Honestly I haven't read Game Informer in a very, very long time. But during the 00s I was a subscriber and really enjoyed reading it. The internet was slower back then and a monthly publication...
Honestly I haven't read Game Informer in a very, very long time. But during the 00s I was a subscriber and really enjoyed reading it. The internet was slower back then and a monthly publication was still a viable option for staying in the loop on gaming news.
I remember, as a teen, I was determined to get a letter published in their Q&A section and I finally did. Looking back it's embarrassing because the letter was basically me predicting that the PSP would destroy the DS because Nintendo wasn't as focused on graphics as Sony was. A hilariously stupid take in retrospect, but I was 16.
RIP though. I kept most of my issues from that era and every now and then it's really fun to grab a few issues and just flip through them feel nostalgic. Print advertisements are almost a novelty at this point, so I don't even mind that 1/4 of the magazine was just ads anymore.
I am so glad I don't have access to the letters I wrote to gaming magazines when I was a kid! (I, uh, might have written a lot of them -- they were like proto-internet comments!) I loved reading...
I am so glad I don't have access to the letters I wrote to gaming magazines when I was a kid! (I, uh, might have written a lot of them -- they were like proto-internet comments!)
I loved reading gaming magazines back then, and I think they're a bit of a lost art at this point. Our access to information is SO good now, with instant and on-demand high resolution video of any game we could possibly want to know about, that it's hard to remember that there was a time where the only way to really "plug in" to a broad knowledge of games was through magazines and their tiny little screenshots.
I would read mine cover-to-cover, over-and-over again, devouring every word -- even if they were about games that I wasn't interested in. Getting a new issue in was like Christmas. New previews! New reviews! SO many new games to learn about! I would be excited at school all day when I knew a new one was coming in the mail.
My parents, I think, encouraged the habit because I was avidly reading. They thought that playing videogames was a form of brain rot, but reading about videogames was much more palatable to them. I had subscriptions to multiple magazines for many years, and would also pick up occasional single issues from bookstores.
I honestly think it was great for me at the time, developmentally. I spent untold hours reading them, and then I even started cutting my teeth by doing my own writing. At about age 12, I began composing my own videogame reviews in a big spiral notebook that I kept by my bed -- just like the ones I read in the magazines! After a good amount of those, I got up enough courage to start uploading them to GameFAQs. For a couple of years I reviewed games on that site and even wrote a few guides. I honestly think this was formative for me -- I probably wrote way more than most other kids my age because it felt so cool to me to try and craft fully formed, thoughtful opinions on what I was playing.
Separate from the reading and writing, I also think my extensive magazine habit has directly affected my gaming habits to this day. As a kid I didn't have control over my own money or purchases, and my parents didn't want to encourage my gaming habit too much, so I was pretty strictly metered on the actual games I could get. I would often go months without a new game (though they were less strict with letting me rent games for a weekend at Blockbuster -- remember that?).
Many of the magazines I got, however, came with demo discs. Like how I repeatedly read the magazines over and over again, I would repeatedly play these demo discs over and over again, hopping from game to game. Those small little snippets of a wide variety of games were more my gaming library than the few full titles I was allowed to have.
I say this affected my gaming habits, because, to this day, I describe myself as having "gaming wanderlust." I don't sit with single games for a long time (though I'm actively trying to get better at that). I play the first twenty or thirty minutes of them and then often move on to something else. My husband laughs at me (lovingly) because he's the complete opposite. He's a 1000+ hours in Civ V kind of guy and for him, putting, say, three hours into a game means he's just barely getting started.
For me? Three hours in the same game is like, a MARATHON gaming session. It's practically unheard of.
Just today I tried out maybe five or six different games on my Steam Deck. I didn't really like any of them, but it was still fun for me to spend a few minutes in each, see what it was about, and then move on to something else. I think I have my magazine obsession as a kid to thank for that.
Game Informer was one of the magazines I subscribed to for a bit. I absolutely get why it's shutting down (honestly, it's surprising it didn't happen sooner). The information environment that we're in has changed so drastically that magazines feel out of date in a really bad way. Still, seeing this news makes me a little sad and a lot nostalgic.
The amount of wonder and curiosity those screenshots gave me when I was younger and didn't understand capture cards as a concept. I was like...how on earth do they take such crisp screenshots of...
the only way to really "plug in" to a broad knowledge of games was through magazines and their tiny little screenshots
The amount of wonder and curiosity those screenshots gave me when I was younger and didn't understand capture cards as a concept. I was like...how on earth do they take such crisp screenshots of these games??? Camera's pointed at TVs at the time looked awful! The absolute best I could get at the time was recording fuzzy video to a VHS tape on my TV/VCR combo unit. It felt like complete magic to me that they could take those high-quality screenshots.
honestly think it was great for me at the time, developmentally. I spent untold hours reading them, and then I even started cutting my teeth by doing my own writing. At about age 12, I began composing my own videogame reviews in a big spiral notebook that I kept by my bed -- just like the ones I read in the magazines! After a good amount of those, I got up enough courage to start uploading them to GameFAQs.
Ha! I also did this, but with game guides. I wrote a good half-dozen game guides for GameFAQs in my teens. Mostly for Harvest Moon games (as "HMKing" if anyone read those). It helped me develop the skills for putting together good documentation and instructions that I still use to this day as a programmer! Not to mention it helped me develop a comedic voice through my writing that has helped me a lot in DMing D&D games as an adult.
I miss demo discs, they were so much fun. I wish I'd kept all my copies of PC Gamer from the 90s and 2000s, but I would've struggled to find space for them. My brother used to have that copy from...
I miss demo discs, they were so much fun. I wish I'd kept all my copies of PC Gamer from the 90s and 2000s, but I would've struggled to find space for them. My brother used to have that copy from the late 90s with Duke Nukem on the front and the headline "Miss Me?" - this was back when Duke Nulem Forever was only a couple of years behind schedule, hahaha.
Haha, I had a very similar thing happen! Don’t worry about the embarrassment, others did it too! And yeah, I’m with you, I had a subscription for quite a while. I was stuck on dial up internet...
Haha, I had a very similar thing happen! Don’t worry about the embarrassment, others did it too! And yeah, I’m with you, I had a subscription for quite a while. I was stuck on dial up internet until 2008, so I got all my gaming news from magazines or from xplay and attack of the show. I’m not sure I have any old issues anymore, but next time I’m at my mom’s, I should check!
Not that stupid if you ask me! Graphics were a big selling point around that time. Final Fantasy X comes to mind as the immediate stand out. That game was so far ahead of the curve graphically...
Not that stupid if you ask me! Graphics were a big selling point around that time. Final Fantasy X comes to mind as the immediate stand out. That game was so far ahead of the curve graphically that it sold itself.
And it even sort of reverberates into today! Perhaps not graphics directly, but the performance of the Switch is so abysmal in comparison to the other consoles it's not even part of the conversation anymore. It used to be people talked about the Xbox, PlayStation or GameCube winning the console war.
That's not to say the Switch isn't doing well, but it's an afterthought at best. Hell, they're often named in the same breath as the Steam Deck and that device beats the Switch by a country mile.
That’s a strange way to frame it. By the usual metric, if anything the Switch is the winner of the last generation of console wars. And it wasn’t all that close. Moreover, Nintendos best move was...
That’s a strange way to frame it. By the usual metric, if anything the Switch is the winner of the last generation of console wars. And it wasn’t all that close.
Moreover, Nintendos best move was to get out of that rat race. Both the Xbox and PlayStation have major issues actually differentiating their product when they’ve both evolved to just be x86 boxes with AMD silicon. Nintendo has by far the highest margin on their console for a reason, and it’s because they’ve made something that consumers buy not because of pure specs, which is easy to become a race to the bottom.
Frankly, I love that Nintendo saw the writing on the wall that the race for top graphics and power had a natural end point for most consumers. Now that we're at peak 3D, increased realism and...
Frankly, I love that Nintendo saw the writing on the wall that the race for top graphics and power had a natural end point for most consumers.
Now that we're at peak 3D, increased realism and detail aren't going to push sales by the leaps and bounds they once did. Mid power first party games with a quality gameplay loop plus downloadable indies and retro inspired titles was a smart business plan for the on the go gamer.
That is a very odd argument. The Switch is the 3rd highest selling platform of all time, only behind the DS and PS2. Nintendo's philosophy was started more than 2 decades ago when they created the...
That is a very odd argument.
The Switch is the 3rd highest selling platform of all time, only behind the DS and PS2.
Nintendo's philosophy was started more than 2 decades ago when they created the Gamecube. Their philosophy was "we want our product to be attractive to someone that already owns an Xbox or PS2, at a price point where you can have afford to add a Gamecube to your list of toys" and that really has been their strategy for 20-some years now. Of all the people I know with a current gen or last gen Xbox or PlayStation, all but one of them has a Switch. I'm a PC gamer, and I have a Switch (although it was a gift. I'd have never bought it for myself). I know people without an Xbox, PlayStation, or gaming PC, and they have a Switch. Switch has dominated platform sales for the last 7 years
I'm not surprised to see a magazine dying in this day and age, but this particular magazine dying makes me the saddest. Like others here and on other parts of the internet, Game Informer was my...
I'm not surprised to see a magazine dying in this day and age, but this particular magazine dying makes me the saddest. Like others here and on other parts of the internet, Game Informer was my gateway to the broader gaming industry. They were a huge cornerstone of my interest in the hobby. I am appreciative of all the work put in to it over the years, and I wish all of the success possible for those who are now finding themselves out of work.
There's this from IGN -- https://www.ign.com/articles/game-informer-to-shut-down-after-33-years Although it's not really much more informative. Just a few related tweets from folks impacted by the...
Although it's not really much more informative. Just a few related tweets from folks impacted by the shut down and some historical info about Game Informer.
Not really, their site has the same post: https://www.gameinformer.com/ Probably gotta wait for actual journalists to report on things, I'm... not one of those.
only hint from reports right now is "Gamestop brought them in and shut them down". GME is well past its meme stock days, so this is probably just more aftershocks of its collapse.
only hint from reports right now is "Gamestop brought them in and shut them down". GME is well past its meme stock days, so this is probably just more aftershocks of its collapse.
Honestly I haven't read Game Informer in a very, very long time. But during the 00s I was a subscriber and really enjoyed reading it. The internet was slower back then and a monthly publication was still a viable option for staying in the loop on gaming news.
I remember, as a teen, I was determined to get a letter published in their Q&A section and I finally did. Looking back it's embarrassing because the letter was basically me predicting that the PSP would destroy the DS because Nintendo wasn't as focused on graphics as Sony was. A hilariously stupid take in retrospect, but I was 16.
RIP though. I kept most of my issues from that era and every now and then it's really fun to grab a few issues and just flip through them feel nostalgic. Print advertisements are almost a novelty at this point, so I don't even mind that 1/4 of the magazine was just ads anymore.
I am so glad I don't have access to the letters I wrote to gaming magazines when I was a kid! (I, uh, might have written a lot of them -- they were like proto-internet comments!)
I loved reading gaming magazines back then, and I think they're a bit of a lost art at this point. Our access to information is SO good now, with instant and on-demand high resolution video of any game we could possibly want to know about, that it's hard to remember that there was a time where the only way to really "plug in" to a broad knowledge of games was through magazines and their tiny little screenshots.
I would read mine cover-to-cover, over-and-over again, devouring every word -- even if they were about games that I wasn't interested in. Getting a new issue in was like Christmas. New previews! New reviews! SO many new games to learn about! I would be excited at school all day when I knew a new one was coming in the mail.
My parents, I think, encouraged the habit because I was avidly reading. They thought that playing videogames was a form of brain rot, but reading about videogames was much more palatable to them. I had subscriptions to multiple magazines for many years, and would also pick up occasional single issues from bookstores.
I honestly think it was great for me at the time, developmentally. I spent untold hours reading them, and then I even started cutting my teeth by doing my own writing. At about age 12, I began composing my own videogame reviews in a big spiral notebook that I kept by my bed -- just like the ones I read in the magazines! After a good amount of those, I got up enough courage to start uploading them to GameFAQs. For a couple of years I reviewed games on that site and even wrote a few guides. I honestly think this was formative for me -- I probably wrote way more than most other kids my age because it felt so cool to me to try and craft fully formed, thoughtful opinions on what I was playing.
Separate from the reading and writing, I also think my extensive magazine habit has directly affected my gaming habits to this day. As a kid I didn't have control over my own money or purchases, and my parents didn't want to encourage my gaming habit too much, so I was pretty strictly metered on the actual games I could get. I would often go months without a new game (though they were less strict with letting me rent games for a weekend at Blockbuster -- remember that?).
Many of the magazines I got, however, came with demo discs. Like how I repeatedly read the magazines over and over again, I would repeatedly play these demo discs over and over again, hopping from game to game. Those small little snippets of a wide variety of games were more my gaming library than the few full titles I was allowed to have.
I say this affected my gaming habits, because, to this day, I describe myself as having "gaming wanderlust." I don't sit with single games for a long time (though I'm actively trying to get better at that). I play the first twenty or thirty minutes of them and then often move on to something else. My husband laughs at me (lovingly) because he's the complete opposite. He's a 1000+ hours in Civ V kind of guy and for him, putting, say, three hours into a game means he's just barely getting started.
For me? Three hours in the same game is like, a MARATHON gaming session. It's practically unheard of.
Just today I tried out maybe five or six different games on my Steam Deck. I didn't really like any of them, but it was still fun for me to spend a few minutes in each, see what it was about, and then move on to something else. I think I have my magazine obsession as a kid to thank for that.
Game Informer was one of the magazines I subscribed to for a bit. I absolutely get why it's shutting down (honestly, it's surprising it didn't happen sooner). The information environment that we're in has changed so drastically that magazines feel out of date in a really bad way. Still, seeing this news makes me a little sad and a lot nostalgic.
The amount of wonder and curiosity those screenshots gave me when I was younger and didn't understand capture cards as a concept. I was like...how on earth do they take such crisp screenshots of these games??? Camera's pointed at TVs at the time looked awful! The absolute best I could get at the time was recording fuzzy video to a VHS tape on my TV/VCR combo unit. It felt like complete magic to me that they could take those high-quality screenshots.
Ha! I also did this, but with game guides. I wrote a good half-dozen game guides for GameFAQs in my teens. Mostly for Harvest Moon games (as "HMKing" if anyone read those). It helped me develop the skills for putting together good documentation and instructions that I still use to this day as a programmer! Not to mention it helped me develop a comedic voice through my writing that has helped me a lot in DMing D&D games as an adult.
I miss demo discs, they were so much fun. I wish I'd kept all my copies of PC Gamer from the 90s and 2000s, but I would've struggled to find space for them. My brother used to have that copy from the late 90s with Duke Nukem on the front and the headline "Miss Me?" - this was back when Duke Nulem Forever was only a couple of years behind schedule, hahaha.
Haha, I had a very similar thing happen! Don’t worry about the embarrassment, others did it too! And yeah, I’m with you, I had a subscription for quite a while. I was stuck on dial up internet until 2008, so I got all my gaming news from magazines or from xplay and attack of the show. I’m not sure I have any old issues anymore, but next time I’m at my mom’s, I should check!
Not that stupid if you ask me! Graphics were a big selling point around that time. Final Fantasy X comes to mind as the immediate stand out. That game was so far ahead of the curve graphically that it sold itself.
And it even sort of reverberates into today! Perhaps not graphics directly, but the performance of the Switch is so abysmal in comparison to the other consoles it's not even part of the conversation anymore. It used to be people talked about the Xbox, PlayStation or GameCube winning the console war.
That's not to say the Switch isn't doing well, but it's an afterthought at best. Hell, they're often named in the same breath as the Steam Deck and that device beats the Switch by a country mile.
That’s a strange way to frame it. By the usual metric, if anything the Switch is the winner of the last generation of console wars. And it wasn’t all that close.
Moreover, Nintendos best move was to get out of that rat race. Both the Xbox and PlayStation have major issues actually differentiating their product when they’ve both evolved to just be x86 boxes with AMD silicon. Nintendo has by far the highest margin on their console for a reason, and it’s because they’ve made something that consumers buy not because of pure specs, which is easy to become a race to the bottom.
Frankly, I love that Nintendo saw the writing on the wall that the race for top graphics and power had a natural end point for most consumers.
Now that we're at peak 3D, increased realism and detail aren't going to push sales by the leaps and bounds they once did. Mid power first party games with a quality gameplay loop plus downloadable indies and retro inspired titles was a smart business plan for the on the go gamer.
That is a very odd argument.
The Switch is the 3rd highest selling platform of all time, only behind the DS and PS2.
Nintendo's philosophy was started more than 2 decades ago when they created the Gamecube. Their philosophy was "we want our product to be attractive to someone that already owns an Xbox or PS2, at a price point where you can have afford to add a Gamecube to your list of toys" and that really has been their strategy for 20-some years now. Of all the people I know with a current gen or last gen Xbox or PlayStation, all but one of them has a Switch. I'm a PC gamer, and I have a Switch (although it was a gift. I'd have never bought it for myself). I know people without an Xbox, PlayStation, or gaming PC, and they have a Switch. Switch has dominated platform sales for the last 7 years
I'm not surprised to see a magazine dying in this day and age, but this particular magazine dying makes me the saddest. Like others here and on other parts of the internet, Game Informer was my gateway to the broader gaming industry. They were a huge cornerstone of my interest in the hobby. I am appreciative of all the work put in to it over the years, and I wish all of the success possible for those who are now finding themselves out of work.
That's really content-free beyond "we're closing." Does anyone have more context?
There's this from IGN -- https://www.ign.com/articles/game-informer-to-shut-down-after-33-years
Although it's not really much more informative. Just a few related tweets from folks impacted by the shut down and some historical info about Game Informer.
Not really, their site has the same post: https://www.gameinformer.com/
Probably gotta wait for actual journalists to report on things, I'm... not one of those.
only hint from reports right now is "Gamestop brought them in and shut them down". GME is well past its meme stock days, so this is probably just more aftershocks of its collapse.