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?

Comments

Guidebooks vs. FAQS

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Not true at all.

[Inoshiro]

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.

Re:Not true at all.

[Torgo's Pizza]

Actually, the process starts before the game goes gold. The negotiation for game guides starts fairly early in the development process. Once rights are secured, then the guide publisher will assign a writer to spend time at the developer. The developer will usually kick in nuggets of info from the design manual, artwork, stats, etc. The guide is usually finished before the game is. Once the game goes gold, any errata is taken care of and the guide is off to the publishers.

Why start so early? The key is that by having both guide and game available at the same time you are more apt to purchase the guide. Stores use it as a bundle or as a loss leader on one of the two.

Re:online faqs have major plusses..

[Sevidrac]

The only printed guide I ever bought was the one to Final Fantasy Tactics. Sure, I know I could get all the information on-line...but I liked the handy charts that were in the book. The organization and layout of the guide made it much quicker, not to mention easier, for me to look through.

It'd take another game like that, with another guide of that quality, for me to buy one. Otherwise, I'll just stick to gamefaqs.

Oh, and to the comments below about screenshots. I've seen some faq's that link to self-made screenshots. One of the FAQs about WC3: The Frozen Throne, had screenshots listed in it. Also, some people will create maps (i.e. the full game map for metriod fusion).

I also would like to point out, though, that I've seen incorrect information in the free FAQs as well. Some people write them based on other versions(imported) of the game, though.