GameTrailers Is Closing Down After 13 Years

More likely than not, the economics no longer work out due to the decreasing revenue from advertising.

GT is not the first internet video company hit by this problem. (hence Patreon)

As a gamer, i don't know why anyone would watch their stuff. It is slow, boring and uninformative. Many of their videos are just them talking over trailers, which means they talk over the one piece in game advertisement that usually contains the most lies about the product. There's also horrible editing. Just watch the first minute of this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D1kwXSkkk90 Over half of that could easily be cut. Or this: https://youtu.be/rnL76a2c2VA?t=266 He starts talking about how excited he is, while showing literaly no excitement whatsoever.

Are the "Trailer Score" videos literally them giving trailers scores?!

I lost interest years ago when it became apparent that their positive or negative news coverage of games was based less on the actual content of the games, and more presumably on whether they were paid to give it a positive or negative review. There's some really blatant examples of them bashing some very high quality titles, and vice-versa with writing glowing reviews for unplayable garbage.

It's good to see them finally go. I only wish it could have been sooner.

I was an active visitor from 2006 to 2013. For years it was THE gaming/video site for me.

I remember thinking back in early 2012 how GT is just throwing their success away. The site was super stagnant for years it felt like, tech-wise. No new features, no bugs getting fixed, spam starting to get out of control in the comments. They failed to jump on the HD bandwagon with their video player - their supposed core competency! Yes they had direct link HD video downloads earlier than most and that's how I originally found the site. However in 2013 their video player still couldn't even play 720p, while other sites including YouTube had easy HD playback without having to download any files. [1]

In the summer of 2012 they launched a rather major redesign of their site. I guess this is the reason why the site wasn't maintained technically for years before, the developers were focusing on their secret hidden branch. Unfortunately while the new design had better aesthetics, it was far worse feature-wise. First of all, they completely cut a ton of major features from the site, including user uploaded videos, which had been a major community feature. Plenty of features they didn't remove got seriously downgraded. One of the primary reasons I stopped visiting was because they completely ruined discovery. Previously it was possible to easily see new videos sorted by date uploaded, with the possibility of additional filters like platforms. With the new redesign, there were only like four editor picks in a carousel wheel and some other random videos in a list, but no sort-by-date options. [2]

The real canary in the coal mine event happened in January of 2013, when their editor in chief Shane Satterfield left, stating that he didn't agree with the direction the company was being taken to. [3] Things started going downhill fast after this, content-wise. While before it was mostly technical problems and the content was great, this didn't last long without Shane.

Later on in 2014 GT got sold and 2/3 of their staff was fired, including important veteran employees. I had already stopped visiting by this moment, and I guess plenty of others had well, hence the layoffs. 2015 brought even more firings, and it seems 2016 now finally brought closure.

In conclusion, I feel like GT died mostly because of incompetent top management, failing to properly adapt to changes.

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[1] Looking at the site today, it seems they finally added 720p playback sometime between 2014 and 2016.

[2] Looking at the site today, it seems they've improved the discovery after I left at the end of 2013.

[3] Shane has since started his own gaming site, SIFTD. He has even managed to snatch some key shows from GT, like Pachter Factor. http://siftd.net/

It does seem very sudden.

They just launched a complete site re-design/re-write (which went pretty horrible) and according to their shows they just (weeks ago) moved to new offices.

The launch of the new website was absolutely horrible. Player often didn't work, comments broken, etc. and in retrospect the office move seems sub optimal as they did not appear to be happy with the new space they got.

Brandon Jones! I always loved this blooper reel of his: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bei_xzstrtU