Prima Games’ publisher, DK, has made the very difficult decision to shut down Prima Games after 28 years of creating printed video game guides. Ian Hudson, CEO of DK, put out a memo stating that this decision was reached because sales of Prima’s video game guides have declined significantly. Prima Games will officially close its doors in the spring of 2019. Piggyback is still around, but they do not put out guides at nearly the pace Prima used to.
Video games have become a much more fluid medium, with updates and paid DLC adding new content to them. This has made printed game guides start to feel a bit obsolete, as they can’t be updated like online formats. Prima did however go that route too, selling guides on their website (PrimaGames.com) in electronic form. However, even those were generally not updated when games were changed by big updates or DLC. Prima Games did absorb its main competitor, Brady Games, in 2015, and even started putting guides on Steam, but it was not enough.
Prima Games tried, but could not match the vast traffic of outlets like GameFaqs and IGN. These places offer free guides, and some are updated when games are changed by big updates and/or DLC. I have a very small number of their guides myself, and at times the quality seemed lacking in some areas. For example, the guide for the original Hyrule Warriors was completely missing a page (at least in the electronic version) for Princess Ruto. Regardless, they’ve created tons of video game guides over the years. This unfortunate announcement sucks the most for the employees who worked at Prima Games.
