MudMan

Yeah, but nobody would argue that GameStop was dying in 2002, which is seven years into GameFAQs existing and very much the heyday of Prima and other dedicated print guide writers. Seriously, it just doesn’t line up. GameFAQs and print guides were servicing the same need.

Again, I’m not saying it didn’t have an impact. I’m saying if Prima guides existed as standalone publications in dedicated gaming stores it’s partly because GameFAQs had killed monthly print magazines as a viable way to acquire strategy guides for games, so you instead had dedicated guide publishers working directly with devs and game publishers to have print guides ready to go at day one, sometimes shipping directly bundled with the game.

And then you had an army of crowdsourcer guide writers online that were catching up to those print products almost immediately but offering something very different (namely a searchable text-only lightweight doc different from the high quality art-heavy print guides).

Those were both an alternative to how this worked in the 90s, which was by print magazines with no online competition deciding which game to feature with a map, guide or tricks and every now and then publishing a garbage compilation on toilet paper pulp they could bundle with a mag. I still have some of those crappy early guides. GameFAQs and collectible print guides are both counters to that filling two solutions to the equation and they both share a similar curve in time, from the Internet getting big and killing mag cheats to the enshittified Internet replacing text guides with video walkthroughs and paid editorial digital guides made in bulk.

Well, I’d argue if there was no money to be made, then CNET wouldn’t have purchased GameFAQs. At the very least it served to bring people over to their media ecosystem, and I wanna say they did serve ads and affiliate links on the site proper (but adblocker is also old, so it’s hard to tell).

Video contributed, for sure. This is a process of many years, the whole thing was evolving at once. But the clean break idea that print guides existed and then GameFAQs came along and killed guides just doesn’t fit the timeline at all. It’s off by 5-10 years, at least. Guides weren’t residual in the 00s when GameFAQs was at its peak and being bought as a company, they were doing alright. It’d take 10 years longer for them to struggle and 15 for them to disappear. You’re two console gens off there. That’s a lot. If guide makers like Prima were pivoting to collectible high end books out of desperation you’d expect that process to have failed faster than that.

Instead they failed at the same time GameFAQs started to struggle and get superseded, so I’m more inclined to read that as them both being part of the same thing and the whole thing struggling together as we move towards video on media and digital on game publishing. That fits the timeline better, I think.

In any case, it was what it was, and it’s more enshittified now. I’ve been looking up a couple details on Blake Manor (which is good but buggy and flaky in pieces, so you may need some help even if you don’t want to spoil yourself) and all you get is Steam forums and a couple of hard to navigate pages. The print guide/GameFAQs era was harder to search but more convenient, for sure.

It’s not a “even if some existed” thing, Prima operated until 2018. I personally remember preorder bundles with Prima guides for 360 era games and beyond. They published incredibly elaborate collector’s hardbook guides (that honestly doubled as artbooks) for stuff like Twilight Princess and Halo 3, all the way to the PS4 gen.

Even granting that “booming” is probably a bit hyperbolic, if GameFAQs being free in 1995 was going to kill them, bleeding out would probably not have taken 23 years. The death of retail, print and physical games probably hurt print guides way more than GameFAQs ever did. You didn’t buy those because you were in a hurry to solve a puzzle or look up a special move. They were collectibles and art books first and foremost.

FWIW, guides going back to paid professionals wasn’t as much due to video. Video is still crowdsourced for that stuff. It was visual guides in html with a bunch of images and reference, I think. At least that’s what IGN was doing, and they’re the ones that went hard on that front first. Also for the record, that probably had something to do with IGN and GameFAQs being affiliated for a while. GameFAQs was bought off by CNET in '03, it was definitely part of the big online gaming press ecosystem. I can see how IGN thought they could do better.

I don’t know that the timeline works out there. GameFAQs is, as this post reminds us, pretty old. Even assuming that it didn’t break out until the very late 90s or early 00s as THE destination for guides, there was certainly a booming editoral market for highly produced guides all the way into the Xbox 360 era.

I’d say it was responsible for the press not focusing on guides as much and instead refocusing on news and reviews. And then news and reviews died out and the press that was left refocused on guides again because by that point the text-only crowdsourced output of GameFAQs was less interesting than the more fully produced, visually-driven guides in professional outlets. And now… well, who knows, it’s a mess now. Mostly Reddit, I suppose?

I mean… MK1 predates it by what? 3-4 years? Which in 90s tech time is an eternity.

MK fatality guides were mostly in print. Magazines were all over that type of stuff at the time. But it wouldn’t have been strange to get a familiarly formatted ASCII guide for them with, say, your pirated floppies of the DOS or Amiga versions.

Hm… I’m a bit mixed on that, because GameFAQs became relevant a bit later than that, but at the same time that type of format for ASCII game guides predates GameFAQs being the main place you went to get them, so… it evens out?

I probably didn’t start going to GameFAQs for this stuff until like 2000, but I certainly was using text guides for games in the 90s.

The government isn’t a subscription service or a company.

I can’t deal with Americans’ ultracapitalist perspective on the res publica. It’s so annoying.

In that it’s mostly a merch ad hidden behind a clickbait title.

So I guess it’s a good test for that sort of “just read the headline” response.

It’s been a rough few days and I think I may be coming around. What hope is there to parse AI misinformation if people can’t parse a Reddit-like link aggregator?

I may be done with this place at this point. It’s just all bad. If not the whole Internet, certainly the whole of social media.

Yeeeeeah, the headline in isolation is a bit misleading and unfortunately this seems in line with some recent Nintendo moves where they go after people who slipped on something adjacent.

I have no idea how things work wherever this guy lives, but over here soliciting remuneration would be the difference between this being a problem or not.

That said, I still hope they lose this and I have so many serious questions about how Reddit wouldn’t be liable if the content is illegal and they didn’t do anything to moderate it. This is a weird one and it’s worth keeping an eye on, although I would imagine Nintendo is hoping the lawsuit itself acts as a deterrent regardless.

Yeah, but… this isn’t that.

You’re literally saying “well, anecdotal impressions say this, so I refute this study that says something else”.

We don’t like that. That’s not a thing we like to do.

And for the record, as these things go, the article linked here is pretty good. I’ve seen more than one worse example of a study being reported in the press today.

They provide a neutral headline that conveys the takeaway of the study, they provide context about companies mentioning AIs on layoffs, they provide a link to the full study and they provide a separate study that yields different, seemingly contradicting results.

I mean, this is as close to best case scenario for reporting on a study as you can get in mainstream press. If nothing else, kudos to The Register. The bar was low but they went for personal best anyway.

Man, the problem with giving up all the wonky fashy social media is that when you’re in an echo chamber all the weird misinformation and emotion-driven politics are coming from inside the house. It’s been a particularly rough day for politically-adjacent but epistemologically depressing posts today.

So the report itself argues there is a need for better data, and it seems fairly level headed, but…

…what’s with people being mad about it?

I say this a lot, but there seems to be a lot of weird anti-hype where people want this AI stuff to work better than it does so it can be worse than it is, and I’m often confused by it. The takeaway here is that most jobs don’t seem to be behaving that differently so far if you look at the labor market in aggregate. Which is… fine? It’s not that unexpected? The AI shills were selling that entire industries would be replaced by AI overnight, and most sensible people didn’t think so or argued that the jobs would get replaced with AI wrangler tasks because this thing wouldn’t completely automate most tasks in ways that weren’t already available.

Which seems to be most of what’s going on. AI art is 100% not production-ready out of the gate, AI text seems to be a bit of a wash in terms of saving time for programmers and even in more obvious industries like customer service we already had a bunch of bots and automation in place.

So what’s all the anger? Did people want this to be worse? Do they just want to vibe with the economy being bad in a way they can pin on something they already don’t like and maybe politics is too heavy now? What’s going on there?

No worries, I appreciate that.

FWIW, I don’t really care about downvotes either way. I am clearly not here to pander, with my “NUANCED POINT IS NUANCED, YOU NAUGHTY, NAUGHTY CHILDREN” persona.

I mean, convenience is a factor.

And while Steam doesn’t typically sign exclusive stuff they are known to use store positioning as a bargaining chip for preferential treatment. You’d think Konami would be above needing that, but who knows.

Anyway, good game, whatever the reason for the delay. Someone who is on the fence about getting it on Steam go get it on GOG instead to make up for them tricking me.

It’s come and gone a couple times. There was a period where a bunch of big games did simultaneous launches, then a big period of drought where a few large publishers withdrew entirely from new releases and recently a few isolated AA and AAA releases started popping back up. I wonder if it’s driven by how much effort they can put into outreach or something like that.

Yeah, it sucks for Silent Hill especially because a) it’s super expensive, at 80 bucks on PC, and b) I was on the fence about getting it at launch and only jumped in a few days ago. I’m just out of the refund window and… hey, I like it so far, but I don’t like it 160 bucks’ worth.

Whoever is screwing with GOG screwed them out of my purchase and I’m starting to think that not buying anything on Steam at all if I can help it may be the way to go.

Boycotts, yes.

“I was on the fence about buying this and I want to sound engaged on the Internet, may still get it later” voting-with-your-wallet nonsense? No.

Alright, this is great, but also people need to start confirming GOG drops before the Steam launch. I check for GOG launches whenever I buy a game, but just this month there’s been a couple of big games that got stealth GOG launches just after their Steam release and it’s been extremely frustrating. I don’t know if it’s a publisher thing to work around pirates waiting for DRM free versions or Steam being dicks about it, but it’s infuriating.

Honestly, even at the time that entire “benefit of the doubt” garbage read like some combination of active collaboration and outright denial. It’s nuts that Trump rode it to a second term, honestly. As late as the week of the election people were having haughty conversations about the lack of ties between Project 2025 and the Trump campaign and those morons still elected them again because Harris was too weak on Israel or whatever.

I mean, I’d normally not assume an entire culture is incapable of parsing reality, but there are still supposed American leftists going “they’re both the same” on this site right now.

Which reminds me I’m trying to cut off American politics from my media menu as much as possible, so maybe it’s time to mute this stuff and move on with my day, because man, what a group of weirdos.

It is absolutely fair to criticise them for the stuff they are actually doing, yes.

That’s why I wrote:

I mean, that’s all really bad. Why do we need the hyperbolic “Google is killing Open Source” framing? The real thing is bad enough and it doesn’t make me show up to argue about it. Plus you could have accurately stated “Google kills anonymous apps, threatening alternate app stores” and that would have been 100% accurate and just as horrifying.

Again, there is no need to slippery slope this crap, because it’s bad now. So why even point out how little you trust Google will do the bad thing they said they are doing for 100% real and imagine a worse thing they’ll do later, even if it’s likely that they will? All it does is invite pedants like me to argue with you, which can then be weaponized by Google to say you’re deliberately misrepresenting the issue.

I know. And I didn’t defend Google’s ownership of your phone.

See how annoying that is?

The second person is rhetorical there. I’m saying whether you believe that in all caps and bold letters is entirely irrelevant to whether the video title is misrepresenting the issue.