There is a state of being where the dead are all but confirmed, but not quite in the ground. A moment of convalesce, one might say, from one world to the next. Not just for people, but for brands too. Which I'm pretty sure are legally people somewhere in America, so soon we'll be holding funerals for that I'll imagine. It is within this state that Gamestop has existed for so very long, ever since they had their decline artificially inflated by the Crypto boom from a few years back and the famous 'GameStonk' debacle which set off so many financial institutions to the pure chaos of the crypto currency market. It also inflated Gamestop with enough money to think they might survive into the near future. They even brought abroad ex-Nintendo superstar Reggie to save them. But it was never going to work. Because physical is dead.
I think it really hit home for me when I found myself bouncing from Game to Gamestop all across England for months looking for anyone who had a next- now current- gen console and coming up blank. Sure, a lot of that was the wanting supply issues that were exacerbated by global events- but some of that was the fact that physical stores just weren't being entrusted with these consoles when the online retailers were more likely to push units. My current modern console is the very first console I've ever ordered online and the feeling was deeply wrong- I still don't feel like I crossed that current generation threshold as I did the day I carried my fresh Xbox One home. With the writing on the wall like that, it was only a matter of time before these stores began shuttering.
Just a few months ago I was getting emails telling me how all of my online point privileges were being revoked like I was a criminal, I guess it was around about then that I should have been logging on to Game Informer to save all of my favourite articles. Then again we're talking about Game Informer here- I had no favourite articles. But it's still a bit of gaming media history that stretched back near eons within the gaming world. Because yes, as I'm sure you've heard, Game Informer was pronounced dead not so very long ago. A little bit abruptly to those that weren't directly connected- I didn't even hear word of an impending shutdown. I expected we'd be resting atop Kotaku's grave first, truth be told. But we're here now and we'll mourn if we want to.
Existing as an actual physical magazine all the way back in 1991, Game Informer was one of the very scant real examples of tangible culture that the video game world has, dating back to the foundation of what became the modern games industry after the crash of the old one. Covering the latest games, spreading what counted a virality back then, signal boosting the big hits- that could only be done in print back in the day, and it was publications like Game Informer which bridged that information gap back in those dark ages before standardised Internet. Personally I'll admit never to having enjoyed Game Informer itself, but physical publications were my holy text for a very long time as a budding gamer- of course, that alone was far from Informer's only life.
Game Informer was probably best known in these years as a website providing coverage of everything that the magazine used to, only on a grader scale. And curiously, they were one of the few out there that weren't currently finding themselves in hot-water for rage baiting every other week. They just kept themselves busy actually talking about games, which was preciously rare within the games journalist space, wherein more and more these website pages exist as public blog pages for writers to expunge nonsense about their completely vapid experiences to aid of nothing. I read one such recently about someone experiencing 'the Darkspawn Chronicles' DLC for Dragon Age Origins after avoiding it because they were scared of being the 'what if the bad guys win' scenario. Isn't that the kind of trite better saved for a personal blog such as mine? Game Informer at least kept some standards here and there...
Now if you mosey on over the website you'll find yourself directed to the reason for their downfall- and it's not due to their own inability to keep on track like for Kotaku. Instead it's simply being tied to closely to a sinking ship that has been their downfall. Gamestop is spiralling, losing the little bit of time that the Internet has brought them, and apparently even selling off assets is beyond their capabilities. At this point a full bankruptcy is inevitable and the cost is many losing their jobs. At least this isn't one of those vapid 'cost cutting measures' things we've seen across the rest of the industry, but rather a more desperate 'ventilate the ship before we all drown' kind of scrambles. There's something a tad more respectable about that somehow.
If we were to take this into a bit more of a depressing meta direction we could see this as an indication of the age of media as a medium. Afterall- when personality is being drained out of the surviving outlets because their staff regularly abused that privilege, and sites like Game Informer aren't being considered culturally valuable enough to be shopped off at the very least, and more and more hobbyists to the world of gaming are finding their fixes off free Youtube channels- maybe there just isn't a space for old school journalism set-ups anymore. Afterall, games journalism only really made sense as a kind of reaction to generalised infantilism of the hobby with the assertation that gaming was legitimate enough to warrant enthusiast press coverage from real companies. Now gaming is big enough to sustain itself, perhaps we've outgrown these platforms that once held us up.
So we mark the end of Game Informer and considering the death of the website I'd imagine the erasure of the many years of coverage they provided. Seriously, was anyone archiving all of this before the shut down or did we just lose years of articles? They erased the inbuilt archive so I guess unless someone was already on the ball here we may be out of luck. What a terrible loss for such an important piece of the games industry and it's journey. I truly hope something comes out of this on the other end and maybe the lost former employers come together to start something smaller but a bit more independent. Get with the times a bit, you know?
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