Best-Seller Strategy Guides 59
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."
PacMan strategy guide (Score:1, Funny)
2) Avoid ghosts (note: see 3)
3) Eat big dots to make ghosts blue. Ghosts are okay to touch when they are blue.
I can't wait. This is gonna make me rich!!!
Re:PacMan strategy guide (Score:3, Informative)
Re:PacMan strategy guide (Score:1)
Try this [gamefaqs.com].
Re:PacMan strategy guide (Score:4, Funny)
-Rick
There really is a Pac-Man strategy (Score:2)
Internet Anyone? (Score:4, Informative)
To each his own I suppose.
Re:Internet Anyone? (Score:4, Insightful)
The guides on GameFAQs, when they fall THIS far out of date, either get updated, or replaced with newer and more accurate guides. You can always publish a new edition of a strategy guide, but that leaves the people who already bought one with a piece of garbage. GameFAQs, it's just a matter of going back and trying a different one.
Re:Internet Anyone? (Score:1)
Re:Internet Anyone? (Score:2)
Games where this is handy are few and far between, but I do find myself wishing I had the strategy guide for certain games from time to time. Best left to the experienced p
Re:Internet Anyone? (Score:1)
There are at least a few games where I preferred getting the strat guide to printing out something off the internet. (but I HAVE done both)
GamesFaq (Score:2, Informative)
I just use GamesFaq, and get the same answers for free.
Re:GamesFaq (Score:2, Informative)
StrategyWiki could become a great alternative (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:StrategyWiki could become a great alternative (Score:1)
Although a well written single guide could cover all these bases. And the examples you provide seem to look very nice. The screenshots of OoT, are especially fine.
I like strategy guides (Score:4, Interesting)
I may not want to play through Xenosaga again in the near future, but I can still enjoy flipping through the pages of the strategy guide and remember the various parts of the game and how I felt when I played this part, etc...
Call me silly, but I'm probably the only person still around that enjoys the strategy guides nearly as much as the games themselves.
Re:I like strategy guides (Score:2)
I have to admit to being a bit of a fanboy for Piggyback's guides (http://www.piggybackinteractive.com/en/guides/in d ex.php? [piggybackinteractive.com]), which I've watched grow in variety since I first got their Final Fantasy VIII guide years back. I've since bought thei
Re:I like strategy guides (Score:1)
While an official guide has nice pictures and all an average internet guide will include information that is much more likely to be c
Strategy guides vs. Internet (Score:4, Interesting)
Also appreciated are the sometimes-included DVD-extra style additions to the guide, with the odd interview, concept art, or other behind-the-scenes geek-fodder that make the book more than just a fancy gamefaq.
Best ever? (Score:1)
Antone remember silent service 2 from waaaayyyy back (1990?) the manual was excellent. Had a huge historical section, a section on how to play the game and then a strategy section. Which was a bit like a seperate strategy guide except it came with the game.
Cyclical moment in the transition of consoles? wtf (Score:2)
1. You can get all the same content for free on the internet and gain the ability to do full-text-search on it (gamefaqs.com, among others)
2. The content of the game is updated by bugfixes and patches
3. The strategy guides contain twelve pages of ads for other strategy guides from the same publisher
4. The strategy guide authors put key game info in the back of the book in a sealed section to prevent "spoilers" -- why
Final Fantasy 9 (Score:4, Funny)
View the rest of this post by visiting PlayOnline!
Re:Final Fantasy 9 (Score:2)
OT: Aside on PlayOnline (Score:2)
I bought the computer version of FFXI a while back and after I finished installing all four CDs, it took me another half hour just to put in all the different keycodes and make two different accounts, one for FFXI and one for PlayOnline. Plus it's this terrible GUI that's a PITA to navigate to get to the game.
I decided that I would put FFXI on the backburner after the free month and cancelled my FFXI account, but apparentl
Buying the guides. (Score:4, Insightful)
Now I still get the occasional guide (or use GameFaqs, as has been mentioned to death already), but I never buy it/go there until after at least one playthrough. The guide serves as a tool for re-plays. That way I get the satisfaction of having thought and worked on the game without a hand-holding from someone else, but I still can say "yeah, I found all the goodies."
Re:Buying the guides. (Score:2)
Anyway, the Homeworld one was invaluable as any first-time Homeworld player can tell you. The WOW one I barely ever looked at... the only page I had bookmarked was the one showing the Griffon routes, and even that one got outdated via patches very quickly.
Sometimes they are worth it, and add something (Score:4, Insightful)
But there are a couple of examples of strategy guides on my kids' shelf that blew me away.
The conspicuous example was for one of the GameBoy Color Pokemon titles, believe it or not. Those games were superbly good, incidentally, and don't deserve begin cubbyholed as kids' titles. They're so open-ended that they can be tinkered around in long after someone's played through. Do you want to breed specific species of Pokemon? Collect a bunch of some artifact? Develop a whole new set of critters for use in a new setting, and then compare stables with your friends? Compete in beauty contests for your Pokemon? Win all sorts of different side trophies? They're very, very open-ended titles, and Nintendo produced some beautiful little guides for them.
Let's just say this: As a way of displaying the relative strengths and weaknesses of different species, the Nintendo-produced guides included easily-read, well-laid-out spider graphs for the different traits. When was the last time you saw a spider graph (or really anything but a bar graph) in your local newspaper? The catalogs of all the Pokemon types in those early guides were lovely examples of solid technical writing. You'd be fortunate to encounter software manuals as well-composed, they were a pleasure to read, and in the case of stuff like those graphs they actually bordered on the educational for my kids.
I'll pay $15 for that.
Re:Sometimes they are worth it, and add something (Score:1)
Then there are the old school, actual strategy guides. These are as thick as textbooks and co
High Score? (Score:5, Insightful)
Why is it that whenever journalists or legislators talk about video games, the phrase "high score" (or some permutation there of) is always on the tip of their tongue? I haven't played any games where score is the sole point in ages. The assumption that games are all about score not only betrays the author's ignorance, but it demeans modern video games in general. Games have become much subtler- story and the challenge of survival have become their own ends. But the media can't seem to envision them ever moving past the "survive as long as you can to get the high score" quarter munchers they descended from.
Re:High Score? (Score:2)
Re:High Score? (Score:2)
Re:High Score? (Score:2)
Which is complete bullshit, on every single count.
There are no points in GTA. Period.
There is no raping in GTA. Period.
You get nothing special for attacking a prostitute. In fact, the hookers usually start shooting at you and the police start chasing you if do attack a hooke
Three Problems with Guides (Score:4, Informative)
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.
Re:Three Problems with Guides (Score:2)
That's not always true. Th
Real time strategy (Score:1)
Total Annihilation (Score:1)
Rome on 640K a Day (Score:1)
"Sid Meier's Civilization or Rome on 640k a Day"
That guide broke down the math to all units, improvements, wonders, governments, etc. AND did it in an entertaining way.
Some strategy guides are awesome (Score:1)
Now that I look at it, the game is worth well over $100 bux on E-bay.
Also the strategy guide is worth a ton of money too. A lot of people collect the guides, and they serve as a base for introductory players to a game.
Think of it as a class in school, you learn the material, but in this case, it is the game you learn.
Strategy guides lack strategy (Score:1)
Any chump can play a game and write what he learns from that first playthrough, and they post it on Gamefaqs. Wh
Well (Score:4, Insightful)
I think the strategy guides, with the exception of a few shining examples (the Pokemon and Final Fantasy guides immediately come to mind), have been nothing but a lightly veiled attempt at milking as much money as possible from the gamer.
I remember the day when the best strategy guides were the thick books that CAME WITH THE DAMN GAME! And if I sound like an old fart...keep in mind that I'm only 22. This has been a recent trend to put as little information in with the game as possible. Sometimes games only include a controller layout quicksheet and nothing else aside from a few lose ad flyers floating around in the box. I wonder how much of a cut the publisher gets from the strategy guide companies to do that?
I haven't purchased a strategy guide since I got on the internet, and sites like gamefaqs are making them fast obsolete. But give me the good ol days of nicely produced minibooklets over a $20, mostly fluff strategy guide any day. I mean hell, for games like Diablo, half the info in the guide was obsolete come the first patch. And don't even get me started on some of the "Tips and Strategies" they give in some FPS guides...."Crouch to increase your accuracy!", "Grab health packs to replenish your health!"...Really? No shit Sherlock.
Re:Well (Score:2)
Add this to the fact that you're quite right about most guides - they stink.
Remember Master of Magic? Had a nice, fat handbook full of details. A bit later I bought a guid - a FAT handbook full of lovely details, hints, tips, How Tos...
Oh, well. Not buying guides anymore saves me some money. Nearly exclusively playing shareware games these days also does.
0-day strategy guide == useless? (Score:4, Insightful)
But now Brady and Prima and the like are insistent on putting out guides that get released at the same time as the games themselves do, all in the name of having something to bundle along with the game. These don't work well for a number of reasons.
1) Particularly for Sony and Nintendo console games, many games get released in Japan first, and people are already attacking the Japanese releases for months before they hit American/European shores. I haven't gone to the Kingdom Hearts II section of GameFAQs yet (don't want to see anything resembling a spoiler, any more than I already have), but I bet there's at least 6 full walkthroughs and twice as many specialized topic FAQs already up there. If I'm the sort of gamer who wants to power my way through the game on the first pass, why plunk down the $20 for the paper guide when the material's already been out and is easy to find? (Incidentally, I'm not that kind of gamer -- I'll only hit FAQs on the first pass if it looks like I wouldn't want to play through again to uncover things.)
2) These days, wireless Internet and laptops aren't a novelty, and in many cases aren't even extravagant. (Especially if you've got clueless neighbors, and if you aren't above "hitching a ride".) If you had to run back and forth between your living room and your computer room to consult an Internet strategy guide for your console game, or if you only had one computer for a computer game, having a paper guide on hand made a bit more sense. But I can carry my wireless laptop with me all over the house and pull up a strategy guide for games either on the PS2 or on my desktop computer, any time I want.
3) Most damning, getting the guide out at the same time as the game hits shelves means that it has to go to press when the game goes gold, pretty much. So the guys writing the guide are playing on beta builds, with some features either broken or missing. In some cases, the guide's picture of parts of the game may have nothing in common with the released version. (And "The Guide is definitive -- reality is frequently inaccurate" doesn't apply here.) Writing strategy guides as a job may sound like fun, but it's about as much fun as most of the grunt-level jobs at a games developer.
Case in point, my girlfriend has an on-again/off-again contract with one of the major publishers to do freelance work. Most recently, she did the bulk of the editing on the guide for an XB360 title that's due out very soon (not saying which in case there's some NDA that I'd be violating on her behalf). She would've done all of it, except that a bugfix build that ran late in January delayed the playtester/writer of the guide for a week, and the book had to go to press regardless. As such, the publisher had to put out an all-call to their in-house staff to get the last few chapters edited. Meanwhile, my gf is keeping a tally of the number of times that the writer has included notes like "feature not implemented yet", "include maps at press time" (in other words, the man is making references in his text to a map which he hasn't seen), and "broken now, should be fixed by release". The final average came out to about 2-3 of those per mission/level.
She's not the gamer that I am, but she enjoys watching me play games that she won't play herself, and she understands what separates good games from bad ones. Based on what she saw in this guide, it looks like the game has the potential to be good and possibly even entertaining -- but it's more likely to suck the business end of an MP-5. And that's assuming that the guide accurately reflects the finished product. The game may be spectacular, and the guide as written won't do justice to it. So why print the guide at all?
Some are OK (Score:2)
So I think it depends on the game and the quality of the author.
Anybody remember the old X-wing guide? (Score:1)
Strategy games, Strategy Guides (Score:3, Interesting)
Sierra hint books (Score:2)
The hint book for Kings Quest was awesome.
That, and the Final Fantasy 1 strategy guide.
Re: (Score:2)