GameRankings

» see gamerankings.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

gamerankings was one of the two aggregate scores you looked at when you were choosing whether to spend a year's worth of hardware allowance on a boxed game. metacritic was the one journalists talked about. gamerankings was the one that felt less curated and easier to reason about, because the score was just a straight average with the arithmetic showing.

scott bedard started it in 1999. by the mid-2000s it had indexed some 315,000 reviews across 14,500 games. cnet networks bought it, and when cbs bought cnet in june 2008 both gamerankings and metacritic ended up under cbs interactive as a redundant pair. for a long time cbs let them coexist. metacritic got the marketing budget and the industry weight. gamerankings kept a quiet mid-tier audience of players who preferred the no-weight arithmetic mean because it read as more honest, even when the mean scored games two or three points higher than the metascore did.

the shutdown notice went up on 5 december 2019 and the site went dark on 9 december. the domain started redirecting to metacritic and no export of the database was provided. two decades of averaged critic scores from american and european outlets, gone or preserved only in whatever the wayback machine had crawled.

~ the dossier ~

~ the method ~

gamerankings converted every score to a percentage and took a straight mean. metacritic ran a weighted metascore that quietly favored the outlets it considered more credible. the two often disagreed by a few points. players who read both learned to triangulate: if metacritic and gamerankings both put a game above ninety, it was probably a real event. if they diverged by ten points, one of the two was massaging.

~ what got buried with it ~

every magazine and small blog that fed the aggregator over twenty years lost its citation trail. european outlets in particular relied on gamerankings for cross-referencing scores in languages that metacritic never indexed. after december 2019 the only place those reviews existed at aggregate scale was the internet archive.

~ the corporate math ~

cbs interactive did not shut gamerankings because the traffic collapsed. it shut it because the platform-inside-a-parent maintenance cost was not worth defending a mid-tier brand against the flagship. the industry had already decided which score to quote, and the flagship was the one it quoted.

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