GameRankings, part of the CBS Interactive family, which includes GameSpot and MetaCritic, announced on December 4th, 2019 that starting December 9th, 2019 they will be shutting down and redirecting all traffic to MetaCritic instead.

In a brief statement issued by GameRankings lead, Allen Tyner, and MetaCritic co-founder, Marc Doyle, they wrote…

“On Monday, December 9, 2019, www.gamerankings.com will redirect gamers to its sister site Metacritic.com, where they will find a wealth of information about how the latest video game titles are performing among critics. The entire GameRankings.com team will continue our mission to create informative game review content and bring reviews of classic games to Metacritic.

 

“As one of the oldest gaming sites online, we thank you for supporting GameRankings over the past 20 years, and we look forward to conquering new gaming worlds with you for years to come.”

Before MetaCritic was a thing you could previously gain a lot of database information from Game Rankings, which used to show aggregated review scores, the studios behind the game, as well as how well the games ranked in popularity among gamers.

Much like MetaCritic, you could easily see the critic scores for newly released games at the time across different platforms and from different websites.

You can get an idea of what the site was like with archives from the Wayback Machine.

Instead of trying to maintain two databases, they will now focuses only on MetaCritic, unsurprisingly enough.

Unlike GameRankings, MetaCritic controls a lot of sway over the industry. Studios are constantly trying to manipulate MetaCritic scores because they have this false sense of the market where they think that MetaCritic scores equate to better sales, as reported by VentureBeat, Daily Dot, and many other outlets.

We also did our own article about MetaCritic scores being manipulated by game journalists to boost or cost developers their bonuses.

In any case, we’re seeing the bloat from the big boys come down and thin out. They’re consolidating their expanse into more manageable portals. One has to wonder if GameSpot may be on the chopping block next?