Before the internet and its abundance of Wikis and GameFAQs, if you needed to know all the details about a certain video game, your best bet would be a strategy guide. Prima Games stood as one of the most recognized publishers of that market, offering books that contained maps, secret locations, tips, and cheat codes for hundreds of games, ever since it was founded in 1990. After an "extremely difficult decision" by owner Penguin Random House, Prima Games will be shutting down next spring, after almost 29 years of creating physical game guides. Reportedly, the team at Prima will stay on until early 2019 in order to complete the last handful of books that they've been contracted to publish, the final of which appears to be one for Bioware's Anthem. All three of their offices in Roseville, Indianapolis, and New York, which employs at least 40 staff members will be closed by March 2019.

Source

 

[Song of storms]

Strategy guides aren't just to help you with a game: they are beautiful. Well, they're SUPPOSED to be beautiful, but many publishers just copypaste a random Gamefaqs guide and calls it a day. I don't know about them particularly.

 

[pedro702]

well with walkthroughs and youtube and such, its amazing they lasted this long.

 

[Scarlet]

Sad, I loved their hardback Zelda guides.

 

[comput3rus3r]

Yeah I have the mario kart 8 guide and the Smash Brothers and they're really nice. Sad to see them go.

 

[MushGuy]

It's a bummer that this is happening. They went from making unauthorized guides to making official guides with high quality content. I wonder who will succeed Prima now.

 

[Volttekka]

Good riddance. Even if I didn't count the internet, I never really liked Prima's guides. Almost every one of them got at least one fact wrong, and that drove me up the wall.

 

[callmebob]

That sucks! Will they at least let their paid for E guides now be downloadable?

Already sucked that you had to be online to use them.

(edit) Wait is this only for the physical guides?? Maybe the online stays open??

 

[dimmidice]

Strategy guides aren't just to help you with a game: they are beautiful. Well, they're SUPPOSED to be beautiful, but many publishers just copypaste a random Gamefaqs guide and calls it a day. I don't know about them particularly.

Only ever bought one guide from them. But it was really nicely made. Shame you couldn't download them for offline use. But still.

 

[gameboy]

that final fantasy 9 guide was HORRIBLE. but the Pokemon guides are amazing.

the print quality of prima guides were second to none

edit, the ff9 guide was Brady Games lol
https://kotaku.com/the-worst-strategy-guide-ever-made-1702827492

 

[Rabbid4240]

I bet Ubisoft's gonna close down next

 

[the_randomizer]

I bet Ubisoft's gonna close down next

That'd be a shame

 

[ut2k4master]

I wonder who will succeed Prima now.

piggyback

 

[xtreme1]

guessing their web versions will be shut down too? I have a nice digital tales of xillia 2 guide from them

 

[Closet Nerd]

Nooooo

I always considered their guides more of a "collector's edition manual" than an end-all-be-all guide.

Too bad.

 

[BigPanda]

Sad, I purchased more than 20 eguides from primagames.com

 

[orangy57]

Damn, I still have mine for Banjo-Tooie. Those things were like works of art with the amount of detail they slapped into them. Makes sense why they've gotta go, though

 

[BigPanda]

Just wish they were a way to download them for offline usage.

 

[Deleted User]

There goes my Childhood..

 

[radicalwookie]

Strategy guides aren't just to help you with a game: they are beautiful. Well, they're SUPPOSED to be beautiful, but many publishers just copypaste a random Gamefaqs guide and calls it a day. I don't know about them particularly.

The one guide I will alwazs remember is the original World of Warcraft one from...i think it was bradys games. I read that shit at least a 100 times before I even bought the game haha