Some of you may have seen this but I thought it was worthy of its own thread. Basically Gametrailers has given their "Biggest Gaming News Story" of the year award to this whole debacle. For most this was probably in the back of your mind already, so the question is does this story deserve this kind of attention or is it GT's way of taking a shot at a competitor?

Personally I think that while this is a big story there is definitely some competitive forces at work here...just maybe not to the point of it being a consiracy or anything. Still though, it is a big story and I do think they are correct to say that people who know about it were fairly put off by the whole thing.

To me, "Biggest Gaming News Story" is the one that has most affected and been shown to the general public. Out of those nominees, Wii shortages appear to fit that best.

So, yeah, it's a shot at their competitor that's just reasonable enough to escape condemnation.

To me, if a web site is trying to deliberatly con the public by showing (*biased / covered up / untrue) reviewers and info then when they get find out there cannot be ebough publicity about it I reckon.

* delete where applicable

This is perfectly legitimate. People are already beginning to forget this ever happened, and they shouldn't. This is an ongoing problem in the industry, and if we don't hold these companies accountable they're never going to change. The first step towards that is to keep talking about it.

The "Gamespot Debacle" was just a demonstration of what many people already knew ...

There are a lot of publishers who use their massive marketing budgets as a "Big Stick" in order to ensure favourable review scores on their highly anticipated games. There are certain publishers that do it more than others, and certain publishers that push harder than others, and it largely explains why you can (often) find a game that is scored as a 9/10 (or higher) from several sites/magazines to be far less polished and enjoyable than a game that is scored as 6/10 for these same sites/magazines.

I have found that sites like Gamerankings and Metacritic (which are unfortunately owned by Gamespot) to be far better judges because the pay-offs are usually balanced out by smaller sites that are less likely to be impacted by marketing presure; unfortunately, smaller sites tend to be less fair (in general) to games and are far more likely to be biased based on personal preference for a genre or mood of a game.

I kind of agree with everyone in a weird way, I think that the Wii shortages is the biggest story of the year easily, but I do think that this debacle is something people shouldn't just forget about and it does represent something that we as consumers need to be aware about and we need to protect our interests.

 No problem, at the rate things are going the wii shortage might well be next year's biggest story ;)

I think it wasn't a attack on gamespot, it's an important issue these days because of all the people that cry foul with every review each website brings out (especially the GT one where Uncharted got 8.9).

If you look at the comments, a lot of people had no idea this happened (I didn't either) which I guess shows how certain things get swept under the rug for the sake of corporate interest.

As for whether it should have won the award or not, I'd say no, because not everyone knew it happened while everyone knew that Wii was in shortages. But it deserved a nomination to keep the topic alive (I think someone above already said that, but I feel the same way).