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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."
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.