Comment

Comment on To the rapidly aging person reading this: GameFAQs is 30 years old, and people are sharing their memories of the venerable guide hub

<- View Parent

ampersandrew@lemmy.world ⁨18⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

I’m not convinced the market for strategy guides was “booming” by the time we got to 360, even if some existed. That was the same time manuals started to disappear, and it was even the generation before that that the obtuse moon logic of older games was discarded, I’d wager due to GameFAQs.

I’d imagine the reason we went back around to gaming outlets handling guides again is that there’s still a desire for text-based guides, but video guides have a monetary compensation to them that text-based guides on GameFAQs don’t when they’re crowdsourced. I sure miss being able to go to GameFAQs whenever I need to look up anything for a game in the past ~7 years or so.

source

Sort:hotnew top

Ashtear@piefed.social ⁨9⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
Something’s that’s easy to forget is barely half of US households were even online by the 360’s release. Under a third had broadband. Even the Nintendo Power hotline ran until 2010.

I sold thousands of book guides at Gamestop, and the retailers also pushed them because they were higher margin than the games themselves. Yes, back then, the gaming enthusiasts knew GameFAQs was the place for info, but the mass market? The vast majority still got their info from guides and magazines, or word-of-mouth.

It’s like social media adoption. The mass market didn’t jump in until a generation later.

source
MudMan@fedia.io ⁨18⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
It's not a "even if some existed" thing, Prima operated until 2018. I personally remember preorder bundles with Prima guides for 360 era games and beyond. They published incredibly elaborate collector's hardbook guides (that honestly doubled as artbooks) for stuff like Twilight Princess and Halo 3, all the way to the PS4 gen.

Even granting that "booming" is probably a bit hyperbolic, if GameFAQs being free in 1995 was going to kill them, bleeding out would probably not have taken 23 years. The death of retail, print and physical games probably hurt print guides way more than GameFAQs ever did. You didn't buy those because you were in a hurry to solve a puzzle or look up a special move. They were collectibles and art books first and foremost.

FWIW, guides going back to paid professionals wasn't as much due to video. Video is still crowdsourced for that stuff. It was visual guides in html with a bunch of images and reference, I think. At least that's what IGN was doing, and they're the ones that went hard on that front first. Also for the record, that probably had something to do with IGN and GameFAQs being affiliated for a while. GameFAQs was bought off by CNET in '03, it was definitely part of the big online gaming press ecosystem. I can see how IGN thought they could do better.

source
- ampersandrew@lemmy.world ⁨17⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  Alright, sure, a pivot to the collector’s market makes sense, but it makes sense in the same way that GameStop pivoted to Funko Pops, you know? Neither GameStop nor Funko is bankrupt yet, but it’s pretty clear what caused their decline.
  
  FWIW, guides going back to paid professionals wasn’t as much due to video. Video is still crowdsourced for that stuff. It was visual guides in html with a bunch of images and reference, I think.
  
  Emphasis mine, that’s exactly my point. Video is crowdsourced and leads to revenue, while GameFAQs crowdsourced guides don’t. When I look up a YouTube answer to a question about the game I’m playing, and they have 4 minutes of preamble describing the problem before they show me the solution so that advertisers like their video better, it sure seems to explain the A->B. Speaking for myself, embedding images in guides never made them that much more useful to me, and the era we’re in now where the likes of IGN are taking over text based guides just leads to far more of them being incomplete and never finished.
  
  source
  - MudMan@fedia.io ⁨17⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
    Well, I'd argue if there was no money to be made, then CNET wouldn't have purchased GameFAQs. At the very least it served to bring people over to their media ecosystem, and I wanna say they did serve ads and affiliate links on the site proper (but adblocker is also old, so it's hard to tell).
    
    Video contributed, for sure. This is a process of many years, the whole thing was evolving at once. But the clean break idea that print guides existed and then GameFAQs came along and killed guides just doesn't fit the timeline at all. It's off by 5-10 years, at least. Guides weren't residual in the 00s when GameFAQs was at its peak and being bought as a company, they were doing alright. It'd take 10 years longer for them to struggle and 15 for them to disappear. You're two console gens off there. That's a lot. If guide makers like Prima were pivoting to collectible high end books out of desperation you'd expect that process to have failed faster than that.
    
    Instead they failed at the same time GameFAQs started to struggle and get superseded, so I'm more inclined to read that as them both being part of the same thing and the whole thing struggling together as we move towards video on media and digital on game publishing. That fits the timeline better, I think.
    
    In any case, it was what it was, and it's more enshittified now. I've been looking up a couple details on Blake Manor (which is good but buggy and flaky in pieces, so you may need some help even if you don't want to spoil yourself) and all you get is Steam forums and a couple of hard to navigate pages. The print guide/GameFAQs era was harder to search but more convenient, for sure.
    
    source
    ampersandrew@lemmy.world ⁨17⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
    
    Well, I’d argue if there was no money to be made, then CNET wouldn’t have purchased GameFAQs.
    
    I’ve heard lots about acquisitions of games media as they’ve nearly all gone independent lately, especially Giant Bomb, who was part of this family. CNET certainly believed it could make them money, but hardly any of this stuff made anyone any money as they changed hands multiple times. At the very least, it could benefit from economies of scale around securing ads in one deal and displaying them in multiple places, but advertisers paid out less for traditional ads on static web pages at the same time that video ad spending was increasing.
    
    But the clean break idea that print guides existed and then GameFAQs came along and killed guides just doesn’t fit the timeline at all. It’s off by 5-10 years, at least.
    
    It didn’t happen overnight, much like GameStop.
    
    source
    -> View More Comments