Well this is a real punch in the gut. For years, we have been talking about a strange lack of interest within the video game industry when it comes to game preservation. In far, far too many cases, both single player and multiplayer video games that rely on backend checks to start the game, or online servers on which to play them, or games being available in digital storefronts essentially disappear at the whim of game publishers’ desire to keep them available. Never mind that this can mean that games people purchased become unavailable to them. Never mind that these publishers could make their games’ source code available so that fans could keep them running. It all just goes away without recourse for the public, due to the fact that these games remain protected by copyright, despite their being unavailable to the public, thereby breaking the supposed copyright contract. It’s a massive problem if you care about the preservation of culture.
But surely when it comes to something like journalism surrounding the games industry the thinking would be different… right? Nobody is going to let decades of journalistic output just suddenly get disappeared out of nowhere… right?
When it comes to Game Informer, the GameStop owned video game magazine that has been in production for over three decades, that’s exactly what just happened.
Staff at the magazine, which also publishes a website, weekly podcast, and online video documentaries about game studios and developers, were all called into a meeting on Friday with parent company GameStop’s VP of HR. In it they were told the publication was closing immediately, they were all laid off, and would begin receiving severance terms. At least one staffer was in the middle of a work trip when the team was told.
The sudden closure of Game Informer means that issue number 367, the outlet’s Dragon Age: The Veilguard cover story, will be its last. The entire website has been taken offline as well.
This isn’t link rot. It’s link decapitation. Every single URL from the Game Informer website now points only to the main site URL, with the following message posted on it.
After 33 thrilling years of bringing you the latest news, reviews, and insights from the ever-evolving world of gaming, it is with a heavy heart that we announce the closure of Game Informer.
From the early days of pixelated adventures to today’s immersive virtual realms, we’ve been honored to share this incredible journey with you, our loyal readers. While our presses may stop, the passion for gaming that we’ve cultivated together will continue to live on.
Thank you for being part of our epic quest, and may your own gaming adventures never end.
Barring anyone with physical copies of the magazine, or those that created their own online scans of those magazines, or whatever you can still get out of the Internet Archive, it’s all just gone. Thousands of articles and features, millions of words of journalistic output, simply erased. Even the ExTwitter account for the publication has been disappeared, even after it was used to post the same message as on the website. What you will see if you go that link for the disappeared tweet is an outpouring of sadness from all sorts of folks, including famed voice actors, content creators like Mega Ran, and even game studios, all eulogizing the beloved magazine.
And it seems that this shut down, almost certainly at the hands of CEO Ryan Cohen, occurred without any opportunity for those who produced all of this content to take backups for archive purposes.
This comes as GameStop is experiencing two things. First, the decline of physical game sales that has cut deeply into GameStop’s business. Second, the massive infusion of cash the company has on hand as a result of the memestock fin-bro infatuation with the company’s stock. In other words, the company has a massive problem on its hands… but that problem is not immediate. There were ways to do this that didn’t result in the effacement of decades of cultural content that is, of course, all still protected under copyright law, limiting the public’s ability to mitigate any of this.
And, because cultural disasters like this tend to be sprinkled with at least a dash of irony:
A recent in-depth feature on the retro game studio Digital Eclipse about gaming’s history and preservation is one of the stories that is no longer accessible. A write-up about Game Informer’s famous game vault, containing releases from across its decades long history, is also inaccessible.
So a gaming journalism outfit failed to preserve its own features on game preservation. That would actually be funny if it weren’t so infuriating.
