One of the Oldest Review Sites is Calling it QuitsÂ
GameRankings is one of the oldest video game review sites to date. It has been telling the public what is hot or not since 1999 and it will soon be shutting down forever. The aggregate review site has undoubtedly been a major influence within the video game industry. Many other websites like Metacritic and OpenCritic are both modeled off GameRankings.
This news was made public thanks to a direct post on the website. The website will close down on December 9th. After Monday, the site will just redirect to Metacritic, a sister company of GameRankings. Most of the current employees of GameRankings will end up working for Metacritic instead. The post read, “The entire GameRankings.com team will continue our mission to create informative game review content and bring reviews of classic games to Metacritic.”
Despite the old site not seeing the limelight that it used to, it still managed to hang around for 20 years. Something that most companies never accomplish. Not to mention that they could be largely credited with the birth of the other websites mentioned earlier.
GameRankings and by extension Metacritic used user reviews to tally up an overall score. Much like Rotten Tomatoes, there would be two different overall scores, one that tallied up the overall opinions of the professionals and another that got the publics’ response. As we all know, this sort of design would create some very interesting situations were the critics hated a game whereas the public loved it. Or vice versa. This, of course, did lead to angry gamers to just trash games for no reason. But that’s the internet.
Make sure to check out their site one last time. You have four days until its all over. RIP GameRankings.