Ubisoft Says No More Game Manuals

thsoundman writes with this excerpt from The Gamers Blog: "No more manuals? Ubisoft announced last week that they will be ditching the trend of printing instruction manuals for new games under the 'green' initiative. While no other publishers have jumped on that 'green' train just yet, it is likely that others will follow suit. Printed manuals have been part of gaming since you bought PC games in plastic bags. There have been many standout eras for manuals, such as the NES-era booklets to the manuals that accompanied Electronic Arts vinyl-sized game sleeves. Some may argue that the advancement in on-screen contextual commands and first-level tutorials have made the manual pointless, but is this really the case?"

Comments

Re:Has anybody read a modern game manual?

[ProppaT]

It's funny, modern instruction manuals are....worthless. There's about 10 pages of front matter, including boilerplate information from the console manufacturer (controller configuration, seizure warnings, etc), ToC, etc. Then there's about 5-10 pages on the actual game. Then once you start the game you go through 30minutes to an hour of non-skippable tutorial. It's obnoxious. How many different ways can you explain to someone to hit the button to jump and the other one to shoot?

I remember, back when games were much simpler, even stupidly simple games would have much larger instruction books. Dare I say they were even fun to read? They were full of story, jokes, cool art, etc. To this day, I have all the instruction books for my old NES and SNES games. I wouldn't buy a game without them. Now I couldn't care less about them. Which is sad to say because I write technical manuals for a living. I'd be lying if I said that videogame instruction books weren't influential in me going down this career path.