Prima Games is shutting down

Surprised they even lasted this long. There are a plethora of free guides out on the internet.
 
Yeah thats a shame. I always liked picking up the guides for games like The Elder Scrolls or Fall Out.

The stuff is available on the internet, but sometimes you are stuck watching some dumbasses video to find the location of something or whatever.

I always like having the maps available without having to pull out my phone, or tablet, probably because I am old and still like printed books.
 
If you're a fan of playing older rpg's and what-not, go ahead and find and archive any of these in a legitimate manner. They're guides were excellent resources.
 
I never understood the purpose of game guides. Isn't it part of the fun to discover things for yourself? How to play, what's the best strategy. If a guide tells you exactly what to do, when, and where, then what is your role? As crazy that it sounds failure is part of the experience.
 
M76 said:
I never understood the purpose of game guides. Isn't it part of the fun to discover things for yourself? How to play, what's the best strategy. If a guide tells you exactly what to do, when, and where, then what is your role? As crazy that it sounds failure is part of the experience.
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I concur.

Now on the other hand, as a kid before internet, best believe I forked over accumulated lunch money for guides lol

(back then games were much less "hand-holdy" and getting completely stuck was a fairly common experience)

Games like Milon's Secret Castle and Castlevania II immediately come to mind as great works of soulless, sadistic, dream-crushing, coder-logic nonsense.
 
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M76 said:
I never understood the purpose of game guides. Isn't it part of the fun to discover things for yourself? How to play, what's the best strategy. If a guide tells you exactly what to do, when, and where, then what is your role? As crazy that it sounds failure is part of the experience.
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More options are always better than less.
 
Krenum said:
Another end of an era. Always thought their guides were way too expensive anyway.
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Their print guides certainly were. But the digital guides are always $9.99 or less and contain the same content as their $39.99 hard bound print guides. If you pay attention to their website they also have frequent sales on the scale of a Steam sale. One of the things I always liked about their digital guides were the maps.
exlink said:
Surprised they even lasted this long. There are a plethora of free guides out on the internet.
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No doubt, but online guides have somehow greatly gone down in quality compared to 10 years ago. I liked Prima's digital guides because they were well laid out, easy to read, and easy to find things. Plus, you never have to deal with the eccentricities of the author's personality or ineptitude like you have to when searching for a good free one.
M76 said:
I never understood the purpose of game guides. Isn't it part of the fun to discover things for yourself? How to play, what's the best strategy. If a guide tells you exactly what to do, when, and where, then what is your role? As crazy that it sounds failure is part of the experience.
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I agree, but a guide is good to have as a companion for a second playthrough or when you get stuck and just can't find a way forward. My opinion is if you're reading a guide like a novel as you're playing a game then you might as well just watch a LP.
 
The last guide I picked up from them wa The Witcher 3 and it has everything it was useful. I think they did a Pillars of Eternity guide as well which sells for big bucks. Guides are awesome my main problem the pictures in the guides were too small. Today you have some British mamas boy putting up a walkthrough on YouTube which is usually a lot better and more thorough.
 
Some of the sites out there for say Kingdom come Deliverance are really shady you might want to run a secured browser just to view them.
 
I love game guides.

They are anither outlet to enjoy the game's art and lore.

Too bad. Seems like now I always get the most irritating YouTube videos or the ones in Chinese or whatever
 
I always think about Prima guides like I think of Mad Catz. For years I equated them with total garbage. Yet once they started taking fighting games seriously, they turned a corner. The guides of all sorts suddenly improved.
I bought their guides for Street Fighter 4, Tekken Tag 2, and for SF x Tekken. They're good guides and with input from actual pro players. That's night and day from those garbage guides in the mid 90's that looked like Gamepro send-offs.
 
I have a ton of these guides, I always liked collecting them just to have on the shelf. Hell, I buy Collector's Edition guides from Future Press just for the great quality and the fact that they look great on a shelf. Will be an en of an era, for sure.
 
M76 said:
I never understood the purpose of game guides. Isn't it part of the fun to discover things for yourself? How to play, what's the best strategy. If a guide tells you exactly what to do, when, and where, then what is your role? As crazy that it sounds failure is part of the experience.
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IME guides always ruin the experience... ignorance is bliss

I don't wanna know of any big chunky guides, making me feel guilty for not discovering every nook-and-cranny, I also hate to know how long a game lasts, what my percentage of completion is, how many hours I've been playing or how many fcking "steps" I've taken

I guess I'm in the minority here, it's similar to the reasons I don't really like cinema or novels... series are better I guess, except tv series tend to get suckier as time goes by so I wait until the entire show is finished and makes sure I'm not sitting through another 100+ hour long anti-climatic fuckery like LOST (such wasted potential)

but for those who love guides, yea this is a loss... I certainly can understand the love of art work in there, fortunately I've seen a lot of art books come out for popular games, which I've found pretty awesome to look through after beating a game
 
For me it was more about their guides to fighting games (or any sort of competitive games) rather than the guides that are just walkthroughs. I haven't wanted a physical walkthrough in like 20 years. I mean, GameFAQs has been around since the 90s, right? These days there are videos that will help you blow through any puzzle in any game in real time.
However it can be pretty handy having a front and center physical guide to moves/plays, matchup advice, etc. in a game like Street Fighter or Madden. I see that being more of a loss.
Ditto with the people that like artwork and whatnot that would be exclusive to a physical copy.
 
I was never a pyshical game guide person. Never wanted to pay money for what I could go to gamefaqs and find out for free but I could certainly understand the appeal. But as people have mentioned here free written game guides are only getting worse as everyone wants to have a YouTube channel for this stuff. The shame of that is everything is a five minute video now and you can’t just read about what you need help with anymore. Videos are great for some things but sometimes you just need a few lines of text.

As for the use of guides I just don’t have the time to butt my head on things that much like when I was younger. If I’ve given it the ol college try and can’t figure it out then I’m looking it up. No looking ahead though. Just what I need help with at the moment.
 
It was announced yesterday that Asteri Holding has acquired Prima Games and will continue to operate the brand as digital only. Asteri Holdings is an analytics firm that will be bringing a piece of that industry to the Prima website. Prima Games will continue to operate as a gaming hub with access to premium guide content along with bringing news and creator content with partner Greenlit Content. The announcement was oddly missing an important piece of information: whether or not past content purchased by users will continue to be accessible.

https://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2019-03-14-asteri-acquires-prima-games
https://www.shacknews.com/article/110521/asteri-holdings-acquires-prima-games-digital-assets
 
Honestly, even back in the day, there were better paper guides than Prima....
 
horrorshow said:
Honestly, even back in the day, there were better paper guides than Prima....
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Their quality was actually getting better up to the point that they shut down. Brady was definitely better before Prima acquired them. Piggyback has always been top-notch. Future Press has gotten pretty good over the years.
 
Part of the problem with printed guides is the photos were too small having a digital PDF or whatever can help the readability.
 
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