss away its credibility so readily.

Ahh, that feels good right there. I don't think we'll be talking about this week next week. The Facebook pile-on continued. Amazon's Kindle reader suffered a surprise media backlash. I'd hoped for another bank-employee-in-tutu photo to liven things up. Instead we got Gerstmanngate. At least we still have jobs — oh wait, Valleywag party girl Megan "Leggy" McCarthy is heading to Wired. I think I'll go curl up in the tub with my INVISIBLE PUPPY. (Photo by Jason Calacanis)

We never know for sure if the commentards are who they claim to be. But one prodigious poster with the new account "gamespot" is telling what reads like a credible insider story — it's written in editor-speak — of what happened to ex-CNET GameSpot reviewer Jeff Gerstmann, supposedly fired for low-scoring an advertiser's new game. "Gamespot"'s posts are in need of a 100-word-versioning, but it's Friday so forgettabout it here's the whole thing pasted in. I've bolded the newsy parts.

Jeff Gerstmann, the former CNET GameSpot reviewer whom the rumor mill claims was fired by CNET for angering an advertiser with a negative writeup about one of their games, responded to my Facebook poke. Besides being a journalistic first for me, Jeff's message made me laugh.

Here's a new wrinkle on the controversial firing of CNET editor Jeff Gerstmann, which came shortly after he posted a negative review of CNET advertiser Eidos's Kane & Lynch. An individual claiming to work in CNET ad sales — specifically on the Eidos ad campaign — claims that while Eidos was upset over the review, that conflict was settled over two weeks ago. He says, "I'd heard a few people tell that [Gerstmann had] already been skating on thin ice for 'unprofessional reviews and review practices.'"

The only offense we see is that his words were much harsher than his written review. Gerstmann called Kane & Lynch an "ugly, ugly game" and characterized the developers as "lazy," but he still gave the game a 6 out of 10 score. Some choice quotes from his video review: