In summary: Ina points out an obvious plot hole and Cho makes a daring strategic retreat!
I don’t know if I’ve mentioned this, I love video games! By happenstance, I also love videogame websites. Kotaku.com, polygon.com, destructoid.com, and a myriad of youtube channels are on my daily browsing list. But my favorite gaming site for years has been gametrailers.com. And as of February 8th, the entire staff was laid off and the site stopped updating. The business reasons behind the layoffs, while not public, are pretty obvious in that the site’s traffic had been waning and Defy Media, the owners of the the site, didn’t see it fit to put effort into making gametrailers.com profitable so much as they’d rather let it fade away and forget they ever bought it.
I discovered GT back in the days when finding video content about games was not as easy as searching youtube. I spent a lot of time watching trailers for upcoming games, but I really fell in love with the site when it started generating original content, such as the podcast Invisible Walls with Shane Satterfield and Marcus Beer. The podcast covered the games industry and their often sarcastic/pessimistic thoughts on it. The site created videos of game retrospectives as well, and they were always something to which I looked forward. Eventually Shane and Marcus both left to pursue other opportunities, and many of the behind-the-scenes interns and staff stepped up to take center stage. The site began to morph into something a less like a game industry information and game trailers repository, which youtube had made unnecessary, and more into an original content and internet personality generator. The younger team was filled with enthusiasm and optimism that was infectious, and they always came off as a lot of funny, hard working people who loved the hell out of what they were doing.
After watching gametrailers.com’s original shows for years, and, more recently, their nightly Twitch streams, I can safely say I feel very close to the site’s entire editorial staff. I could probably go on for hours about how much I loved Mandatory Update, The Final Bosman, Trailer Score, GT Time, and the many game reviews and opinion editorial videos. Brandon Jones, Daniel Bloodworth, Kyle Bosman, Micheal Huber, Ian Hinck, Elyse Willems, Brad Ellis, and Brandon Jones feel like family to me and it still feels very weird to know that there will never be any new gametrailers.com videos. I wish them well in whatever the team does next, and I hope they can do whatever that may be together, because I’d be there to watch!
Published on by Alex Kolesar