

The GameSpot staff gets a bit smaller this Friday, when editor Brad Shoemaker makes his departure.

Shoemaker announced that he would be leaving GameSpot on the most recent episode of the site's podcast,The Hot Spot. Shoemaker had been with the site, in one fashion or another, since 1999.

"I have gotten so tired of people confusing GameSpot and GameStop that forget it, I'm just going to go work for GameStop," joked Shoemaker.

The Hot Spot team seemed a bit blase when discussing Shoemaker's last day – perhaps the departure of editors is now commonplace enough to have become boring for them – but Shoemaker made some bittersweet comments about it on his GameSpot blog:

The hardest part will be leaving all my coworkers behind, whom I admire and will miss each in their own way. You wouldn't believe the number of talented and inspiring people I've been lucky enough to cross paths with–and in some cases, truly befriend–in my years here. Pretty humbling, really.

Shoemaker didn't provide any details about his reasons for leaving or where he might be headed, but his new blog says that he is "now juggling two promising careers in freelance writing and professional time-wasting. Either way, I'll be playing a lot of games."

Does that mean he's the newest GameSpotter to join Jeff Gerstmann's Giant Bomb blog? Maybe.

See Also:

The Hot Spot [GameSpot]