Well, I've got a bit of time to talk before lunch so here goes:
This firing's a shame, but that's the risk of trying to make a living of reviewing games - they're trying to be a profitable business, so the advertisers can't be completely ignored.
The advertisers can't be completely ignored. However, they would have to be pretty f*cking naive to believe that everyone will automatically start singing praises for their games that they choose to advertise. Look, I understand that gaming sites need profit to stay on, but to tell people that you can't say such-and-such and have to replace it with such-and-such is just unprofessional. Sure, Gerstmann's reviews tend to be pretty unprofessional but that's beside the point. The point is that people who play the game should have the right to speak based on their own personal views of what the game is like to them. For crying out loud, I see game ads on GameFAQs all the time and yet, nobody on that site bothers to take down fan reviews and ban the reviewers themselves for fear of advertiser pullout. Besides, since when has it been proven that reviews led to horrendous sales of games? This is just Eidos being paranoid. Maybe Eidos should go after bad reviews on GameFAQs next. [sarcasm]The bad fan reviews could potentially hurt game sales.[/sarcasm]
Oh and WTF is up with your Source link? I click on it, I get a Firefox 404. I manually copy and paste, it takes me to the Wikipedia page for HTTP.
By the time you read this message, the link will already be fixed.
Kitsu, twenty years ago, what you said might hold some weight. But the fact is that today, there IS no heart and soul in commercial games. The people who work on them are paid to do a job. It's that simple. Long gone are the days of inspired games that come from actual gamers, nowadays the big studios are filled mostly with newly graduated college geeks looking to make money off of a hot industry; they could give two shits about the game itself as long as they get their paycheck. The games industry has turned into a conveyor-belt factory scheme where the only point is to make as much money as possible and get out before people find out you're a phony.
This is why I don't bother to read the reviews. I usually just rent the game and judge it based on my own preferences. However, firing people over reviews is just out of hand.