[HN Gopher] Game Informer shutting down after 33 years
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Game Informer shutting down after 33 years
Author : bookofjoe
Score : 91 points
Date : 2024-08-03 15:55 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.theverge.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.theverge.com)
| lifeisstillgood wrote:
| But I thought GameStop stock, the meme-y one beloved by Matt
| Levine was riding high. Surely GameStop has sold enough stock to
| meme-y retail Investors to afford a couple of yachts for each
| board member and keep a game magazine going - send a free copy to
| every stock owner surely ? What a waste of marketing
| kortilla wrote:
| > Investors to afford a couple of yachts for each board member
|
| Board members generally hold stock and don't receive large cash
| payments from the company. The board represents the
| shareholders so there would be a massive conflict of interest
| if they made more money from the company in cash than from
| shares.
| lifeisstillgood wrote:
| The point I was making is that an irrational rise in your
| stock price is the perfect time to sell stock in order to
| capture that rise - it's almost a fiduciary duty. So selling
| 100 million of inflated stock should give them the
| opportunity to fund a lot of marketing projects, focus on the
| underlying business - not to cut costs and hope to survive.
| Either you believe there is a world for real world shops in a
| market dominated by Steam or you give the keys to the stores
| back.
| dwighttk wrote:
| Beloved by Matt Levine?
|
| It's been a a few weeks since I read him but do you mean
| something more than beloved for providing grist for the "look
| at this absurd thing" mill?
| lifeisstillgood wrote:
| Beloved as in "writes about quite a lot, snorts derisively
| too, but still it's stuff like this that gets the readers in,
| so beloved, yeah maybe."
| eropple wrote:
| If anyone reads anything Matt Levine writes about GME and
| goes "ooh, I want that", they have conclusively failed at
| literacy, both media and mathematical.
| ThinkBeat wrote:
| Was the magazine any good?
| kevingadd wrote:
| It was always kind of undermined by being tied to GameStop, but
| they did serious journalism from time to time and would have
| detailed behind-the-scenes/preview pieces and exclusive
| announcements. I can't remember ever seeing anything bad
| published by them, unlike some other outlets, even if I didn't
| visit their website regularly
| rootsudo wrote:
| I never thought so. I considered it fluff when getting a
| Gamestop Pro membership. I'm surprised that so many people here
| considered it a high piece of journalism. The Pro membership
| did pay for itself, in some effect but after once or twice, I
| did not renew the subscription and went out of gaming entirely.
|
| Imagine that, a magazine, marketing puffery designed to push
| the very product that said store was selling - is going to be
| missed.
|
| But then again people had the same outcry when, say, the Sears
| Catalog went away.
|
| --
|
| As for magazines I personally missed, Nintendo Power, EGM,
| Playstation Magazine were all of a higher _tier_ and quality,
| and I 'm sure I'm aging myself there. :)
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| [dupe]
|
| Some more discussion:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41141260
| xyst wrote:
| Seems like "gaming journalism" has been replaced by independent
| journalists or random social media "influencers". Mostly the
| latter.
|
| Gaming mags like Game Informer used to be the premier source of
| gaming industry news - exclusive interviews with publishers and
| studios, and game reviews. The reception of these quality
| articles largely determined the success of games.
|
| But now? Just buy off a few "influencers" with significant
| following, have them play through the happy path, review, edit
| and approve videos for positive vibes.
|
| Formula for success. No need to push out quality anymore. Keep
| milking the cash cow game series.
|
| Very hard to find a good game these days. Have to sift through at
| least a dozen of shit games in the marketplace before settling on
| something half decent.
| Spivak wrote:
| > Just buy off a few "influencers" with significant following
|
| If it was that easy there would be no unsuccessful games.
|
| > Very hard to find a good game these days
|
| Hard hard disagree. We're drowning in great games. The 90% of
| everything is shit rule is the same as it's always been so I'm
| sympathetic to having to sift through hay but there are more
| needles than ever before.
| zoogeny wrote:
| > No need to push out quality anymore
|
| At some point in my life I started watching people play games
| on YouTube far more than I play games myself. There are a
| handful of channels I follow where the creator (influencer?)
| plays a wide variety of new games completely uncut. Very often,
| for a single game there are 100+ 30 minute videos of the entire
| game.
|
| I find this kind of deep-dive into the game to be invaluable.
| Good creators/influencers make it abundantly clear when they
| are taking a sponsorship. It is also usually clear when a
| sponsored game gets 4 videos (total of 2 hours of content) how
| the creator feels, even if they don't explicitly criticize the
| game. Although, the better creators will offer unbiased
| opinions even on sponsored content.
|
| When I compare this to the vast majority of gaming "journalism"
| that I grew up with, I am more than happy with the new status
| quo.
| DataDaoDe wrote:
| Just out of curiosity about the gaming journalism you are
| talking about, what gaming era did you grow up in? For
| instance, for me it was the mid 90s to early 2000s, the days
| of the demo cds, etc. Somehow the whole watching other people
| play games movement missed me, not saying that's good or bad,
| maybe its just an artifact of my own life and has little to
| do with my generation in general.
| zoogeny wrote:
| I grew up with magazines (and demo CDs) before the
| Internet. I worked for a while in the game industry, so
| I've always kept up with it.
|
| I just don't have time to play another 100+ hour RPG or
| slog my way through a FromSoftware game, but I do want to
| keep tabs on what is being done. Sampling 5 or 6 hours of
| the 100 hours of gameplay for games I know I am unlikely to
| purchase was a compromise. Then it became a habit. I now
| definitely spend more time watching people play new release
| games than watching Netflix, etc.
|
| And this habit has resulted in me buying and enjoying games
| I never would have found otherwise.
| alex_suzuki wrote:
| Your mention of demo CDs just made me extremely nostalgic
| for the days where I played Star Wars: Rebel Assault,
| loaded from a CD-ROM in a single-speed Mitsumi drive. The
| loading times were probably atrocious but the graphics were
| cool...
| bobthepanda wrote:
| I'm into it from like an eSports perspective, but I will
| say that streamed gameplay is a pretty good preview
| indicator for games that don't have demos. Streamers can be
| biased, but there are fundamental things they cannot fake,
| like say how pleasant the UX is.
|
| Demos are limited in that often they're a short snippet of
| game and may not be indicative of the whole thing.
| Barrin92 wrote:
| >Good creators/influencers make it abundantly clear when they
| are taking a sponsorship
|
| The issues aren't sponsorships which are always obvious, it's
| that content creators are by the very nature of their
| business model completely audience captured. They don't
| review things that aren't going to get them clicks on their
| channels, and if they do they're unlikely to give a truly
| controversial opinion that conflicts with the views of their
| audience or sours the relationships with a publisher.
|
| That is the real value of journalism, gaming or otherwise.
| There's a firewall between the audience and the writer and
| there's institutional power that gives writers independence.
| Content creators are, the overwhelming amount of the time,
| just an amplified version of their median audience member
| which is why companies love them much more than journalists,
| and it also means there's zero signal in what they say.
| zoogeny wrote:
| I think you may be underestimating the degree to which
| reviewers were captured by the publishers. It was a pretty
| big meme back in the day, where AAA titles pretty much
| always got a 7 or more. The incentive back in the days of
| magazines was early access to games. If your magazine
| didn't have the newest blockbuster on the cover along with
| an in-depth review then your magazine wouldn't sell. That
| meant that you had to have a relationship with the
| publisher, a relationship that would get chilly if you
| didn't consistently give the publisher good reviews.
|
| I remember when Kotaku started (long before they were
| bought out) and they were lauded as being immune to this
| interference. Same with Giant Bomb, which has now changed
| hands many times.
|
| I'm not saying the current system is perfect - I'm just
| saying that my own preference has completely changed. I
| stopped reading game reviews probably a decade ago and now
| I have a small selection of creators who have proven
| themselves to me. They didn't do so by trying to be a
| YouTube equivalent of game journalism (ala TotalBiscuit or
| Zero Punctuation) but simply by playing thousands of games.
| The review is incidental, their primary focus is on playing
| the game.
|
| The days of listening to the opinion of someone who played
| the game for 5 hours in a rush to meet a deadline are gone
| for me. The days of someone shoe-horning reviews into
| gameplay/sound/ui/audio breakdowns are gone for me. For
| almost any game I care about there is someone who is just
| playing it, and I watch them play it, and decide for
| myself.
| RiverCrochet wrote:
| All those game mags in the 90's were riddled with ads. Plus I
| remember renting NES games from Blockbuster and other video
| game rental stores. 12:1 shit ratio was true then.
|
| Still, I think Game Informer was one of the better magazines,
| along with Video Games and Computer Entertainment.
|
| But the demise of print-based anything for games was rather
| obvious once broadband Internet became ubiquitous and online
| gaming became a real thing. I haven't touched a magazine let
| alone a video game magazine in over a decade. Doesn't mean
| they're not cool to have, or don't perform a valuable function,
| but I'm surprised it lasted this long.
| codebolt wrote:
| Just to confirm, I have strongly nostalgic memories of gaming
| magazines from the 90s, and recently decided to bring my 8
| year old son to the biggest international magazine shop in my
| northern European city in hopes of giving him a taste of the
| joy they brought me. But the selection these days is simply
| garbage. Only a couple of gaming magazines remain and they
| were very gimmicky with little journalism or substance.
| jart wrote:
| Influencers is such a better system. I think two things sealed
| the fate of gaming journalists: (1) the Internet killed
| journalism revenues, and (2) the Internet showed gaming
| journalists what their fans are really like. A lot of them
| couldn't handle the double whammy and spent their twilight
| years using all their power and influence to destroy their
| readership, sort of like how Hitler tried to destroy Germany on
| the way out. I wouldn't call that quality and I doubt anyone
| misses them.
| eropple wrote:
| In this analogy, _game journalists_ are your Hitler
| equivalent? I guess there 's an epistemic closure where it
| certainly wasn't The Gamers who decided to have a pretty
| massive case of "any woman in gamedev must be a slut and
| feminists are destroying video games" for half a decade, but
| that closure has little bearing on reality.
| radicalbyte wrote:
| > Very hard to find a good game these days
|
| Super Mario Wonder, Unicorn Overlord, Elden Ring, Hifi Rush,
| Monster Hunter World or Rise. Like A Dragon. Cyberpunk 2077.
|
| There are plenty of great games you just need to listen more to
| the fans (and small youtubers who share your tastes).
| jayd16 wrote:
| > The reception of these quality articles largely determined
| the success of games.
|
| Sure it's marketing but I don't think Game informer held any
| special sway that any other review didn't.
|
| Can you list an example where a review significantly changed a
| games reception?
| crooked-v wrote:
| Gaming journalism was never good in the first place. People
| like to dream about some supposed golden age there, but it was
| always 99% press releases and puff coverage designed to never
| acknowledge that any game could ever be bad.
|
| "Game doesn't run, and it also killed my cat. 6 out of 10."
| devjab wrote:
| I used to write for one of the bigger Danish gaming sites
| back near 2000. Some of my articles even made it to some of
| our national news papers which contracted particularly well
| written reviews back then. One of the first thing I was told
| by the bosses was that certain games needed a 8-10/10 or they
| would stop sending us review copies, and that was just how it
| was. It wasn't in anyway serious. One of my articles which
| ended up in Jyllands Posten was for a dogs life or whatever
| it was called and I had spent maybe 5 minutes playing the
| game. I think that was the reason my review got so popular,
| because I covered my ass by being creative writing it from a
| dogs perspective and basically saying nothing about the
| actual game. I also once gave temple of elemental evil 8/10
| even though it was so horribly bugged that it could barely
| run solely because I liked Trokia games.
|
| I was a teenager doing it as a side gig for paper route
| money, so it's not like my integrity was ever really in it.
| Nobody reading my reviews knew that, however, I was presented
| as an adult full time employee by the company. So yes, it was
| always pretty bad in a lot of places.
| valianteffort wrote:
| Play Elden Ring
| mikub wrote:
| As someone who mostly plays (J)RPG's nowadays, I have to say
| that there never was a better time for the genre. So many great
| new stuff and ideas, but also some incredible remakes that came
| out in the last few years.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| A lot of the difficulty finding good games is simple volume.
| The cost to build a game has come way down from a quarter
| century ago, and more people than ever who have an idea have
| fewer gatekeepers than ever putting that idea on your screen.
|
| In many ways this is good (consider Minecraft started as a
| dream and a very clever price curve). But I think we have
| passed the event horizon where content comes out faster than it
| can be consumed.
| phendrenad2 wrote:
| I think this is out of touch with reality. Nobody is "buying
| off" influencers (except for scummy gatcha games). And
| companies are still making quality games. I think what happened
| is gaming companies started targeting younger audiences. If you
| grew up playing Doom II or Quake you probably won't want to re-
| experience new games that are made for kids. You want games
| made for you, in your 30s or whatever. But they don't exist, or
| if they do, they're poorly made.
| lupusreal wrote:
| Those influencers are for sale but they're still more reputable
| than the traditional media. For the most part they're not very
| good at faking enthusiasm for a bad game because they betray
| more genuine emotion in the video format they use, vs text-
| based mediums where it's trivial to lie with a straight face.
| lovethevoid wrote:
| No they aren't more reputable, they're cheaper and
| unfortunately have greater impact. A streamer playing a game
| to their 10k audience, despite the game being shit, will
| still result in guaranteed sales in a way that makes full
| blown marketing campaigns in traditional media pale in
| comparison.
|
| It literally doesn't matter how good or bad they are at
| acting, all that matters is the game gets coverage on their
| channel, that's exactly what the campaigns are paying them
| thousands for. Yes, thousands.
| lupusreal wrote:
| Reputable was the wrong word; the point is it's easier to
| tell when they're lying because their face is on camera.
| Written reviews don't have that.
|
| I can tell if a game is good or not by watching people play
| it. I haven't been duped yet. It's always obvious when the
| game is a stinker and the person playing it is straining to
| look like they're having fun.
| crngefest wrote:
| Game journalism was literal ads/dogshit. I used to buy them a
| lot for the free games included as kid but the reviews were
| laughably bad even at a time when there wasn't much of this
| content online available.
|
| Now you have excellent reviews by real people actually playing
| the game instead of some ,,journalist" pretending to.
|
| Good riddance, you won't be missed game journalism
| 42lux wrote:
| So GameStop comes in as the savior earlier and just as the CEO
| goes totally nuts on Twitter they release bad news after bad
| news. What a coincidence.
| monetus wrote:
| I don't reader twitter, thanks for posting a heads up.
| hnpolicestate wrote:
| I remember being wowed by the Dreamcast and Shenmu review. Good
| times.
| wildpeaks wrote:
| The Dishonored/Prey/Deathloop covers were wonderful:
| https://x.com/Sinnoware/status/1819421747399250198
| https://x.com/jlmonnet/status/1716026320822399158
|
| The Cyberpunk2077 AR one was amazing too:
| https://x.com/gamebowski/status/1281003400403042305
| phendrenad2 wrote:
| Gaming magazines were magical 30 years ago when game companies
| were black boxes. Games just appeared on shelves one day and you
| had to rely on the publisher's brand name as a guarantee of
| quality. Simpler times. You could maybe get a highly-
| editorialized sneak peak from a gaming mag a few months early.
|
| Now, it's almost like games are made in public. Everyone knows
| what you're working on thanks to leakers and court filings. Every
| developer's life is analyzed and used as fodder for the rumor
| mill. Companies are basically forced into early-access because
| the cost of a bad review by a prominent influencer post-launch is
| too high.
| layer8 wrote:
| > you had to rely on the publisher's brand name as a guarantee
| of quality
|
| I only relied on the pictures on the box. ;)
| phatfish wrote:
| "In March, Game Informer introduced out a way to subscribe to the
| magazine directly -- previously, you could only get the magazine
| by buying issues on their own or through a GameStop Pro
| subscription."
|
| Huh, that sounds crazy. Even back in the 90s subscriptions were
| common in the UK. I would get a 6 month/1 year sub to a magazine
| i liked for a birthday every now and then. There would always be
| a page trying to get readers to sub.
|
| I assumed this is how the likes of Edge still survive.
| kinlan wrote:
| I hope so, I'm seeing fewer and fewer stores stocking Edge
| magazine directly.
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