SAN FRANCISCO — Several anonymous tipsters revealed today that a breaking news article on the front page of GameSpot this morning is merely a link to IGN’s report on the story published yesterday.
“Another huge scoop for us,” said Molly Reilly, a writer from GameSpot. “We’ve cut our teeth on two things around here and made a career out of it: being the 7th or 8th best video game news site and being confused for gaming retail giant GameStop. This is a banner day for GameSpot, and we think this report from IGN is some of the best coverage we’ve done in a while. Don’t forget to bookmark GameSpot.com for more timely coverage of the biggest stories in gaming!”
While many predicted that the alleged redirect would spur controversy for GameSpot, gamers seem to be relatively unsurprised at the news.
“Oh yeah, that’s about par for the course,” said Roy Summer, a frequent user of websites. “I remember last year when they ‘premiered’ the trailer for CyberPunk 2077 a week before it came out! I was sick of it already and here they were pretending it was new. Weird man. How do they stay in business? Is it because people think they’re GameStop? That’s it, isn’t it? ‘Cause I thought it was GameStop for a while and, hell, I thought GameStop itself was SmashBurger for years.”
Representatives of IGN, however, were none too pleased with GameSpot’s approach to reporting breaking news.
“This is the type of shit that gives video game journalism a bad name,” said Devin Copeland, a senior editor at IGN. “We get up every day and go to work paraphrasing press releases, and for those assholes at GameSpot to just swoop in on our swoopings is just, well, it’s fucked up, man. This is worse than the time some parody website accidentally reposted a joke they made about Filip Miucin.”
As of press time, IGN had blocked further redirects to their site from GameSpot, just as GameSpot was reporting that James Gunn had been fired from Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3.