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Best-Seller Strategy Guides
TasosF writes "The New York Times published a feature on the strategy guide publishing. Strategy guide sales reportedly generated about $90 million in 2004, with the guide to GTA San Andreas having sold 748,000 copies to date." From the article "'It's like writing a travel guide to a place that doesn't exist,' Mr. Hodgson said. 'Whereas Frommer's guides tell you what hotel to stay in, I tell you which hotel not to stay in because you're going to get dragged down by a gangster.' By most measures, strategy guides are not a huge business. They generated about $90 million in sales in 2004, according to the NPD Group, a market research firm; the figure dropped to $67 million in 2005, but that decline was expected as a cyclical moment, paralleling a transition in the industry to a new generation of advanced game consoles."
1) Eat dots
2) Avoid ghosts (note: see 3)
3) Eat big dots to make ghosts blue. Ghosts are okay to touch when they are blue.
I can't wait. This is gonna make me rich!!!
I hardly play games anymore, but when I did, I found strategy guides to be a waste of money when I have my computer 2 feet away from me when I played console games. All I needed was http://gamefaqs.com/ and I pretty much had everything I needed to know, and thats not even mentioning all of the sites out there dedicated to individual games.
To each his own I suppose.
As far as I understand these guides are the Gamestop equivalent to an extended warranty. They push them on anybody buying a game which has a guide.
I just use GamesFaq, and get the same answers for free.
The third most important thing I have learned in life: Squeeze anything hard enough and it eventually makes a noise.
I may not want to play through Xenosaga again in the near future, but I can still enjoy flipping through the pages of the strategy guide and remember the various parts of the game and how I felt when I played this part, etc...
Call me silly, but I'm probably the only person still around that enjoys the strategy guides nearly as much as the games themselves.
I used to have an insane collection of strategy guides back in the 8-bit and 16-bit days, which was of course before anything in those books could be found on the Internet. Nowadays, I do still dig the printed book with foldout maps, charts, and such more than looking up a gamefaq, but only for a few titles I collect and immerse myself in like the sad fanboy I am. In those cases I'm also likely to pick up action figures, soundtracks, and junk, so the tie-in aspect is just as much of a selling point for me as the strategic value.
Also appreciated are the sometimes-included DVD-extra style additions to the guide, with the odd interview, concept art, or other behind-the-scenes geek-fodder that make the book more than just a fancy gamefaq.
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I got a free strategy Guide with Civ 2 by sid meir and it was brillian. Even included information on modding and customising the game.
Antone remember silent service 2 from waaaayyyy back (1990?) the manual was excellent. Had a huge historical section, a section on how to play the game and then a strategy section. Which was a bit like a seperate strategy guide except it came with the game.
Bah, it has to do with people realizing it's stupid to pay $15 for a "strategy guide" when:
1. You can get all the same content for free on the internet and gain the ability to do full-text-search on it (gamefaqs.com, among others)
2. The content of the game is updated by bugfixes and patches
3. The strategy guides contain twelve pages of ads for other strategy guides from the same publisher
4. The strategy guide authors put key game info in the back of the book in a sealed section to prevent "spoilers" -- why else would you buy the guide? (This was the case for a pokemon guide a year or three ago)
Seriously, the last "strategy guide" I bought hardcopy was for 8-bit NES. Then I realized that all the maps, cheat codes, and level guides were available on BBSes and later the Internet... and generally in better quality than the circular advertising from Prima or the "strategy" propaganda published by Nintendo itself.
What the game industry doesn't realize however, is that a big change is looming on the horizon. It will mean a great deal of money for both the video game and strategy guide publishers, but they'll both have to...
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Back when I was much younger (say, in my early teens), I'd buy the game and guide at the same time. I quickly learned that doing so completely ruined the fun of playing the game. Instead of learning what to do and exploring, I'd just flip to page 3, get the answer, and continue. It's like gaming on autopilot.
Now I still get the occasional guide (or use GameFaqs, as has been mentioned to death already), but I never buy it/go there until after at least one playthrough. The guide serves as a tool for re-plays. That way I get the satisfaction of having thought and worked on the game without a hand-holding from someone else, but I still can say "yeah, I found all the goodies."
But there are a couple of examples of strategy guides on my kids' shelf that blew me away.
The conspicuous example was for one of the GameBoy Color Pokemon titles, believe it or not. Those games were superbly good, incidentally, and don't deserve begin cubbyholed as kids' titles. They're so open-ended that they can be tinkered around in long after someone's played through. Do you want to breed specific species of Pokemon? Collect a bunch of some artifact? Develop a whole new set of critters for use in a new setting, and then compare stables with your friends? Compete in beauty contests for your Pokemon? Win all sorts of different side trophies? They're very, very open-ended titles, and Nintendo produced some beautiful little guides for them.
Let's just say this: As a way of displaying the relative strengths and weaknesses of different species, the Nintendo-produced guides included easily-read, well-laid-out spider graphs for the different traits. When was the last time you saw a spider graph (or really anything but a bar graph) in your local newspaper? The catalogs of all the Pokemon types in those early guides were lovely examples of solid technical writing. You'd be fortunate to encounter software manuals as well-composed, they were a pleasure to read, and in the case of stuff like those graphs they actually bordered on the educational for my kids.
I'll pay $15 for that.
"Fundamentalism" isn't about divine morality. It's about human authority.
From the article: After logging long hours trying various tactics, Mr. Hodgson said he asked the company whether he had explored them all, and which ones would help players rack up the highest scores.
Why is it that whenever journalists or legislators talk about video games, the phrase "high score" (or some permutation there of) is always on the tip of their tongue? I haven't played any games where score is the sole point in ages. The assumption that games are all about score not only betrays the author's ignorance, but it demeans modern video games in general. Games have become much subtler- story and the challenge of survival have become their own ends. But the media can't seem to envision them ever moving past the "survive as long as you can to get the high score" quarter munchers they descended from.
2) They are not written by the people who should be writing them - the designers. Once the designers are done with a game, the last thing they want to do is hang around and write a guide. They are either working on a patch or taking a vacation. They typically give almost no support to the people who actually write the guide whom, aside from writing ability, are no better gamers than the kid who picks the game off the retail shelf, resulting in a whole lot of fluff to fill pages.
3) These guides use to be called 'instruction manuals.' Guides back in the day use to come out well after the game and had actual tips and tricks that were truly valuable and could not be determined on the players own - or they included really good versions of maps. Now this role has been supplanted by the Internet - including the maps.
Game Guides will likely continue to see steep declines in sales as free fan created, internet based guides are becoming increasingly better written and presented. This 75% decrease this past year is not 'cyclical' in any way.
I am a big addict of age of conquerors and I really liked the strategies which are explained through saved or sample games often posted on the AOC sites. Reading a strategy is boring and difficult to follow. Watching saved games and seeing the way strategies are implemented is a real fun.
They called me mad, and I called them mad, and damn them, they outvoted me. -Nathaniel Lee
That thing's a piece of shit. I wouldn't be surprised if the circulation total somehow goes negative.
"I like strategy guides, actually, I love them. The internet is nice and a good way to find your information, but a strategy guide will give you that same information, and will be filled with maps (a very big advantage over text only FAQs) and the guides are also filled with art from the game."
Not just maps, but graphics in general (picture:==thousand words). Plus there's one thing that they give you when browsing the store. Weither a game is worth purchasing.
I purchased this game used and it actually had the strategy guide in the box. :) I've replayed the game at least 2 or 3 times and I still find the guide to be useful. Hints, tips, and best of all, maps.
Like a travel guide to a place that never existed? Sounds like my favorite strategy guide of all-time.
"Sid Meier's Civilization or Rome on 640k a Day"
That guide broke down the math to all units, improvements, wonders, governments, etc. AND did it in an entertaining way.
"A government is a body of people, usually notably ungoverned." - Shepard Book Quoting Malcolm Reynolds
When I first purchased Suikoden 2, back in the PS1 days, I loved the game. Unfortunatly, I sold the game to EBGAMES along with almost all the other PS1 games I had for 4 PS2 games.
Now that I look at it, the game is worth well over $100 bux on E-bay.
Also the strategy guide is worth a ton of money too. A lot of people collect the guides, and they serve as a base for introductory players to a game.
Think of it as a class in school, you learn the material, but in this case, it is the game you learn.
The problem with strategy guides is they don't offer any new strategies. Long gone are the days when one could actually learn insider secrets on a game from reading the guide. I look back to the days of Mortal Kombat. How the hell were we ever supposed to guess those nonsensical finishing moves ? The game designers were involved with the guide publishers and magazines such as GamePro and EGM.
Any chump can play a game and write what he learns from that first playthrough, and they post it on Gamefaqs. Why would anyone pay for the same goddamned thing in hardcopy (and rather pricey too).. that eludes me. You won't learn any big secrets, you won't get dibs on a weathered, refined strategy to vanquish your opponents, you won't even get factual information half the time because they make tons of mistakes that don't get checked due to deadlines and the fact that commercial guide publishers are often poor writers AND poor gamers.
The last guide I bought was Final Fantasy 7, and while it's relatively clean as a walkthrough, it is nowhere near complete and pales in comparison to the huge texts found on GameFaqs. The one thing I like about my book is the bestiary and materia list, which are handy to have on my lap when I'm level rushing, but it's nothing I couldn't have printed off the net.
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Why, back in the day every manual included instructions on how to play the game. Crazy, eh? Silent Service II was one of the first computer games I played. Awesome stuff while it lasted. Then I got a computer without a 5 1/4 inch floppy drive and was swept up by CD-ROMs, multimedia, and 3D cards. Things have gotten more expensive, but not more fun.
I think the strategy guides, with the exception of a few shining examples (the Pokemon and Final Fantasy guides immediately come to mind), have been nothing but a lightly veiled attempt at milking as much money as possible from the gamer.
I remember the day when the best strategy guides were the thick books that CAME WITH THE DAMN GAME! And if I sound like an old fart...keep in mind that I'm only 22. This has been a recent trend to put as little information in with the game as possible. Sometimes games only include a controller layout quicksheet and nothing else aside from a few lose ad flyers floating around in the box. I wonder how much of a cut the publisher gets from the strategy guide companies to do that?
I haven't purchased a strategy guide since I got on the internet, and sites like gamefaqs are making them fast obsolete. But give me the good ol days of nicely produced minibooklets over a $20, mostly fluff strategy guide any day. I mean hell, for games like Diablo, half the info in the guide was obsolete come the first patch. And don't even get me started on some of the "Tips and Strategies" they give in some FPS guides...."Crouch to increase your accuracy!", "Grab health packs to replenish your health!"...Really? No shit Sherlock.
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Back in the day, a strategy guide wouldn't come out until weeks or even months after the game did. It was written by people who had played the gold version of the game to death, without any sort of hard deadline, and it contained useful and relevant information. Some of them even could say "this is an issue, but it'll be fixed with an upcoming patch". One of my favorites was the Civ I guide written by the then-editors of Computer Gaming World, and in keeping with the department, the FFIII/VI guides were also very good.
But now Brady and Prima and the like are insistent on putting out guides that get released at the same time as the games themselves do, all in the name of having something to bundle along with the game. These don't work well for a number of reasons.
1) Particularly for Sony and Nintendo console games, many games get released in Japan first, and people are already attacking the Japanese releases for months before they hit American/European shores. I haven't gone to the Kingdom Hearts II section of GameFAQs yet (don't want to see anything resembling a spoiler, any more than I already have), but I bet there's at least 6 full walkthroughs and twice as many specialized topic FAQs already up there. If I'm the sort of gamer who wants to power my way through the game on the first pass, why plunk down the $20 for the paper guide when the material's already been out and is easy to find? (Incidentally, I'm not that kind of gamer -- I'll only hit FAQs on the first pass if it looks like I wouldn't want to play through again to uncover things.)
2) These days, wireless Internet and laptops aren't a novelty, and in many cases aren't even extravagant. (Especially if you've got clueless neighbors, and if you aren't above "hitching a ride".) If you had to run back and forth between your living room and your computer room to consult an Internet strategy guide for your console game, or if you only had one computer for a computer game, having a paper guide on hand made a bit more sense. But I can carry my wireless laptop with me all over the house and pull up a strategy guide for games either on the PS2 or on my desktop computer, any time I want.
3) Most damning, getting the guide out at the same time as the game hits shelves means that it has to go to press when the game goes gold, pretty much. So the guys writing the guide are playing on beta builds, with some features either broken or missing. In some cases, the guide's picture of parts of the game may have nothing in common with the released version. (And "The Guide is definitive -- reality is frequently inaccurate" doesn't apply here.) Writing strategy guides as a job may sound like fun, but it's about as much fun as most of the grunt-level jobs at a games developer.
Case in point, my girlfriend has an on-again/off-again contract with one of the major publishers to do freelance work. Most recently, she did the bulk of the editing on the guide for an XB360 title that's due out very soon (not saying which in case there's some NDA that I'd be violating on her behalf). She would've done all of it, except that a bugfix build that ran late in January delayed the playtester/writer of the guide for a week, and the book had to go to press regardless. As such, the publisher had to put out an all-call to their in-house staff to get the last few chapters edited. Meanwhile, my gf is keeping a tally of the number of times that the writer has included notes like "feature not implemented yet", "include maps at press time" (in other words, the man is making references in his text to a map which he hasn't seen), and "broken now, should be fixed by release". The final average came out to about 2-3 of those per mission/level.
She's not the gamer that I am, but she enjoys watching me play games that she won't play herself, and she understands what separates good games from bad ones. Based on what she saw in this guide, it looks like the game has the potential to be good and possibly even entertaining -- but it's more likely to suck the business end of an MP-5. And that's assuming that the guide accurately reflects the finished product. The game may be spectacular, and the guide as written won't do justice to it. So why print the guide at all?
We can believe in you for 3 minutes, but beyond that, even the King of All Cosmos can't be expected to wait.
A strategy guide for a skill/twitch based game is usually useless, but I know that my wife is really into the Sims 2, and knew a LOT, and then I got her the strategy guide and was surprised that there was quite a bit in there that she didn't know about.
So I think it depends on the game and the quality of the author.
"I have never let my schooling interfere with my education." - Mark Twain
Is it just me, or is PlayOnline really just a terrible platform for nearly anything?
I bought the computer version of FFXI a while back and after I finished installing all four CDs, it took me another half hour just to put in all the different keycodes and make two different accounts, one for FFXI and one for PlayOnline. Plus it's this terrible GUI that's a PITA to navigate to get to the game.
I decided that I would put FFXI on the backburner after the free month and cancelled my FFXI account, but apparently didn't cancel my PlayOnline account or something. A couple months later I decided to sign up again and pay for a month when I had some free time. I couldn't register my account again, so I checked my seldom-used e-mail that I had signed up the game with, and I have a months old e-mail saying if I didn't deactivate my PlayOnline account my game key would go bad.
It might just be me, but I've played a ton of MMOs, and none of them have made it such a pain in the ass to register, quit, and reactivate. If all of them worked through a kludgy system like PlayOnline, they would've lost quite a bit more of my money, because I wouldn't have taken the bother to reactivate accounts on a whim.
The X-Wing Strategy Guide was a thick book that provided a narrative example of a rebel pilot as he attempted each mission in the X-Wing game. It read like a reasonably interesting novel written from the perspective of the pilot, and contained his detailed mission analysis complete with detailed maps and screenshots. After each mission he'd reflect on what worked and what didn't, and what he would have done differently (alternate strategies). It was very well done - I'd love to see this concept applied to current generation games.
...but strategy guides are only for those who lack skillz. And, more importantly, patience.
In my opinion, the best strategy guides are the ones that go with strategy games. A few easy examples come to mind: Master of Orion 1 (written by Alan Emrich, who I maintain doesn't deserve the blame for MoO3), Alpha Centauri (probably the best strategy guide I've ever had) and Civilization: Call to Power.
The guide for Starship Titanic has about 20 pages of new Douglas Adams text before the spoilers section, talking about the game. Got it for 99 cents at a remainder table.
What happened to the days of making your OWN? I remember playing Zillion on the Sega Master System, and then Phantasy Star 1,2,3,4 on the Sega Master and Genesis systems. Each time I would get a thick made of graphing paper and start to draw my maps and make notes as I went along.
Then one day I lent my game and very thick notes of Phantasy Star III to a friend, and that was the last time I saw them. I worked my ASS off! I still hold that grudge since then for almost 20 years.
Kids these days are LAZY! Where is the fun of beating a game if you didn't do it yourself?
The website isn't without its problems, however. Vandalism and the fact that MediaWiki is a resource hog will likely always be problems. The most glaring problem, though, is that the wiki hasn't really caught on yet. It needs some serious press. If you take a look at their hard work, you'll see that the guide has had some serious effort put into it.
If you happen to be a Wikipedia/GameFAQs editor/writer, maybe you'd be interested in the StrategyWiki project. They could use you...
(Full disclosure: I am a writer at StrategyWiki.)
Back in the day, they were hint books, had no maps, and were in the form of Q A1, A2, A3, and you had to use a chemical marker to unhide the actual answers.
The hint book for Kings Quest was awesome.
That, and the Final Fantasy 1 strategy guide.
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but that decline was expected as a cyclical moment, paralleling a transition in the industry to a new generation of advanced game consoles.
:(
This is the real news here. Instead of going crazy and blaming everything in sight for the decrease in sales, they recognize that sometimes sales just slow down.
It's sad that this is surprising to see.
there's a pattern that, if followed, will allow you to clear every board. It's pretty complicated too, I couldn't imagine committing it to memory, but then again I choke on the Tekken 5 movelist so...
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