https://www.gematsu.com/2024/08/game-informer-shuts-down-after-33-years
Game Informer, the longest running video games magazine in the United States, will shut down after 33 years of operation, the publication announced.
Indeed. Its sad to see a reputable name go before something far less reputable, like Kotaku for example.
I guess it must be true, hate clicks and outrage do generate more revenue than real, genuine gaming articles written with pretty good journalistic integrity.
eh, kotaku has some solid articles and reporting as well. gaming journalism in general is incestuous shit but most of the anti-kotaku sentiment comes from goonergate shit
The hilarious thing about you getting downvotes immediately is Kotaku led the reporting on this news this morning. Link is in the posted article, y'all.
Of course Kotaku is going to report on it. They want in on the outrage of companies firing employees that has been happening lately.
They were throwing temper tantrums over the owner of Kotaku telling them that they needed to write more gaming guides/articles instead of the social culture outrage garbage they had been spewing that tarnished their reputation. Imagine working for a gaming media outlet, and then getting mad when the owner tells you that you need to focus on gaming articles.
They were throwing temper tantrums over the owner of Kotaku telling them that they needed to write more gaming guides/articles instead of the social culture outrage garbage they had been spewing that tarnished their reputation.
So these attacks are gamergate garbage, thanks.
Nah, Kotaku had a shit reputation for years before gamergate got shat into existence. Their reporting was sloppy and often wrong, most of them sucked at the games they were reviewing, they spammed out vapid clickbait articles about nothing to farm ad rev. The only reason people respect them now is because they were positioned opposite gamergate, as if two things can't both suck.
You're joking, right? Pre-2012, it was one of the most visited sites on the internet and in the top 20 gaming sites. They weren't some no-name blog. Then after they hired Totilo, their shitty pop-tabloid reporting became so infamous even Forbes had articles about it, well before gamergate was ever a thing. This all used to be sourced info on the wiki page.
a reputable name
?
they were wholly owned by gamestop. their magazine was a lever to drive gamestop subscriptions and upsells. y'all worried about kotaku crack me up, if there were real ethics in game journalism a supposedly independent publication reviewing the products wouldn't be owned by the largest vendor of the products.
If you actually read their interviews and reviews you will see that it is way more in-depth than any YouTube essays or twitch streams. It sucks that those things attract more people because I get way more informed at an objective level with GI articles and similar podcasts.
I wouldn’t say better, if you didn’t like them in their earlier days then I doubt you would like them now. To me, they just provided more thorough insights into the games than random YouTuber or Reddit comment section.
Eh.... they were beholden to the games industry as much as any publication, and perhaps more due to their ownership.
yeah i meant work as in interesting content rather than journalism. never referred to GI for reviews but they had fun content.
that's fair. I suspect their relationship with gamestop, which had it's own mini-e3 for a while, led to a ton of great content discovery that many journalists didn't get access to back in the day.
Fuck. It was one of the few remaining good videogame-related publications. They will be sorely missed.
Where to go from here?
I remember absolutely being a fanboy in the 90s. It was so much better than it's rivals like EGM and GamePro.
But around 2005, either I aged out of it or the magazine got worse. Then I remember GameStop giving it for free at some point. I just remember it being a shell of a shell of a magazine, as the rest of the gaming industry moved to gaming blogs.
The Gamestop deal would have been 2002-ish. I actually hadn't heard of the magazine before we started pushing it in the store. With Game Informer's features mirroring our store marketing, it was the first time I realized how incestuous the industry was (easy to see the signs of it now when looking back at even older mags). The bizarre amount of coverage it had on the PS2 game State of Emergency was one example from the time. It's wild to me to hear it being called reputable here and elsewhere today when it had such a fundamental conflict of interest for the vast majority of its run.
You're totally right.
I was in middle school when I had fond memories of gaming mags, and that's probably when I was the most infatuated by the publications.
And by high school (2000s) it was getting weird and slowly dropping off.
At some point was the whole Kotaku gamergate BS and completely checked out of gaming news because it wasn't just weird, but then it got real racist/sexist.
I remember their reviews being fairly good, once you accepted that 70 was a minimal passing grade.
They were surely paid for coverage but I don't recall anything being wildly undeserved. At least once you got to their 9s and 10s anyways.
I'm kind of in the same boat as you. My mainstay for the longest time was RockPaperShotgun, probably from 2008–2016 or thereabouts. Once the old guard left the quality of the site drastically changed, and it became significant shallower in terms of reviews. Not really sure where to get the same kind of journalism these days.
When a business is closing many of its stores and shutting down a subsidiary that has been around for 30+ years with a pretty reputable name (instead of selling it, for example), thats usually a sign that the business is going to go bye bye in the near future.
the mag has been a loss leader used to drive traffic into the stores for preorders. it was always pretty slanted, I suspect it's just been too expensive (as have all printed magazines lately) with too few subscribers to justify the outlay.
GameStop has sucked for a very long time and I’m astounded that so many people holding out hope for a meme stock to GO TO THE MOOOON again think it’s going to last.
Support local stores, death to GameStop
I'm not really holding out hope for anything, and I don't own Gamestop stock.
I just don't think that Game Informer closing down is the death knell of Gamestop.
That’s fair! I was part of the initial explosion of the stock, and sold the same day. The cult of GameStop loonies is still holding out hope to this day… it’s wild.
My local stores are less reliable when it comes to used games working. GameStop has always been reliable in my experience.
Well, probably should go archive the old crew Super Replays. Hearing Dan's laugh as Reiner loses his shit at him is like an old comfort blanket.
Tim, Dan, and Reiner in any horror themed Super Replay is fantastic. I went through a really rough separation and I needed something happy-ish to fill the dead noise at night and found the Megaman Legends Super Replay and the rest is history.
I just signed up for their 2 year subscription deal, and always looked forward to getting my latest edition. Also listened to their podcast, which was great too. Super bummed about this.
Is there any way to read Game Internet online now (archive or whatever)?
I'd really love to check out the Vampire Survivors interview from the final issue.