The GameTrailers website is gone forever, but its name and videos will live on. IGN has acquired the rights to the GameTrailers name and content library, and will keep the site's content available on YouTube, GameTrailers co-founder Brandon Jones announced today.
Defy Media, which acquired GameTrailers in mid-2014, shut down the nearly 14-year-old site this past February. The company laid off GameTrailers' entire staff, and the website and its YouTube channel stopped updating. Prior to today, the last GameTrailers video on YouTube was dated Feb. 8.
"As of today, our longtime friends at IGN have picked up all the assets from GameTrailers," said Jones in a video, which you can watch above. "Although GameTrailers.com is shutting down, IGN is committed to archiving GT's massive library. That means all the Countdowns, Retrospectives, reviews and original shows won't just disappear."
We've reached out to IGN and Defy for comment, and will update this article with any information we receive.
IGN has already begun uploading videos from the GameTrailers archive — starting with series such as Retrospective and BackTrack — to GameTrailers' YouTube channel, which still has more than half a million subscribers. A note on the channel says that IGN will complete the archival process next month.
The GameTrailers channel won't just serve as a library for old GameTrailers content, however. IGN will keep the channel active, publishing the latest video game trailers "and maybe more," according to Jones.
Jones and the rest of the GameTrailers staff have since launched a new venture, going the Patreon route with Easy Allies. The nine-person team's Patreon channel pulls in more than $37,000 per month from more than 4,700 contributors.
Update: Reached for comment, an IGN representative provided Polygon with the following statement: "We are big fans of the content GameTrailers has published over the years and want to ensure that the videos will survive online. We have added the GT YouTube channel to our network and are scouring hard drives and uploading back catalog content that never made it across."
