Best-Seller Strategy Guides

TasosF writes "The New York Times published a feature on the strategy guide publishing. Strategy guide sales reportedly generated about $90 million in 2004, with the guide to GTA San Andreas having sold 748,000 copies to date." From the article "'It's like writing a travel guide to a place that doesn't exist,' Mr. Hodgson said. 'Whereas Frommer's guides tell you what hotel to stay in, I tell you which hotel not to stay in because you're going to get dragged down by a gangster.' By most measures, strategy guides are not a huge business. They generated about $90 million in sales in 2004, according to the NPD Group, a market research firm; the figure dropped to $67 million in 2005, but that decline was expected as a cyclical moment, paralleling a transition in the industry to a new generation of advanced game consoles."

Re:PacMan strategy guide

[Rob T Firefly]

Sorry, it's been done. [gamefaqs.com]

Internet Anyone?

[therage96]

I hardly play games anymore, but when I did, I found strategy guides to be a waste of money when I have my computer 2 feet away from me when I played console games. All I needed was http://gamefaqs.com/ [gamefaqs.com] and I pretty much had everything I needed to know, and thats not even mentioning all of the sites out there dedicated to individual games.

To each his own I suppose.

GamesFaq

[mabba18]

As far as I understand these guides are the Gamestop equivalent to an extended warranty. They push them on anybody buying a game which has a guide.

I just use GamesFaq, and get the same answers for free.

Re:GamesFaq

[Thrymm]

Exactly, when I worked at EB 10 years ago while in college we were drilled to put the strat guides into the customer's head to buy em. I hardly ever would though, even in 96 one could go online and find the hints you needed. Such a sham these things are and even in some cases (the Prima ones especially), dont really help at all. Basically a big commercial inside the strategy guides for the games themselves.

Three Problems with Guides

[MBraynard]

1) They are nearly all written before the game is gold. Frequently enough, the guide has information that reflects a beta version of the game and is inaccurate as it pertains to the release version. If the guides didn't have to ship with the game and instead came out maybe a week or so later, they would be more valuable.

2) They are not written by the people who should be writing them - the designers. Once the designers are done with a game, the last thing they want to do is hang around and write a guide. They are either working on a patch or taking a vacation. They typically give almost no support to the people who actually write the guide whom, aside from writing ability, are no better gamers than the kid who picks the game off the retail shelf, resulting in a whole lot of fluff to fill pages.

3) These guides use to be called 'instruction manuals.' Guides back in the day use to come out well after the game and had actual tips and tricks that were truly valuable and could not be determined on the players own - or they included really good versions of maps. Now this role has been supplanted by the Internet - including the maps.

Game Guides will likely continue to see steep declines in sales as free fan created, internet based guides are becoming increasingly better written and presented. This 75% decrease this past year is not 'cyclical' in any way.