I really enjoy reading through the Prima guides of my favorite games, but it makes sense that they're shutting down since everyone just looks shit up online now
I actually bought a guide from them for Company of Heroes way back in the days. It was pretty neat. Though it was obvious this was gonna happen eventually.
It was only a matter of time, tbh. Sure it's nice to have something physical if you're into that but Prima never had a chance of competing against the internet.
Some of them make for nice collector's pieces, like the Collector's Editions of all the Fallout prima guides are gorgeous.
My pal used to have all of the GTA prima guides since GTA3.
We used to go round his house for a smoke and he'd make us do hunt GTA4s pigeons with the guide
Doesn't surprise me, but some of them will be missed.
I still have my Lego Star Wars II: The Original Trilogy Prima Guide, good memories <3
at least RDR2 got a guide before this
I still have their guide for Final Fantasy XI, which was out-of-date before it was released and contained some hilariously bad advice like suggesting that White Mage is a good subjob selection for Monk. But it's hard to blame them for such faults when writing about an MMO that was receiving constant updates. Trying to write a deadtree book about a live service is just asking for it.
Hell, the guide for Final Fantasy IX pretty much jumpstarted the trend of physical guides being seen as less useful compared to online ones. It was chopped up so damn much that it only had the bare essentials of information, with practically every page advertising to go to PlayOnline for the more full guide experience, which was a subscription service.
It took twenty years, but that backfire bit them in the ass.
Professionally-made player's guides are still useful even through the modern era with the internet. While some games do have intricate wikis that put the guides to shame, there were others where the fanbase just wasn't up to the task of putting together that info, or at least there was no way for the fanbase to collect all that info on their own within the first weeks of the game being out.
I still bought the guide for every Animal Crossing game when they came out, because I knew that no online source would have a full catalog of the game's content for a while after launch (since there's just so much stuff in those games). It's gonna be interesting to see if the time between a game's launch and that game's respective wiki/subreddit/GameFAQs page will increase significantly now that the last major player's guide publisher is gone.
I remember when I was young I begged my mom to buy me the Runescape guide at the schoolastic bookfair. It had it's fair share of misinformation, but I still loved it because I loved Runescape.
the printouts of the pokemon maps were always gorgeous. there was no way of getting a complete view of the map back then and there were lots of hidden areas.
I liked Prima Guides because of the extra non-walkthrough information they had. Ability stats to help character building, concept art, and especially those beautiful bestiaries some of them had really kept me interested.
I wouldn't be surprised if some of the people working here go onto working on gaming wikis and getting jobs making special-edition content for devs, honestly. I'm sad that it's happened like this though, I would have preferred to see them find a new niche.
I still have my copy for Pokemon Emerald floating around. I used that shit religiously as a kid, was how I first learned about the Regis and other little secrets like that, blew my young mind
I'm honestly more surprised it was still around than that it's shutting down. GameFaqs has basically been the go-to for most people for like a decade now, if not more.
Sign of the times, really. Either there's a collection of online resources or there's games like this.
https://files.facepunch.com/forum/upload/129/ee71437a-421b-4fae-9f24-73ab2ca5aee5/large[1].jpg
I think the last guide I bought from them was like back in 2000 for FFX
I remember buying super cheap Prima Guides when i was a kid (~$1-$2). The one for The Thing game came with a cool poster.
The end of an era
these were so good, they had such a good deal of quality to them
That was the first guide I considered buying in like 15 years. I only ever had them for Rockstar games
Not Prima, it was Piggyback.
I’ve been buying their online guides because they have been really useful for me. Sad to see it go
Figures it would happen eventually. I wonder if this means prices for old Prima guides is going to go up in the near future. I still have a few guides for old games from when I was a kid. Guess I had enough forethought to keep them as let's be honest, physical guides weren't going to stick around forever. It kind of sucks because for a lot of games they included some cool bits of lore and explanations for things you probably wouldn't have figured out just from playing it.
Such a shame. While they can't really compete with the ease of "just looking it up online for free" I simply loved how much detail went into the guides themselves. Not to mention having proper indexing and visual examples. A lot of them doubled as art books and had a lot of promotional art as well.
Rip. They provided quality guides. They should have moved to ad orientated content online.
I've got some bad new for you, buddy.
I remember buying their BF2142 guide as a kid. Come to think of it there was a passage encouraging readers to shit on people with the BF2 tags imported over because "we don't need know-it-all noobs!"
I have a lot of their books, especially for the Tomb Raider and Final Fantasy series. To be honest, I'm surprised that they're only now going out of business. I sort of assumed that they shut down years ago.
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