Joystiq fires Robert Summa over post, Summa responds and joins Destructoid

Robert Summa responds to being fired by Joystiq.

Anyway, Joystiq knew the news (I told them) and they knew I was posting a note to let readers know to come back later. If they, at any point, thought I was sensationalizing things or was not in line with their “mission,� then they had an entire day to edit or take down the note. But, of course, they left it up. Why?

Destructoid was smart enough to bring is Robert Summa as soon as he was let go.

Earlier in the day on Thursday, Robert Summa ran a post on Joystiq entitled “Major next-gen console news coming tonight“. The post said that at 12:01am Joystiq would run a feature with next-gen console news which they couldn’t reveal until then. This particular post got a lot of attention and was hyped all over the net. It ended up with slightly over 1000 comments.

At 12:01 Robert Summa posted the promised news, which basically was that IBM has been shipping their Broadway chip for Nintendo’s Wii console since July. He also speculated that while this was great news, the release date of the Wii might be much sooner than originally though.

As it turns out a lot of readers were disappointed with the news, as they were expecting much much more. If you want to read through some of the comments you can see that some people were expecting ridiculous news, such as the Nintendo Wii being available for sale the next day, or the PS3 canceled. Numerous times throughout the night Robert Summa posted hints and debunked crazy ideas.

Soon after the feature started to receive negative attention, the feature was updated with “toned down language throughout”, which basically means they took any fun and interesting speculation out of it. Eventually, Joystiq ended up issuing a public apology, and firing Robert.

In their apology, Joystiq throws Robert Summa under the bus, basically saying that they agree with the readers.

We believe that Joystiq overreacted, and didn’t know how to deal with the negative attention. They should have not fired Robert and they did just to save face, as they were well aware of the contents of the upcoming feature, and still allowed the whole event to take place.

If you enjoy reading Robert Summa’s posts, you can now read them over at his new home destructoid.com