Howdy, Stranger!
It looks like you're new here. If you want to get involved, click one of these buttons!
This forum is in permanent archive mode. Our new active community can be found here.
GameTrailers is dead
in Video Games
GameTrailers is dead.
I didn't actually realize they still existed until I learned about it.
This popular article about it basically seems to complain that companies like this collapse because popularity/audience no longer matters. Only money matters.
http://www.thejimquisition.com/2016/02/gametrailers-was-a-victim-of-itself/
It's always been that way. If you don't make money, you can't keep being a company.
I didn't actually realize they still existed until I learned about it.
This popular article about it basically seems to complain that companies like this collapse because popularity/audience no longer matters. Only money matters.
http://www.thejimquisition.com/2016/02/gametrailers-was-a-victim-of-itself/
It's always been that way. If you don't make money, you can't keep being a company.
Comments
Other than that, what purpose does GameTrailers serve in a land of YouTube? Most game trailers I see these days are actually Kickstarter videos.
Guess who else does. People like us. Lots and lots of people like us.
Their content costs a lot more to make than similar content made by hobbyists and fans, and the quality isn't that much higher. Certainly not enough to monetize enough to pay those salaries.
But, Rym, you are correct. Content-producing had a boom where it paid for people's lives, and it's slowly dialing back. The few people who can be successful are stabilizing and finding the people who are willing to fund them. Sometimes it's private funding, other times it's working for a company. Essentially, successful full-time content-creators are either TV personalities on the internet, or people with devoted cult followings. I don't think we'll see anyone outside of those two categories last for more than a number of years.
Following the guys who ran the shows, it was becoming clear that Gametrailers were having trouble monetising the website. (sidenote my adblocker was in the 1000s, every time I visited).
As soon as those shows stopped running, and those hosts left, there was no reason to go to gametrailers. Trailers can be seen on YouTube...
The actual content creation stopped when the creators left/ fired etc.
Shane Satterfield now runs a games community website, subscription based http://siftd.net/ with Marcus Beer and Michael Pachter
Ryan Stevens has a gaming podcast http://pushove.com/
Not sure what Geoff Keighley is doing these days.
So, it's the same issue like Twitter. Monetising... Gametrailers fucked up, because of corporate BS. Now the actual content creators are finding their own ways of sustaining what they do.
I remember back when I was an MTV employee I was so surprised to find out that GameTrailers were also owned by Viacom. We were co-workers, and I didn't know it. My boss asked me to reach out with them and help plan NYCC coverage. It was unexpected, and I also was like... "isn't that just a website for watching trailers of games...?" I figured they died out when Viacom totally burnt down all of its digital content divisions, but it turns out they just got gutted that year, and the corpse shambled on until now. I guess the clicks ran out.
http://kotaku.com/gametrailers-staff-return-with-new-site-1766096817