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Businesses United States Games

Strategy Guide Company Prima Games Is Shutting Down (kotaku.com) 50

Posted by BeauHD from the times-they-are-a-changin dept.
Prima Games, the publishing company that has printed video game strategy guides since it was founded in 1990, is shutting down. "The label will no longer publish new guides starting now, and it will officially shutter in the spring," reports Kotaku. From the report: Thanks to the rise of sites like GameFAQs -- and major gaming publications like IGN commissioning their own online guides, which bring in monstrous amounts of traffic -- print strategy guides have struggled for years now. In 2015, Prima purchased and swallowed its biggest competitor, BradyGames, and has been consistently churning out guides for both print and the web, but it wasn't enough to survive what the company called "a significant decline" in the world of print video game guides.
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Strategy Guide Company Prima Games Is Shutting Down More

Strategy Guide Company Prima Games Is Shutting Down

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  • Wikis too (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Most of the time I can just type game name wiki into google.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Anonymous Coward

      I'm surprised Prima lasted as long as they did. GameFAQs and sites dedicated to games (now replaced by wikis, as you mention) have been around a long time, and everybody's been on the 'net for over a decade. I've never bought a print guide in my life, and I only own a few commercial PDF guides because they came with the game(s).

  • Oh no, that's terrible. (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    And nothing of value was lost given how much completely wrong and/or outdated beta information was often thrown into Prima's "guides".

  • What about their assets? (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Any information of what is going to happen with its assets (Intellectual Property). ? My suggestion to them is to turn them public domain and preserve those guides on the Internet Archive (archive.org)

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Yeah, not happening.

      Keep in mind that material like that about video games is copyrighted. You can't even publish screenshots without crediting them as copyrighted works. (For reviews, screenshots and brief video are clearly "fair use." For strategy guides, it's a bit more murky.)

      Things like maps or actual data about the game are definitely covered by the original game's copyright and almost certainly licensed for printing in the guide. (It's why the guides are usually exclusives: they're written based on d

  • Some really creative ones out there (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Etcetera ( 14711 ) on Friday November 09, 2018 @09:18PM (#57620354) Homepage

    One of the best guides I ever read was the Prima one for Uru: Ages Beyond Myst [wikipedia.org]. Since Uru was a meta, alternative reality game taking place in the real world -- in which the original Myst games were put out by Cyna to help spread the word about the "real" D'ni civilization discovered underground in New Mexico -- the Prima guide was written as a completely first person account, leading others through the journey that the writer (a "former games guide writer") had taken.

    It was really rather imaginative and very well done [google.com]... And remember, this was 2003, before some of these other meta-tricks became more common place. RIP Prima :/
    https://www.amazon.com/URU-Beyond-Primas-Official-Strategy/dp/0761544704/

  • I could never understand who bought those things. (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 09, 2018 @09:20PM (#57620362)

    Yes, I got stuck a lot. All the time, in fact. But if I had a glossy guidebook to consult each time, I'd beat the expensive game in no time. What's the point of that? Is a game purchased in order to beat it as quickly as possible? Anyone who does that has completely missed the point. Plus the guidebook cost *extra* money, so you were wasting even more money to get less challenge/enjoyment from the main product...

    If you have never walked around helplessly in Hyrule for weeks, looking for that item to get you past an obstacle, you also won't know the pleasure of eventually finding it. That was the actual game -- the feeling of a vast virtual world where you are thrown in and have to attempt to figure it out. Not just looking it up in some book or digital text file.

    There were even hugely popular "cheating devices" that went even further, by allowing you to get unlimited lives/continues/power/HP/ammo, etc. I cannot understand the mentality of people who bought and used those things.

    • I suppose it would depend on the reason you are playing the game in the first place. If it's to prove to your peers that you can / or did get through the game then a guide would help with that. If it's to have fun and figure things out then I suppose a guide would be superfluous. The main thing here is that they were PRINTED guides, although I suppose they probably let people buy and download PDF versions, not sure, but seems obvious. There are certain business models that are dying, people need to move

    • Yes, I got stuck a lot. All the time, in fact. But if I had a glossy guidebook to consult each time, I'd beat the expensive game in no time. What's the point of that?

      There are many different ways to enjoy things in general. You can enjoy them all at once, or you can enjoy them as slowly as possible, or anywhere in between. You can appreciate them for the experience, or for the art, or the story.

      If I've stopped enjoying some part of a game, I fire up the goog and find an answer. It comes in especially handy with these Bethesda games where you can't actually complete many [broken] quests without cheating, but I find it to be an enjoyable practice in general.

      There were even hugely popular "cheating devices" that went even further, by allowing you to get unlimited lives/continues/power/HP/ammo, etc. I cannot understand the mentality of people who bought and used those things.

      Some people ju

    • I usually saw these on places like eBay, where the seller would advertise them with the game name in big bold letters, and in the fine print mention that it was a guide, not the game or its manual.

      Pre-Internet there was some market for these. Back then, if you got stuck in a game and your friends couldn't help, buying a guide was usually the only way to move on. It became a decision between flushing $50 down the drain because you were stuck in the game, or paying an extra $20 so you could continue to e

  • Prima purchased and swallowed its biggest competitor, BradyGames

    What they were doing wasn't working, so what does that suggest? Oh, yes, of course, let's buy someone else who is doing the same thing we are but obviously worse than we are in the hopes that we'll now be able to, ummmm, what exactly?

    I'm sorry, but I have zero sympathy for them. Ten years ago I might have had a smidge. Just a smidge then. But today... if they hadn't realized before now that print strategy guides wasn't a sustainable busine

    • Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)

      by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Friday November 09, 2018 @11:20PM (#57620662)
      Comment removed based on user account deletion
    • To obtain more market share? To eliminate a competitor? To allow the executives to be employed for another year? Come on, man, think. Don't just assume everyone but you is a moron.

    • I have no particular sympathy either, but I don't think there's anything they could have actually done to remain relevant, period. Freely available game guides, primarily on GameFAQs, IGN and Wikia, have eliminated any actual need for their product to exist. It's not clear that it would have remained viable in any form. Maybe if they made a website which could host full video walkthroughs, and sold ads? They have much of the top of the search real estate, so they could have had eyeballs in spite of the domi

  • Good (Score:1)

    by Phaid ( 938 )

    When you are trying to charge between $30 and $40 for information that can easily be obtained more accurately on any number of wikis, to say nothing of the $70-$80 "Special Editions" with cardboard sleeves to hold even more useless junk, it's long past time you went away. I thought game guides were passe when I used to see them at CompUSA in the 90s, it's almost shocking they are even a thing today. Good riddance.

    • While I agree with you to a large degree, there are certain guides that I always insist on getting in print. Perhaps I am old fashioned, but car and motor bike workshop manuals I always try to get a printed copy. My one bike I could only find a PDF manual (it's a rare bike) and it's a bit of a pain when the tablet dies halfway through an overhaul. Not just that, it's generally a dirty job with abrasive materials involved, not exactly the environment I want my tablet to be in, whereas with a workshop manu

  • Not much money in it anymore (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    all the modern games are:

    For money cheat, send $20 to rockstar & theyll give you some virtual money.

    For item cheat send $20 to EA and theyll give you some free items.

    Nobody needs a guide for that.

  • I'm stuck in base Cochise and I can't find Secpass B.

  • the biggest problem is that games today change all the time, update every month/week/... and change the rules, remove unintended exploits etc.
    by the time you buy your strategy guide, it's already outdated.

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