I wonder what happened. Looking at their youtube page, most recent videos have between 10k-20k views. This is nothing compared other popular video game channels. What killed it? Streaming? Bad writing? Low production quality? They still got the same awesome narrator at least.

https://www.youtube.com/user/gametrailers

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?!

damn, their audio sucks in the first vid you shared, way too long and verbose. I think they didn't really spend any time on it. That said, they have 500000 yt subs. I would figure out a way to keep it up rather than just shut down.

That's the problem though. After half a million youtube videos they should have the taste to make decent videos, but apparently they don't.

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.

That's exactly why I stopped following them. The quality of their reviews really dropped at some point, they were praising some titles too much (mainly PlayStation ones), with very little criticism.

My understanding is that this kind of payola is rampant in the industry and has been for decades?

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)

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.

--

[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/

Kotaku has a round up of related tweets and postings:

http://kotaku.com/video-game-website-gametrailers-closes-aft...

I don't want this to sound like a snarky "Oh [some company the Twiteratti thinks is lame] is still around?" comment, but I truly had thought GT was dead, because of its notable layoff announcements in recent years:

[Layoffs hit GameTrailers day after E3 (2014)](http://www.polygon.com/2014/6/13/5807898/gametrailers-layoff...)

[GameTrailers, GameFront and The Escapist Hit By Layoffs (2015)](http://www.craveonline.com/culture/813763-gametrailers-gamef...)

But looks like this really is GT's epitaph; this forum post dated today comes from GT's associate editor (according to Kotaku), and alludes to this being a sudden development:

> Hi everyone, Ben here. I just wanted to confirm that GameTrailers is shutting down officially today. Everyone is being let go. We all found out mere hours ago, so we're still reeling a bit. Sincerely, thank you all for the tremendous support.

http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showpost.php?p=194642343&postcou...

Best of luck to the GT former employees.

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.

I hope the guy who speaks their reviews gets to continue doing that job somewhere else. His voice is cool.

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

I'll still always remember Haloid back in 2007, the best Halo + Metroid mashup video ever https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cL-mR79GErU (re-uploaded on YouTube, it was originally on GameTrailers)

It was created by the late Monty Oum (creator of RWBY and art director for RvB) and apparently it's still the most watched video GameTrailers ever had [0]

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WJC5Ct9vXMM

That's a very sad news for me. I am long time GT audience, and still stop by there website for video reviews(no other videos).

Also I've always found Brandon Jones's voice very soothing. I hope he continues to do game reviews.

Jeeze, what a shame.

The thing about Gametrailers was that their video reviews were never fantastic, they were just competent, which is more than I could say for the awful Gamespot and IGN video reviews.

Also, their Retrospective features were top-notch. Seriously, go watch the Diablo retrospective now. I'll wait:

http://www.gametrailers.com/shows/gt-retrospectives

Damn, this is a shame. I loved their reviews - I just watched the Firewatch review a couple of hours ago. Turns out it was their last review ever.