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Are Game Guides Dying?
Thanks to GameSpot for their guest GameSpotting feature discussing whether the print-based game guide is a thing of the past. According to the piece: "As long as there have been games, there have been game guides to help players beat them. Over the years they have evolved into slick, glossy (and thin) books with tons of valuable information and high-quality screenshots and maps... Guides make tough games easier. But are they worth it?" The author references a videogame-store friend laughing: "Why buy a game guide when I can just download the FAQ for free?" Is there any new presentation of paper-based game guides that might make you tempted to pay for them, or are they truly dying out for good?
first of all of course, they're free.
they're also available when you need it (just one googling away).
most importantly they're updated with various bits of little tidbits usually. the official kind of booklets can fail you miserably if there were some last minute changes to the game, or bugs. paper versions also aren't usually made by some mad gamer, which can be a plus as well as a minus.
also forums provide nowadays most of the information that such booklets would be useful for.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
It used to be you would get a useful manual with a game. Now, all that you get is a "how to install" and a "how to play the tutorial" section in the manual. The rest of the useful information is printed into the game guide for extra profit.
No, I don't trust in god. He'll have to pay up front, like everybody else.
They may be almost completely pointless for somebody who knows about gamefaqs.com, but some are great as art books / reference for game programmers (especially RPGs). And they have nice maps and stuff.
What I want to know is who's watching those 'cheat code' segments of video game shows and G4's 'cheat' full half-hour. I mean, watching it hoping one of the games you own ends up there and then going to the web site and printing the codes? Why watch in the first place?
On another note: are "are X dying" articles dying? I haven't seen one in a few days.
The slight benefit of even greater mobility than the laptop is lost once you factor in the $9.95 (or more) price tag.
They may be dropping in popularity, but they are not going to die soon. They typically have more information than FAQs found on the Internet, and for less-popular games, they are often available sooner.
buying a guide for RTS games is probably an absolute waste. Blizzard games, for example, go through major revisions before release, so that the artwork on the box is usually out of date by the time the game goes gold (as boxes are done months in advance) (siege tanks shooting battle cruisers on the SC box, for example). i imagine books are on a similar schedule, so the information in such a guide would be useless.
then you get into the whole realm of strategies which are very much an evolutionary thing, changing dramatically over time, particularly with each balance change introduced.
"Why buy Y if X is free?"
Hello Jack Valenti's argument, how'd you get in here?
Having the game guides is fun, dumbass. Reading printouts from a FAQ sucks balls. Like I want to run to the computer everytime I have some trouble.
Why go to a concert if you can get the CD?
Why go to a poetry reading, if you can read it yourself at the library?
Morons.
The message on the other side of this sig is false.
I remember the small package that Sierra use to make for the Kings Quest, etc series.. You had to use that "magic" marker to view the clues in order to finish the game.. Those rock'd! Too bad Sierra doesn't still rock.
Another great advantage of Gamefaqs is that there are typically many different faqs/walkthroughs for the same game. I often find it useful to read a couple of different authors' explanations of a difficult part of a game. If one author offers a confusing or difficult solution, I can simply jump to another faq to look for a better explanation or a more elegant tip. With a print guide, if you don't get what the author is trying to have you accomplish (or if the proposed solution is difficult or klugy), you're screwed.
"The dinosaurs died because they didn't have a space program." - Niven
The old Infocom games had the best hint books...
They used special pens to reveal hidden answers so you couldn't accidentally read something you didn't want to.
There were some great red herring questions to keep people honest, too.
Of course, they are all Online now, too...
I buy game guides for most of the console games I purchase. Not so much for myself, but for my daughter. Guides for Gran Turismo 3, and the FIFA games have helped her get up to speed in a game quickly. Hard to read a FAQ on the PC from across the house she says. Since I wait for them to go on sale, the cost is negligible for me.
----- LoboSoft specializes in Digital Language Lab
Sometimes this has to do with the type of game being covered. Game guides are very handy for most RPGs, but for Racers and Shooters, they don't have much to add. But even when the game offers a gold mine of potential content, the publisher gets lazy and pads them with redundant information and pictures.
A classic example is the guide for Everquest Online Adventures for PS2. All it really covers is the creation of your character. After that you're on your own...
It's not so much that the content is available for free as it is that the guides cost on the order of $20+ USD and that's quite expensive! I really don't care about the glossy print nor artwork on a guide. It means nothing to me. The ASCII format is wonderful because I can format it if need be and I can search it easily too.
I have console gaming friends and I would always be printing out GameFAQ guides and cheat codes for them. Once they found out they could just ask me for the content, they stopped buying the crazy guides. Half the time they are so gaudy you have trouble reading the damn things due to lack of contrast!. i.e. Dark page with dark print or very tiny print.
I use GameFAQ constantly! I generally try not to use it until I've beaten the game on my own but sometimes you get stuck on something really stupid and can't figure out how to get past it. I look up what I need and I go back to the game. This mostly happens with poorly designed levels that are darn near impossible to understand without a guide.
It's possible, perhaps even likely, that games companies will become the dominant producers of guides. Why should they let third-parties profit off the back of their hard work? Plus of course there are two revenue streams available to them, not just the one available to third-parties...
1. Selling the guide on its own.
2. At a later date, when sales of the game and guide have dried up, bundling them together (perhaps with a DVD or soundtrack CD) and selling them as special editions, gift packs, etc. Third-party guide publishers generally don't have this option available to them, so the shelf life of a guide is relatively short.
George Broussard of 3D Realms has already talked about preventing third-parties from publishing guides to Duke Nukem Forever, by not allowing them to use screenshots. (Sure they can still publish the guide, freedom of speech 'n' all that, but who's going to buy a guide without screenshots?) That would suggest 3DR intends to produce their own guide at some point, and if a big developer like 3DR starts the bandwagon rolling then we can expect to see a lot of other developers piling up on the back of it. And quite right too.
Guidebooks have a few advantages; they fit on your coffee table, next to your pizza and your beverage of choice. They open nicely to the page corresponding to the level where you're stuck, and they stay there until you turn the page. They go into the living room, bathroom, outside to the porch etc. without much fuss. They tend to have the benefit of being 'official', implying to me at least contact with the game designers. They tend to be easier for children to use and understand, especially for games a little beyond their current level of comprehension. Plus, quite honestly, sometimes they're just plain more useful than online faqs, containing cross-referenced charts and tables, or at least MUCH nicer-than-ASCII art. (RPG guides especially shine in this area.)
Oh, and sometimes they come with stickers.
Do you need to buy a guide for every game out there? No, probably not. I check gamefaqs for that one little hint that puts be back on track before I run out to get the guidebook, usually because I only NEED that one little hint. And buying a guidebook for some kinds of games is just silly; sports games don't need guidebooks because jocks either don't or can't read.*
Do guidebooks need to be $15-20? No, definitely not. They've found consumers' pain threshhold for spending money and they teeter right over it, because they know some of you buy ANYTHING.
So, in summation; I dunno. I buy 'em secondhand for about $2 each, if I feel like I want to have that guide. Then it goes in the box with the others.
*Anecdotal: I worked in a game store which was popular among the local pro football team for whatever reason. One burly type came in and spent a hefty chunk of change on console versions of the game that he played in Real Life, and my manager offered the strategy guides for a discount. Embarassed, the man-mountain was swayed into buying them all. For weeks afterward, we received phone calls asking us to read some of the more difficult paragraphs to him over the phone.
I still don't know why he made a million bucks a season and I was reading to him for minimum wage.
I am not a big fan of guides in most cases since to me, getting a solution without finding it yourself defeats the entire purpose of playing the game in the first place. I do however purchase guides under certain circumstances. Some RPGs for example have just absurd amounts of complexity and having some charts to organize information can be welcome indeed.
Dark Cloud 2 springs to mind. If you have never played it, the game boasts a number of very deep side games and a robust item crafting system that could take you years to completely chronicle yourself. Having a reference for fish breeding, and inventing can save me from a lot of boring repetitive experimentation. While I think the fishing is neat, I have no desire to spend 40 hours doing it. Am I cheating? I guess but I prefer to think of it as speeding through something I don't find as entertaining in favor of spending more time beating monsters with my wrench.
Most games however are not this complex, A typical FPS has you wandering through a fairly straight-forward maze shooting and killing things and looking for some way to open a door at the end of it. Do I really need a guide to tell me that in order to finish the Last stage of Halo I need to drive really fast and not hit obstructions? Is it any mystery that I am supposed to shoot everybody I see when playing Red Faction 2?
Are guides dying? Not anytime soon. While the store charges you $15-$20 a piece for them, keep in mind that they only pay about a dollar a piece from the publisher so the huge markup balances any losses incurred from unsold stock. Besides, every on-line FAQ that appears in the first week of a game's release is plagiarized straight out of a guide anyway. If guides were gone, the FAQs would shrink up as well.
On Wall Street they say "buy low, sell high" On the pad we say, "buy high, sell high" Isn't that somehow better?
Not I have bought a guide in a while, as I use GameFaqs just like everyone else, but the one advantage that I think people haven't mentioned yet of the printed guides are the screenshots. There are definitely some games and situations where words just can't adequately express what you're supposed to do or go. Usually in the FAQ that will be accompanied by "just keep trying - you'll get it eventually!"
Like I said, I haven't bought a guide in a while, but if I'm already at the store, and I happen to remember that I'm stuck somewhere in one of many games I play and then put on hold, I definitely might check out the screenshot. Screenshots of items and enemies might be useful as well, as in the text FAQ all you're getting is the general description and then it's up to you to match that mentally when you actually encounter it in the game.
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I came pretty close to buying an Advance Wars 2 guide the other day when I saw it at Wal-Mart. As has been mentioned a few times already, the big advantage is the large screenshots included. You can't really get those in a text FAQ. Unfortunately guides still cost an upwards of 15 dollars, which completely turned me off of purchasing one. For that price I could almost afford a new game.
I've been trying to get to the next page of my game FAQ for the last 1/2 hr. Boredom drove me here finally only to find you guys are at fault. Thanks a million :(
.. was when I bought my son the guide book for one of the later Final Fantasy games ( I believe it was FF9). The book was full of the typical hints, tips and tricks, but all of the key information was missing. For all of the really important stuff you needed to take a code number listed in the guide and input it into Square's playonline.com website (which required registration, of course).
If I have to go to the computer to get the information anyway, why not just use one of the free faqs available? Why pay my money for a slick, colorful guide with little valuable information? I am pretty sure that was the last guide book I ever purchased.
In the future they will probably just skip the printed material altogether and charge you $5.95 to access the same information on their website.
GameSpot buys GameFAQs, GameSpot runs article asking if published game guides are dying... including the obligatory link to their own, somewhat newly acquired, fairly well know, GameFAQs.com (then again, maybe some of GameSpot's normal audience doesn't know GameFAQs.com too well).
Yeah, well, right now I'm in a bit of a monetary crunch so I've been downloading FAQs and printing them out, because I can get paper for about $10 for 2500 pages, vs. a guide for $10-20, but, for the most part, when the guide is easy to find, I'm perfectly willing to pick one up. That being said, there are many game types for which I'd never pick up a guide, yet I see plenty of them in print. RTS games? Anything useful the guide has to say I can pick up on my own after a couple times through the skirmish mode. FPS games? umm yeah right. Platformers, doubtful.
It all comes down to RPGs and fighting games, and many of the fighting games have the essentials (the moves list) online in a much more concise, valuable format.
Oh, and the FF9 guide really killed itself by telling you to go to the PlayOnline website to get more information on just about everything in the book, and basically having the entire book + the extra information available online to anyone that bothered to sign up (and it's all still there if anyone wants it), including most of the artwork from the book.
-PainKilleR-[CE]
I have never seen a decent map for a game area outside of a print guidebook. Some others may be usable, but they are ugly.
The only real advantage with a store-bought game guide is that they are typically available as soon as the game is released. Usually you have a company that puts out the "official" game guide for a game, and the author of this guide has had plenty of time and access to the beta version of the game. So its great if you are one of those release-day buyers that lack patience.
One might argue that they look prettier and more professional than a FAQ but often the content itself is very lacking. A good example of this was the last game guide I bought which was for Master of Orion 3. On the surface it looked like it was going to be an extremely informative and helpful book for strategy. But when I actually took it home and started really digging into it, I found that it offered very little. I found it akin to having an 18' X 36' swimming pool that only ended up being 3 inches deep.
Plus, you have to take into account the fact that games get patched (well PC games anyway). A lot of times the patches can really change the dynamic of the game. You are not going to see version 2 of a game guide. On the other hand you will see version 12.55 of a FAQ.
I don't really get the whole portability argument either. If you are on a console you arent even tying up your computer anyway. If its a computer game, theres a decent chance you can either run it in a window or otherwise alt-tab out of the thing. Plus its not like you have to print out all 200 pages of the FAQ. A lot of times FAQs have a lot of info that is cool as a reference but not really required to "win the game" or otherwise get you unstuck.
As far as grammar and spelling, again I don't necessarily see the game guide winning out in every case. With a FAQ, if you make a grammatical mistake, its easy enough to correct. FAQ writers have all the time in the world to update and make corrections. Game guides on the other hand are going to be under some strict deadlines because publishers want that book out there the minute the game is available.
One thing that annoys me the most about game guides is the software stores nagging you to buy them. I think they know the deal and so they will offer incentives to make you buy it with the game, like say give you 20% off if you buy it when you buy the game.
I'm though buying game guides myself although I don't see them disappearing entirely either. I think the impulse buyers will be enough to keep them going although I think either you are going to see the prices go up or profits down.
Makes you wonder though if somebody would ever try selling a CD-only version of the game guide since it would save them a lot of manufacturing costs. Or for that matter bundling it with the game as a separate package. Its not like you don't see enough "super-secret special collectors edition complete with collectable toilet seat" versions of games out there.
She said it's just a better experience to have a book there beside her when she plays, where she can flip the pages. I can't argue, but I can definitely see that the days of A Link To The Past (where you needed the guide if you wanted to find every heart) are long past. Now, the guides are no longer necessary, they're just for convenience.
/syle
However, the devs figured they could make the extra cash by selling a $15 game guide that was seemingly necessary to suceed at a game.
Oh, and btw - most game guides are crap. Essentially reprinting information from the manual or ingame help with LOTS of oversized image and white space. Needless. Most of the useful information in these game guides (espececially those from Prima) can be distilled down to a page or less.
Besides, forget gamefaq, just ask a question on the fansite or even official bulliten board.
Or more importantly: Is it confirmed by netcraft?
Seriously, I never understood what game guides are good for, it's like watching someone else playing that game.
Besides, todays games are made for mainstream audience - and the mainstream does not want to read it wants to play. NOW.
I remember when Mortal Kombat 3 came out, and everyone was rushing to release move and fatality lists. This was around when I was on AOL and my friend was on Compuserve, and showed me that there were lists online for free. I bought an issue of EGM or EGM2 with a move list in it, and was pretty dissapointed when none of the moves worked. Then looking around the FAQ sites I found out EGM had just copied one of these (incorrect) online faqs.
I won't use EGM even to wipe my ass anymore.
Print Game Guides are dieing, nobody cares. What I'm surprised no one remembers is gameguides.com which was owned by Gamespot, they had the idea that they could sell PDF guides with screen shots and everything only online, their problem was that they wanted to charge back in the 90's when everything was supposed to be free. Anyway IGN launched IGN Guides which was supposed to be the exact same thing except it was free! (Everyone can see where this is going? Microsoft vs. Netscape anyone?) Anyway Gameguides.com turned to free and eventually gamespot let it die. Once they did that a time later (I'm not sure how long) IGN introduced IGN Insider and made new guides a perk of being an Insider and it was infact one of the reasons I signed up. I mean for $25 you get Video Game News, reviews, videos, pictures and full fledged game guides (no longer in PDF though) with pictures and maps. So I think Print Guides have outlived their business model and it's time for them to move online.
I doubt the FAQs would be as complete and quickly completed if there weren't game guides to derive from. Game Guides sometimes contain information you wouldn't find by just playing the game (cheat codes, really hidden rooms etc.) and they occasionally double check facts with the developer (if they can get through the publisher's producer).
Maybe you haven't heard about how the strategy guide stuff works, but here's the gist of it.
The game goes gold. Then it is sent to a publisher who has rights to the game. They, in turn, have a group of hardcore gamers who are also litterate (things like capitalizing the start of sentences, proper comma and semi-colon usage, etc). They get to play through the game before anyone else, with the catch that they have to play through it completely and also write everything down. They take screenshots, and in some cases also make maps. All of it is vetted past the game developers.
That's how Versus Books, Brady, and Prima do it.
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No forum comes with glossy, pretty pages. No forum has answers for the end of the game if you are stuck near the end, and it just came out. No forum gives you something that's super easy to read on the couch (unless you purchase a tablet PC; however, you could also buy about 200 guides for the same price).
I can't count the number of illiterate gamefaqs exist on the net. There are so many people who failed grade 8 english who like games, and they all seem to like to try and write guides.
For PC games the guide can be outdated, but for most console games, it's the most complete guide you'll ever find.
How many people out there are willing to spend 60+ hours on a game, and then write it up all for free? There are lots of people who'll write complete FAQs for SW: KOTOR, but how many complete guides exist for Hey, you, Pikachu?
There are 2 uses to a guide. The first is the most obvious: when I get stuck, I will look it up in the guide. I do this sparingly, so as not so spoil anything. Cool guides that work to not spoil it (like Brady's Wind Waker guide), are even better. Once I've beaten the game once, and the game offers replay value (again, Wind Waker does this, as does KOTOR), I will play through the game with guide in hand. I will find everything, I well check all the side quests, I will do everything I humanly can. If I really consider it done and I really won't want to play it years later, I even get extra from my local video game store when I trade in the guide with the game.
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They've learned not to ask me anymore...
There will always be a need for the fancy printed game guides, so long as there are RPGs. Sure you could download a ASCII FAQ and Walkthrough, but the quantity and quality of the information will never compare.
_______
Death wish, n.:
The only wish that always comes true, whether or not one wishes it t
It is now official - Netcraft has confirmed: Game Guides are dying
... [etc.]
Yet another crippling bombshell hit the beleaguered Game Guide community when
I'd have to say that for certain games, especially those on console platforms, it is hard to find illustrative screen shots of areas (such as those for role playing games or adventure games) with markings denoting where things really are. On the other hand, games like Baldur's Gate 2 have a wealth of information online including some guides with fully annotated maps, cheats (item codes, spawn codes, etc for the Lua-based console system) that are mostly derived from screen shots.
Console game guides are worthwhile if the game has more than 30 hours of depth of gameplay (as in, not repetitive and increasing in complexity). PC games it's a lot harder to judge, but if you are searching for a lesser known title chances are that you won't be able to find a guide in stores anyway and you will be forced to rely on newsgroups and/or the web.
Of course, that's just my opinion...
I bought the Final Fantasy X game guide for the nice artwork that was fused into the guide. Sure, I could have ordered an artbook from an import web site...but I liked the fact that I could preview the whole guide and see if the art was truly good... I would have prefered a separate art book though, such as "The Art of Final Fantasy IX"...
http://chrono.posterous.com/
I am sure we will see them as freebies since no one wants to purchase them. It will be a good way to get the game name out by giving them away, or at least short versions with select tips.
I think I will always prefer the Strategy Guides, because you can always trust them. I also like the fact that most of them comes with posters and guided pictures.
FAQS are made by people who love the game they are writing about and are doing it for free. I think that is reason enough not to ever buy another game guide again. Besides that: they suck. What i like best about FAQS is the fact the you are sometimes able to find reference for little tidbits that you would never have noticed if you did'nt read about it.
I also think that gamefaqs has created a wonderful community of game lovers who love to discuss games. Take a look at the board for FFVII and you will be amazed to see that this game is still popular (very popular) 6 years after it had been released.
The only reason for buying a game guide could be the art, the problem is not too many guides have a good enough selction. One thing that guides can evolve too is a medium for publishing background information on the game your playing. They are already doing it in japan (surprise !). The best example could be the xenogears perfect works book which is highly sought after around the xenogears fan community. BTW their is now a faq writer on gamefaqs trying to translate this thing.
If you are going to try and sell the whole "kazza doesn't impact software/music/video sales" line, you cannot then argue that downloadable FAQ's are going to drop game guide sales.
Slashdot meet consistancy of argument; consistancy of argument meet slashdot.
The are several reasons why game guides are, and should be, dying.
1)FAQs are free
2)FAQs are written by people who have played the game a lot and really enjoy it
3)FAQs generally provide more information as well as opinions that can be both interesting and helpful
4)The make game guides for some of the stupidest crap sometimes. If there was a new Final Fight game they would make a guide for it. I mean come on you beat up bad guys and walk to the right when the arrow points that way, yet they would right a 150 page guide (with lots of large pictures) about fighting technique, boss strategy, items, five page character descriptions, and other random filler garbage.
Don't get me wrong I think that there will be official guides for as long as there are RPGs, but hopefully there won't be one for every stupid game.
M.D. Inc.
DVDs/CDs with gameplay footage. Complete run-through of the game by an expert player for the shorter action titles like Shinobi, Gungrave, Ikaruga, etc. Or for longer things, give me stuff like DVD menus of footage of boss battles and important, tough parts of the game. 90% of the time, i don't believe for an instant that the people writing game guides have actually used the strategy they were espousing. Show me proof other than a dinky screenshot. Give me a feeling for the speed of a boss, or what spells I'm going to need to use, etc. Watching someone do it is a hell of a lot better than trying to decipher a game geek's version of it. If the game guides came with stuff like this (on CD/DVD with the guide, not downloadable) then I'd be FAR more likely to go for that instead of using Gamefaqs.
Try playing EVE Online - The game has changed so much since the guide was released that it isn't even worth the paper it's printed on.
There is NOTHING in that guide that is accurate anymore. Ore locations have changed drastically, system security ratings have changed drastically, EVERYTHING is different.
Even if things hadn't changed, the guide had nothing but a brief summary of all systems in a single region of the game. Considering that the game has 5-6 different starting regions, the guide sucked to begin with.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
Game guides are a waste of money. However, if they sold sets of nice glossy color maps for (say) $5, I'd probably buy those. F'rinstance, I could have used a good map of Vice City, and I'm currently addicted to Ratchet and Clank and could use some maps for that.
The problem is, they don't sell the maps without the useless book...
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
I was laughing with my friend who works at the video game store, because the guide came in around December. MOO 3 didn't come out until February or March. Normally the guides arrive at the store half a week before the game.. although there are some times when it gets in much earlier. My friend still has a strategy guide for Dreamcast Half-Life in mint condition :)
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When I got stuck in suikoden3 for ps2, I didn't have the option of buying a guide. The publisher decided not to print it. So I got it on gamefaqs. It would have been tempting to have a printed copy, but I can't argue with free. I got the guide to GTA:VC pretty much just for the maps. (to agree with another post)
The guide would tell you almost everything you needed to know about a particular situition in the game. To get the complete scoop, however, you would write down a code printed in the guide, walk down the hall to your PC, enter the code into a form on PlayOnline.com, and get the rest of the info. The guide became nothing more than a book full of dumb codes, and I'd spend all my time walking back and forth from my PC to my PS2. Man, that was frustrating! If I'd wanted to to online for game info, I would have just gone to gamefaqs.
I think most everything has been covered. Online FAQs have the limitation of (a) being text-only, and (b) not being able to start the FAQ until they get the game in stores. However, they have the advantage of being EXTREMELY easy to update. As a corollary, if it's a good writer, mistakes will be corrected fairly quickly.
I think some of the posters here have forgotten the REAL reason game guides won't die out any time soon: tech savvy. When I was 6 years old, I wouldn't know enough about the Internet to go looking for a game guide, especially if I wasn't very adept at finding things on the Internet.
Game guide publishers still have two very big things going for them: impulse buyers (read: parents and small children) and low-tech appeal. Searching through a 100KB+ text document for one paragraph can be rather difficult for some. (I should know, people STILL send me questions about my Oracle of Ages guide that could be answered with a simple copy/paste.) But flipping through 108 pages is comparatively easier when you can look for the big section headings.
In other words, online game guides are like Linux. Sure, they're free and (sometimes) better than the expensive stuff, but it scares off a lot of people. That's why Windows... er, game guide publishers have nothing to worry about.
This is my sig. There are many others like it, but this one is mine.
If you don't consider FAQ/Walkthroughs game guides then I guess you could say that they are dying out. Why would I want to pay for something when the same, if not better, information is on the internet? I try to figure out stuff on my own, but I'm not going to waste on day on a certain part on the game.
A good timewaster
Since I don't have a dedicated line nor is the computer necessarily located near the console... I prefer to have a book to thumb through while playing, especially if its a pc game so i don't have to quit or alt-tab to a browser. Also, in playing Legend of Mana I found the Brady book helpful just for the maps and not the game walkthrough. FAQs are nice cause you get more insight into the non-linear aspects of the game. Ie. in Legend of Mana the guide barely touches on the forging, gardening, pets and golem systems in it. In that sense FAQs were much more helpful and informative. I will usually buy the guide for a console game, but typically for pc games like RTS and FPS games i don't usually buy them. Yes FAQs have taken some of the steam, but i think they will equal out in the long run.
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Go to GameFAQs (the best known and one of the largest FAQ sites) and watch the available FAQs for a game that hasn't been released yet.
Let me save you the trouble, the first FAQs will go up about 2 days after the guides ship to stores. These people are not playing the games through to completion, they are ripping out of guides. Simple as that.
In all my years of sailing the 7 seas, I have yet to meet a pirate that writes FAQs. Does it happen? Im sure once and a while for some very popular games a few dedicated souls will snag import copies or pirated copies and actually pen their own work, but I am confident in guessing that such cases account for less than 10% of all online FAQs.
On Wall Street they say "buy low, sell high" On the pad we say, "buy high, sell high" Isn't that somehow better?