Less than it used to. YouTube videos are the terrible, nearly completely unhelpful replacement. It’s great.
Considering how poorly the Prima produced Dark Souls 3 guide was received by the community compared to the Future Press guides for Dark Souls, Dark Souls 2 and Bloodborne, perhaps a small case of market forces at play as well. As tough a gig as making a commercially viable hardprint game guide can be, could be argued that at least one of Prima’s competitors often produced better quality guides.
Still, feels a bit like the end of an era.
GameFAQs is still a thing that exists. You don’t have to watch YouTube videos for everything.
This is really sad. I have a bunch of theirs and they where ways full of useful information. I used several as sourcebooks for homemade PnP RPG Campaigns.
I’m surprised they lasted this long. Guides have seemed less useful as the big budget games move further into the GaaS model, where a guide can be outdated at launch.
Might’ve been able to carve out a decent market by pivoting to art and lore books. The market for those isn’t huge but tends to reward quality work.
Definitely the end of an era. I have many Prima and Brady guides for older games, in fact right now in my desk drawer here at work is the Elder Scrolls Oblivion guide for PC and Xbox 360 which I used last year to finally, after 10 long years, complete the entire game. I will miss those softcover tomes of infinite knowledge.
That said, I haven’t bought one in years. Between a decline in the overall quality of the information in the guides and the fact that free guides are readily available online at places like IGN and Gamepressure, why spend $20 on what will amount to bathroom reading material? Also, games can now change dramatically from release to 3/6/12 months out, with huge patches/fixes, content updates, DLC and expansions changing the way some games work entirely (see No Man’s Sky for a perfect example).
I suspect Prima/Brady will live on as an online game guide publisher. They already have a structure in place at their website where they publish free basic guides and/or hints & tips for games, then sell access to premium online guides. It might be hard to compete with the YouTube crowd serving up walkthroughs for free, but if they structure the pay content nicely, make sure it’s full of information, and keep the price just low enough to be enticing, I could see them doing well with people who want all the secrets of a Red Dead Redemption or Elder Scrolls game in an indexed, easily searchable format.
The last one I purchased was the bigass hardcover for ESO’s Morrowind expansion.
Beautiful book to just flip through.
Yes, IGN and GamePressure also release excellent online guides for major games, completely free.
Stusser, meet Internet. Internet, this is Stusser.
This really sucks. I have a ton of amazing strategy guides on my bookshelf, I am a bit of a collector for them, and Prima is one of my favorites. I hope some of those staffers can find work at places like Piggyback or something.
What I meant is that essentially 100% of the population likes to defrag their hard drive, if you know what I mean, while a substantial portion don’t play videogames.
I sincerely thought they were long gone.
Not for everything, no. But I used to be able to go to Gamefaqs for practically any game and find four or five obsessively detailed full guides and 8 or 9 specialized ones, more for the really popular stuff, and now there are plenty of more obscure games with little more than a few board topics, and even the popular stuff tends to only have a couple guides.
And if you search the general internet for that info, chances are it’s in a fucking video.
So did I
Yeah, the boards are a dying breed. You can hang on with all your might but not only does the younger generation go to videos to watch how to play games… sometimes they do that more than they do actually playing games.
Which pissed me off no end. When I want to know how to do something, I want to know how to do something. I don’t need to listen to/watch some yootoober drone on and on rather than getting to the fucking point.
/oldpersonrantoff
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I might not be as well seasoned as some of you, but I can’t stand listening to most videos in gaming or podcast. I just want to spend a minute looking something up and get back to playing. I don’t often have to look things up these days though. Maybe it’s just my perception, but there are more games that give you more than one way to do things so less my way or the highway need to look up something precisely. Or that could just be the type of games i play.
Niche games like Rimworld, still plenty of written material , same with EU IV.
I enjoy watching other people play games, but I don’t consider that in any way, shape or form a viable substitute for a searchable text document where I can find the solution to a specific problem I am having or just easily follow along in my own play without having to constantly pause and unpause.