GRcade

Yet another long-running staple of print gaming media is being pulled. EGM Now is reporting today that strategy guide imprint Prima Games will halt operations by next spring.

A Prima representative confirmed that the company will no longer commission new strategy guides, discontinuing the imprint in spring of 2019. As for layoffs associated with the move, the representative said, "We are in conversations with the Prima Games team and cannot comment on this further at this point."

https://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/ ... own-report


Damn, though I guess it's no real surprise. With guides available so freely on the internet most people who used to buy guides probably aren't bothering anymore and only really collectors were even bothering.

Shame, but inevitable I guess.

Their guides are excellent. I still use the Might & Magic VII one as there is so much to do and remember.

Surprised they lasted this long.

The only Prima guide I have is LoZ: OoT. I bought it after I failed to find my final heart container. I bought the guide and... I still couldn't find it Money well spent / I don't know how to strategy guide.

I still have a lot of my old prima guides, my Shenmue one is still full of little extras which i never knew about at the time.

Quite sad. A new Zelda game along with its Prima was always a special day

Oh man this sucks. Haven't bought a strategy guide in forever but I am super fond of the ones I have. I've always treated them more like art and trivia books.

Oddly enough I have really gotten into strategy guide books over the past five or six years and I have a number of Prima ones. As Orange indicated, they're great for flicking through even from an art-and-tidbits viewpoint.

Sure, you can get hints for free on the net - and that is sometimes handy - but, for me, a book works well when you're playing through a game.

Physical guides have always seemed pretty pointless to me in this day and age, especially with how often games are patched to rebalance and change things.

That's a shame, when I get really into a game (Zelda, Skyrim to name a couple) I always prefer a physical guide. Guess I'll just have to stick to online/YouTube guides from now on.

I've never bought a guide but it's a shame to see them go.

You'd all be surprised at just how many people will still pay decent money for a decent game guide. Sadly, most of Prima's more recent guides were somewhat gooseberry fool (Dark Souls 3 being a notable example).

They screwed up by taking FAR too long to get digital guides out. And even then they were merely static PDF rehashes (versus a solid interactive eBook).

And their official licenses always cost a gooseberry fool load and rarely covered digital guides or video guides. Brady games paid $600,000+ for the Resi 6 guide (print only license).

But YouTube guides have clearly eaten into their profits and didn't step up to offer a better solution.

I hate using YouTube guides really. A lot of the time I'll be stuck at a specific section of a game and will be trying to find a written guide for just that part but all the results you get end up being YouTube videos that you have to try and skip around to find the part you want.

I'd much rather have a digital guide that I can do a Ctrl+F on for the specific part I need.

I have a number of their guides, mainly from the 90s and early 00s. For reasons I never really understood, they used to release “unauthorised” and official guides of the same game. I’ve got the unauthorised guide for Resident Evil 2, but there’s also an official one. Things got even more weird with Resident Evil 3, with Piggyback, Prima and BradyGames all claiming to have the official guide.

In recent years I bought Prima’s hardback guide to Rise of the Tomb Raider, which came with the e version and key ring.

Piggyback/BradyGames tended to release higher quality guides though. The ones for MGS2/3, Jax 2 and GTA were much better than anything Prima put out.

Lagamorph wrote:I hate using YouTube guides really. A lot of the time I'll be stuck at a specific section of a game and will be trying to find a written guide for just that part but all the results you get end up being YouTube videos that you have to try and skip around to find the part you want.

I'd much rather have a digital guide that I can do a Ctrl+F on for the specific part I need.

So much this. Seems with recent games gamefaqs will have barely anything, but a quick search on youtube will find several full playthroughs. That you then have to waste time jumping through just to find out the one little thing you were missing

gamefaqs has also gone downhill in that it's now in a wiki form rather than a plaintext single document - which is absolutely useless for ctrl-f!

KK wrote:Piggyback/BradyGames tended to release higher quality guides though. The ones for MGS2/3, Jax 2 and GTA were much better than anything Prima put out.

The guides for Jak II and Jak3 are fantastic

Shame, i saw these as the companion for physical games now that you don't get a manual anymore. That being said, a manual does not cost an extra £10+...... but it was a nice way of cementing a special games tangibility.

The future: 'Remember when we used to read about videogames...on paper? Crazy times.'

Shame but it's a sign of the times, folks just look online for help it's quicker and it's free.

Lagamorph wrote:I hate using YouTube guides really. A lot of the time I'll be stuck at a specific section of a game and will be trying to find a written guide for just that part but all the results you get end up being YouTube videos that you have to try and skip around to find the part you want.

I'd much rather have a digital guide that I can do a Ctrl+F on for the specific part I need.

That's a very easy to solve problem. Just a bit of internal hyperlinking to key puzzles/collectables/bosses, etc in the video description (via timestamps), gives you immediate access to what you need.

It's hardly rocket science.

But then there's vastly less chance for them to earn any additional revenue from their videos that way.