Whoops

It figures. Right after I post a drunken rant about the tragic loss of strategy guides in magazines, I find two at once.

The first is from the December 2009 issue of GamePro. This is one or two issues before the infinitely better redesign, so it's still basically the ultra cool GamePro of olden days. It inexplicably includes four random pages out of BradyGames' Uncharted 2 strategy guide. They're not interesting pages either, just a few spreadsheets detailing what you can buy in the store. Bizarre.

However! The fact that the reprint pages are produced by BradyGames leads me to believe that one route for getting strategy content back into magazines is to outsource it to strategy specialists, by which I mean publishers of strategy guides. Take that four-page Donkey Kong Country Returns guide I talked about earlier and am now starting to realize I desperately want. Let Prima repurpose information and screens from the strategy guide they already have and produce it for you. They get some kinda stipend and free advertising. They can also sell the "miniguide" at their own site; pay a dollar, print it out, fold it up and keep it in the game's case. Ta-da!

The other guide comes in the form of a Rift launch guide from the April 2011 issue of PC Gamer magazine. It's 5 pages, and this time it's produced in-house by the magazine's staff. It actually reads a little like an early review or preview describing the experience, but the point is it gives you a lot of tips on character selection, dungeons, and what to expect initially. Because apparently MMORPGs are hard to just jump into?

This brings to mind another way that magazines can best serve their customers with strategy. Consider magazines exclusive to specific consoles or formats, such as Official Xbox Magazine. They can rest assured that when it comes to the big exclusives, like Halo or God of War, a much larger percentage of their readership is going to be playing them as compared to the readership of a multiplatform magazine. Thus, when it comes to those exclusives, they're going to be best positioned to deliver magazine strategy. This also might be one of the few cases where online multiplayer strategy is justified; if readership continues to play, you can "update" them every month.

Yup. I wish I knew the business better so I could say if all of these ideas are half-assed and unfeasible. Well, at least unfeasible.