GamePro Shutting Down After 22 Years

redletterdave writes "Popular gaming magazine GamePro has shut down its U.S. operations after 22 years of publications by its parent company IDG. GamePro's website, which has been online for about 13 years, will be converted to a gaming channel and incorporated into PCWorld on Dec. 5. Sources within the magazine say GamePro's employees, including its executives, received phone calls this morning with the news. The news comes as a relative surprise, as GamePro experienced its highest traffic ever last week. The company also released its first quarterly magazine earlier this month after deciding monthly print issues were too costly to maintain."

Going from monthly to quarterly

[ackthpt]

That's usually a pretty bad sign, right there. While magazines seem to be dying everywhere, I'm completely at a loss for the hige number of magazines in a local bookseller, which appear to cater to select readership. There must be something they do right.

By Slashdot standards, Reddit's crap looks savory.

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh please. I accept your challenge. Compare the comments on these sections:

http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience [reddit.com] and http://www.reddit.com/r/science [reddit.com]
http://science.slashdot.org [slashdot.org] (Be alert; it's worse than Facebook.)

Or the submissions here:

http://www.reddit.com/r/games [reddit.com] and http://www.reddit.com/r/gamernews [reddit.com]
http://games.slashdot.org [slashdot.org] (Um, where are the big news articles?)

Or here:

http://www.reddit.com/r/programming [reddit.com]
http://developers.slashdot.org [slashdot.org] (What happened? 10 years ago, programming topics were the main attraction of Slashdot.)

Or the comments here:

http://www.reddit.com/r/politics [reddit.com]
http://politics.slashdot.org [slashdot.org]

Slashdot today is a bad joke. I often find better content and discussions on Twitter.

And (not much) of value was lost

[cdecoro]

I hate to say it, especially thinking of all the people that will be losing their jobs in this hard economy, but GamePro's demise is long overdue, and no great loss. I haven't been into video games much for the last 10 years, but as a high-schooler in the 90's, I was quite a devoted reader of the video game press. Compared to Electronic Gaming Monthly, perhaps its major competitor for most of that time, GamePro was essentially a purveyor of hype and marketing buzz, rather than a serious commentator on the state of the field (assuming that a magazine about games can ever be serious). Nearly every (well-marketed/buzzworthy) game had an almost perfect rating on the scale that they used -- one could never rely on GamePro to give any sort of critical view. Many games had absolutely perfect scores.

By contrast, EGM had a scale of 1-10, through for the first year or so I thought it was a 1-9 scale because I never saw any 10's (I want to say it was Final Fantasy III that got the first 10 that I saw, but I'm not sure). I remember that EGM prided themselves for many years on never having rated a game 10 by all four reviewers. Moreover, unlike EGM (or earlier-90's Nintendo Power), GamePro had a saccarine, plastic, slick, manufactured feel (I apologize for my lack of a better term), and lacked any real sense of personality or character. Kind of like cheap candy -- yeah, it has an overwhelming sweetness, but has so little else that it ends up feeling as if it tasted bland. I've kept all the Nintendo Power issues from when it started in 1988, until I stopped subscribing around 2000. Most of the EGMs from that time period as well. GamePro, if I ever somehow ended up with an issue, went straight to the trash.