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Best-Seller Strategy Guides

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the last-one-i-bought-was-for-final-fantasy-vi dept.

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."

3 of 59 comments (clear)

  1. PacMan strategy guide by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Funny

    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!!!

    1. Re:PacMan strategy guide by RingDev · · Score: 3, Funny

      Don't forget a few polished screen shots and a bar chart showing the power difference between regular pacman and pacman after eating a big dot.

      -Rick

      --
      "Most people in the U.S. wouldn't know they live in a tyrannical state if it walked up and grabbed their junk." - MyFirs
  2. Final Fantasy 9 by voice_of_all_reason · · Score: 3, Funny

    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...

    View the rest of this post by visiting PlayOnline!