GameStops Game Informer
Jalopnik
Well, this sucks:
Game Informer, the longest-running gaming magazine in the U.S., is officially dead and GameStop killed it. It began publishing in 1991 and has been one of the last remaining physical gaming magazines in the world, with cover stories that continued to share deep dives and exclusive interviews on the biggest games coming out, from Final Fantasy: VII Rebirth to Star Wars Outlaws. No more.
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 physical magazine.
Game Informer started publishing right at the start of my videogame heyday. I didn't love it as much as, say, Nintendo Power, but that's only because of my love for that videogame company and brand in particular. I subscribed to Game Informer for years and years – in the latter years, perhaps in part thanks to weird GameStop promotions. And by "weird" and "promotions" I'm using nice ways of saying "upsells" and "spam" but still, that wasn't about the content, which I always enjoyed.
In its heyday, Game Informer was the leading monthly magazine among a group of publications that included Game Pro, Electronic Gaming Monthly, and several others, as well as platform-centric periodicals like Nintendo Power. The Minneapolis-based print publication had since become the only major one left standing in the U.S., known for monthly reviews, editor columns, and wide-ranging previews for upcoming games and access to big names for interviews that few others in the industry could match.
I recall going to bookstores back in the day and just going through all of these magazines for hours on end. Wild that Game Informer ended up being the last one standing, but more so that it lasted this long into our age of everything being online. Still, there was something to the tangibility of being able to flip through highly visual pages and playing games in your head, as it were.
Game Informer was purchased by GameStop along with its previous owner, gaming retail competitor FuncoLand, in 2000. This essentially gave the publication its own one-magazine newsstand across thousands of stores, with GameStop customers getting a yearly subscription as one of the perks for signing up for the store’s rewards program. In the days before online gaming blogs and YouTube channels were ubiquitous, thumbing through the pages of Game Informer was the main way many players experienced the world of games beyond whatever few they and their friends owned.
I had almost completely forgotten about FuncoLand. What a name!
Game Informer’s closure comes as GameStop CEO Ryan Cohen continues shit-posting about the 2024 election. In an email to staff last year, the executive called for “extreme frugality” and criticized “money wasters” who didn’t contribute to the company or its success. He’s currently being sued by the former company behind Bed, Bath, and Beyond for $47 million in insider trading profits.
More like NoFuncoLand. Yuck.
M.G. Siegler