People have been asking me for my take on the Gamespot/Gerstmann issue. For those who haven’t been following it, there are allegations that Senior Editor Jeff Gerstmann was dismissed from Gamespot for matters related to his scathing video review of Eidos’ Kane & Lynch, a game that had been heavily promoted on the site. All the usual places have all the usual speculation. (Games media observer Kyle Orland has a great summary of the story over at Joystiq.)

I don’t have a lot of contacts over at Gamespot, and they are all too professional or out of the loop to tell me anything that hasn’t been confirmed. Suffice it to say that we really don’t know much about what has happened. Alex Navarro’s comments confirm that the firing was a shock to some people there, Valleywag has alleged insider information. And it’s hard not to make some conspiratorial connection to new business priorities of the recently hired Stephen Colvin, who built the advertiser friendly Maxim and Stuff magazines.

But let’s face it. We know very little beyond a timeline. Though a wave of resignations would probably confirm the worst, the lack thereof doesn’t prove the opposite, since most people don’t leave jobs without a lot of deliberation. (And it’s not like there’s a plethora of full time games media work out there.)

What does this tell us about the larger games sites? Very little, actually. If the lesson is that the priorities of the corporate masters and editors/writers often clash, we already knew that. (That’s why so many have firewalls between editorial and marketing, including Gamespot.)

It tells us that even established professionals are disposable, which is also no surprise given how many people want to be games journalists.

It tells us that you can get in more trouble for saying things out loud than you can for writing them. (Gerstmann’s print review is still up, with some minor edits.)

It’s much too soon and too unclear to draw any firm conclusions beyond those rather obvious lessons. The ‘net wide outrage is not very surprising, and since this is over one of the largest internet media companies and one of the most long-lived games media sites I don’t think the storm will pass very soon.

But I don’t think that it will lead to any long term damage for the site. Gamers are pretty forgiving, especially since so many of them assume the worst of journalists to begin with. Unless there is a mass exodus from the Gamespot, people will still go there to read opinions, participate on their forums and maybe even watch their video reviews.