Times change, but this magazine was great for a long time.
Well, I guess this is an early sign to say RIP to GameStop too.
GameStop has sucked for a very long time and I’m astounded that so many people holding out hope for a meme stock to GO TO THE MOOOON again think it’s going to last.
Support local stores, death to GameStop
I’m not really holding out hope for anything, and I don’t own Gamestop stock.
I just don’t think that Game Informer closing down is the death knell of Gamestop.
When a business is closing many of its stores and shutting down a subsidiary that has been around for 30+ years with a pretty reputable name (instead of selling it, for example), thats usually a sign that the business is going to go bye bye in the near future.
Fuck. It was one of the few remaining good videogame-related publications. They will be sorely missed.
Where to go from here?
I remember absolutely being a fanboy in the 90s. It was so much better than it’s rivals like EGM and GamePro.
But around 2005, either I aged out of it or the magazine got worse. Then I remember GameStop giving it for free at some point. I just remember it being a shell of a shell of a magazine, as the rest of the gaming industry moved to gaming blogs.
The Gamestop deal would have been 2002-ish. I actually hadn’t heard of the magazine before we started pushing it in the store. With Game Informer’s features mirroring our store marketing, it was the first time I realized how incestuous the industry was (easy to see the signs of it now when looking back at even older mags). The bizarre amount of coverage it had on the PS2 game State of Emergency was one example from the time. It’s wild to me to hear it being called reputable here and elsewhere today when it had such a fundamental conflict of interest for the vast majority of its run.
You’re totally right.
I was in middle school when I had fond memories of gaming mags, and that’s probably when I was the most infatuated by the publications.
And by high school (2000s) it was getting weird and slowly dropping off.
At some point was the whole Kotaku gamergate BS and completely checked out of gaming news because it wasn’t just weird, but then it got real racist/sexist.
I’m kind of in the same boat as you. My mainstay for the longest time was RockPaperShotgun, probably from 2008–2016 or thereabouts. Once the old guard left the quality of the site drastically changed, and it became significant shallower in terms of reviews. Not really sure where to get the same kind of journalism these days.
I just signed up for their 2 year subscription deal, and always looked forward to getting my latest edition. Also listened to their podcast, which was great too. Super bummed about this.
