Re: Goodbye Game Informer

Spalls Hurgenson <spallshurgenson@gmail.com> looked up from reading the
entrails of the porn spammer to utter  "The Augury is good, the signs
say:

>
Probably most people won't care, but "GameInformer" -the long running
computer game magazine- shuttered its business the other day.
>
Which probably shouldn't be a surprise; after all, who reads (print)
magazines anymore? (although, like most publishers, they relied more
on digital subscriptions these days). More tellingly, "Game Informer"
was a division of the "GameStop" retail chain, which in recent years
has been better known for its stock antics than its retail
performance. The chain has been struggling, and that "Game Informer"
has survived this long is, frankly, sort of amazing.
>
What was surprising was how /good/ "Game Informer" was. While it
didn't do any hard-hitting journalism, it still had well-written
articles and reviews that weren't just puff-pieces designed to get you
to buy the next game (which is what you'd expect from a magazine
funded by a video-game store).

So not favored by Derek Smart then?

Amongst the surviving 'old-school' video-game magazine publishers, they were probably the best.
>
And while the likes of online publishing -Kotaku, GamesIndustry,
PCGamesN and the rest- have taken up the slack, there was a lot to be
said about a publisher who actually still put out printed material. It
implied a reliability and soundness that you often don't get from the
more fly-by-night online offerings. They were a standard baseline
against which you could measure the competitors.

The other problem, is print takes time, which meant their only online
competitors had up to date news and reviews and they couldn't, due to
the logistics of print.

So it's sort of sad to see them go. Even if I was part of the problem
that led to their demise (I let my subscription lapse years ago...
although that was mostly because the only way to renew the
subscription was by physically going to a Gamestop store).
>
Fare thee well, "Game Informer". You weren't great, but you were good
enough, and your passing is just another sign of the passing of the
golden age of computer gaming.

It's sad to see a lot of the old stuff going, but we romanticize this
stuff and forget all the bad stuff that went with the good.

Was talking about this yesterday in fact, with the guy at the wine store
(I was wearing a jokey t-shirt that mentioned Dos, he laughed, and it
was off down memory lane;  BBS and such.

He said he has fond memories of the pre-internet tech stuff, but he
wouldn't want to go back to it.

Remember when animated gifs became a thing and some websites drenched
themselves in them and took an hour to display the page on a 56k modem
connection?
Oh look this forum, everyone has an animated gif for an avatar, and each
was a megabyte or so in size - 50 comments per page, do the math.

So much so the browser companies (well netscape anyway,) introduced a
toggle off for the images so pages could load in something approximating
real time.

Various things I mourned in passing, but when you take a good hard look
back without the rose coloured glasses, they weren't nearly as good as
we remember, they were simply good for the time, and their time has
passed.

Xocyll