Strategy Guide Publisher Prima Shutting its Doors

Strategy guide maker Prima Games is shutting down

Another household name in gaming goes under.

TM

Oh my! I wonder if the competition of all the online game sites and wiki's is the reason. They had such beautiful guides.

This is sad but not really too surprising. They probably just could not compete with all of the online help for games that is available now.

I have quite a few of their strategy guides that I bought back in the 1990s.

I am sorry to see them go.

I think there's more to it than that.
Walkthrough sites have been around since the late 1990's.
That didn't stop people from buying the nice, glossy, book versions of Guides for their very favorite games.

I think the biggest problem is that the current top-selling games are online games that keep updating, adding features, removing features, rebalancing gameplay, etc. Printed-on-paper guides can't keep up with constant tweaks to the games and can't stay accurate.

eBook versions could stay up to date, but there are already websites selling nicely formatted, professional-looking, color pdf guides. So even if there weren't plain text walkthroughs available for free, there is already competition from websites selling eBook guides.

There's also an argument that many of the people who liked the Guides liked "hard copy" in general -- and most games aren't sold hard copy anymore -- so those people who wanted "hard copy" tended to stop buying games and no longer need Guides for them.

I agree, being in that category. Hard cover, collector's versions are what I look for on triple-A title and/or classic releases. Most times I won't bother with a paper guide unless it's for a game with a very substantial quest base and complex character development tree. Which makes this all the sadder as Prima has put out some wonderful hardcover collector's guides. Both the Skyrim and Witcher 3 guides were excellent.

I was just browsing on Amazon and found lots of the guides -- at unbelievable prices! I guess the news now makes these valuable collector's items. Wish I'd bought some at the time. They look wonderful.