Our final entry of the week is an open letter to VGChartz proprietor Brett Arnone Walton written by Nick Simberg, one of the former GamrFeed contributors who Brett screwed over.

Hi Brett. Remember me? You said you would pay me for working for you, and then you didn’t. You admitted this. It is verifiable. With facts. And proof. I probably wasn’t the first person you took advantage of, but hopefully I will be the last.

You’ll notice that everything we have said about you and VGChartz as a whole over the past week has been true, objective, and verifiable. Because you have been skirting the biggest issue in your malice-filled responses, let me put it in bold letters for you: In exchange for ad revenue, you agreed to not post negative stories about the games being advertised on your site. You let the advertisers dictate your content, and thus performed a great disservice to your readers, who can no longer expect honest, unbiased news out of VGChartz. It doesn’t matter if it was for three days, three hours, or three seconds. You have proven that you can be bought. How can you expect any reader in the future to trust you?

The second point made this week: you have proven that you cannot be trusted to pay your employees. In September 2010, I was the only one on your entire staff willing to go to PAX for you. You agreed to cover the hotel room and the gas to drive from Northern California to Seattle. These were, as outlined in the contract you had with me, “expenses which the company will agree in advance and will then be liable to reimburse [me] for.” You said you would cover them, and you did. But does that mean you can decide to not pay me for the stories I wrote, as well? Ummm… no. Especially when this is something you decided a month after the fact, with nary a word to me. When I brought this up with you, and tried – not to rip you off, but to merely get paid based on our pre-determined terms – you told me that you could simply cancel my contract instead. Basically, you told me you were not paying me for the work I had already done, and if I didn’t like it, I could quit. I should have. Still, your site was a (rather sizable) audience for my work. I stayed.

As for Joe, regardless of his actual “employment status” with you (he was an independent contractor), it is still highly unethical to withhold his pay, especially without telling him why. I don’t know if that’s a legal issue at all (I’m not a lawyer, and neither are you), but honestly – it doesn’t matter. If you had a problem with his work (or mine, for that matter), we’re on the internet. An email – really, any indication that you ever made any effort to communicate with us at all – would have worked wonders.

When we pointed out these issues on GameJournos.com, you responded with nothing more than ad hominem attacks in your own forums, maliciously targeting the characters of me, Ben Paddon, and Joseph Jackmovich, all while avoiding the real issues. These posts of yours show a complete lack of professionalism on your part, and contain numerous straight-up lies with the sole intention of what, making us appear untrustworthy? Let me address a few of these lies right now:

1.  “Joe was fired” – No, he quit. We’ve already shown this to be true in the emails you exchanged with him. And now we know not to trust anything else you say.
2. “The [advertorial “brought to you by…” banner had] been created and approved long before Joe knew anything about the campaign.” – This is also a lie. It was only after Joe cited actual FCC guidelines that you gave in and added the banner. In fact, the first advertorial had the banner added many days after it had already been posted to the site. Of course, due to the fluidity of the internet, there is no proof of this.
3. “Simberg was of a character who had very little work ethic. He often turned up anything up to 30 minutes late to appointments with developers and publishers [at E3], unprepared (starting one interview with ‘so, who are you again’ and having no questions prepared to ask)” – Which interview was this, Brett? Oh, yes, I forget… you like you lie about things. Of course, you lie about things with no proof on either side. I was on time and prepared for every single appointment, and I attended most of them with current Editor-in-Chief Chris Arnone. He’s a nice guy; too bad you treat him so poorly, Brett. Chris just has to deal with it or have his contract canceled, apparently.
4. “I found out during PAX 2010 that Simberg (or someone on his behalf) was using auto page refresh software to artificially increase the pageviews on his previews so he’d get paid more. This is clearly deceitful and lead to the change to writers being paid per unique visitor rather than pageviews on articles.” – Two lies in one! Many articles that month had artificially inflated page view numbers (a handful of reviews, as well, and not just my PAX stories), and nobody knew exactly why except you, Brett. You explained upon being asked that we were being basically e-attacked until our site crashed. You reset the page view numbers with no problem. Claiming that it was my doing when you knew it was not is just… well, it’s not very nice. The second sentence is yet another lie that could actually be corroborated by the entire VGC staff – we switched to unique page views on June 15, 2010 (there was a mass email sent to all the VGC writers), so the change from a variable pay rate to a set pay rate based on total unique views would be more easily calculated at the end of the month.

That’s enough of that. It’s pretty obvious, Brett, that you were merely caught with your hand in the cookie jar (again: taking money from advertisers in exchange for catering editorial content to the advertisers) and your only response was attempted character assassination. You even posted a video of Ben Paddon from Comic Con. Why?

Your numbers are already a laughing stock in the industry, you know; why should VGChartz’s news be any more reliable?

And, as for the notion that being a part of exposing Brett Walton’s corruption to the world will negatively impact my career down the road? Well… if I am not hired in the future because I put journalistic ethics and the readers before the advertisers – if this is how other game sites are run – then I don’t think I’d want to be a part of this industry at all. If Joe and I had kept quiet, Brett, you and others like you would continue to take advantage of writers just trying to make it, as well as hoodwinking readers looking for honest, unbiased reporting. This kind of behavior cannot be tolerated. I know we’re just writing about games, but if we ever want to be taken seriously as “journalists,” we need to start acting like it, and hold ourselves to some higher standards.

Brett, you have failed, on many levels, and the venom with which you attacked the people coming out for readers’ and employees’ rights makes it obvious that you care about nothing more than your own greed. Good luck with your site. If this is how you continue to run things, you’re going to need it.

Love,
Nick Simberg