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Strategy Guide Company Prima Games Is Shutting Down (kotaku.com)
Prima Games, the publishing company that has printed video game strategy guides since it was founded in 1990, is shutting down. "The label will no longer publish new guides starting now, and it will officially shutter in the spring," reports Kotaku. From the report: Thanks to the rise of sites like GameFAQs -- and major gaming publications like IGN commissioning their own online guides, which bring in monstrous amounts of traffic -- print strategy guides have struggled for years now. In 2015, Prima purchased and swallowed its biggest competitor, BradyGames, and has been consistently churning out guides for both print and the web, but it wasn't enough to survive what the company called "a significant decline" in the world of print video game guides.
Yes, I got stuck a lot. All the time, in fact. But if I had a glossy guidebook to consult each time, I'd beat the expensive game in no time. What's the point of that? Is a game purchased in order to beat it as quickly as possible? Anyone who does that has completely missed the point. Plus the guidebook cost *extra* money, so you were wasting even more money to get less challenge/enjoyment from the main product...
If you have never walked around helplessly in Hyrule for weeks, looking for that item to get you past an obstacle, you also won't know the pleasure of eventually finding it. That was the actual game -- the feeling of a vast virtual world where you are thrown in and have to attempt to figure it out. Not just looking it up in some book or digital text file.
There were even hugely popular "cheating devices" that went even further, by allowing you to get unlimited lives/continues/power/HP/ammo, etc. I cannot understand the mentality of people who bought and used those things.
I played SC2000 today and can verify that such strategy guides were useful long ago. Now a days where games can be updated, print is simply the worst choice to convey relevant information. Your entire publication can be rendered useless in an instant after a nerf update.