Prima Games is shutting down after 28-year run
The storied print guide publishing team at Prima Games will be closing the doors on their Roseville and Indianapolis offices by March 2019.
Sad news is circling the internet detailing the closure of one of gaming media's most storied strategy guide publishers. After 28 years in operation, it appears that Prima Games is shutting down, with two of the publisher's three main offices closing its doors within the next five months.
According to reports from EGM Now and GamesIndustry.biz, Penguin Random House has announced the "extremely difficult decision" to close down the United States offices of Prima Games, effective in 2019. Details seem to indicate that an untold number of employees will be affected by the closure.
As it stands now, the Roseville office will be closed as of this November. The Indianapolis office is expected to stay operational all the way through March. We don't yet have concrete details on what will happen at the New York office, though it too is expected to close down sometime around the spring of 2019.
This is certainly disheartening news not only for the company's employees and stockholders, but also for fans of print-based strategy guides. Prima Games has been a name in the industry since 1990, and after a long and storied rivalry with BradyGames, as well as a Penguin Random House merger in 2013, eventually came to be known as the de-facto brand of video game strategy guides.
A 2019 closure will mean the company was able to keep operations running for a full 28 years, creating something to the effect of 1,400 different strategy guides across five distinct console generations.
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replyKevin Tucker posted a new article, Prima Games is shutting down after 28-year run
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I thought it was all the youtube videos where a guy starts off yelling a thanks to all his followers for 5 minutes before showing you the 2 second thing you googled.
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Wonder what this will mean for E-Guides, maybe they will let us download them?
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I assume you mean the ones that were webpages hosted from their site? I wondered that too.
Ironic how dead trees win again.
My favorite is that there's this 11th century printed text called the Domesday Book. It's basically a census of 11th century England and it's proven invaluable over the years to historians because people just didn't write this shit down much over the years and here's where someone did just that.
In the 80's for the 900th anniversary of the book the BBC made a digital multimedia version for computers for various reasons not the least of which was the fact that the 900 year old paper book was going to be dust some day.
The only problem was: they made it using LV-ROM discs (basically Laserdiscs). LV-ROM drives never took off, manufacturers stopped making them, and the ones in existence eventually stopped working, leaving a vanishingly small number of them in existence. And this was Laserdisc, it's not like you could just dump some files off of it and burn them to a CD, it was a combination of video data and some digital overlaid text, all stored in the analog signal format Laserdiscs used.
So at some point it was basically impractical to view this multimedia digital edition any longer. Meanwhile the paper edition continued to work just fine (albeit, not something just anyone can go thumb through).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BBC_Domesday_Project
Today the project has been preserved through various emulation efforts and websites housing the information but the original 80's project is pretty much the textbook case of digital obsolescence.
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