After 33 years, the U.S.’s longest-running video game magazine, Game Informer, has suddenly shuttered, with all its staff laid off.
Staff were suddenly informed around noon EDT today, and Game Informer itself posted a farewell reader to its social media pages—which some believe, ironically, to be an AI-generated message after tossing it into detectors.
To add insult to its staff's injuries, any link to a Game Informer page leads to a dead end with the farewell message. This means that much of the website itself is inaccessible, as has happened with other shuttered news sites—and fans and archivists are already scrambling to find archives for old articles.
In the meantime, an outpouring of love and appreciation has come for the long-standing publication, especially on Twitter, where developers, current and former GameStop staff, official Twitter accounts across the gaming industry, readers, and more shared memories and thank-yous.
The Final Level: Farewell from Game Informer ??? pic.twitter.com/tmrEB2TE7U
— Game Informer (@gameinformer) August 2, 2024
The magazine started in its original paper form in 1991 for the FuncoLand gaming store, before serving much of the same purpose for GameStop in its 2000 acquisition.
Since then, Game Informer captured the attention of the industry and consumers alike, especially with the boom of gaming’s popularity in the mid 2000s. It provided reviews, previews, features, interviews, news and more that few others had access to. GI was especially important in an era when industry news for just about any industry was either greatly concentrated into announcement-heavy doses, like E3 or an Apple presentation, or sparse, spread out, unverifiable and hard to have a real grip on (just like your classmate’s news from their uncle at Nintendo).
GameStop itself has gone into decline as gamers and publishers turn to digital publishing, including Amazon, native console platforms/stores, and a few rare direct-to-consumer distributions. It also acquired geek merch superstore ThinkGeek, which shut down a few years ago as well.
Then, as GameStop saw less impactful profits (and the rise and fall of stock market shenanigans), the corporate fat-cutting became more blunt, as an email sent by former chairman turned self-appointed 2021 CEO Ryan Cohen, also founder of pup box Chewy, unveiled harsher intentions for the company.
“Every expense at the company must be scrutinized under a microscope and all waste eliminated,” he told staff in an email acquired by a long-time game reporter. “It is not sustainable for GameStop to operate a money losing business. The mission is to operate hyper efficiently and profitably. [...] Extreme frugality is required. Every expense at the company must be scrutinized under a microscope and all waste eliminated. The company has no use for delegators and money wasters. I expect everyone to treat company money like their own and lead by example.”
In the meantime, Game Informer saw quite a few layoffs, including a few editors earlier this year and a massive wave in 2022. In March, there was a sudden, massive move to let readers subscribe directly to GameStop, as it was previously only available as a subscription to GameStop Pro shoppers. It seems this wasn’t enough.
Plus, Game Informer is just the latest to go down in the modern gaming media landscape. As Forbes’s Paul Tassi aptly describes it, while GI had been cropping down on its staff for years, it’s only one in a series of publications suffering from conglomerate buyouts, layoffs or full-on shutdowns, with a sprinkle of rare, fortunate independent writers/sites and mainstream outlets with gaming sections. (Adam Conover did a great podcast episode on why this, and the death of the open Internet as a whole, is largely Google’s fault, at least as one major factor.)
The nuking of Game Informer pieces is a further detriment to its writers, artists, and other staff, who rely on the site’s bylines and credits to display their work in portfolios and resumes for further opportunities.
In short, with GameStop’s now-infamous low profitability and the slow crash of the media industry, this seemed like an unfortunate but looming possibility—and one few, if any, in the industry wished to see, especially so suddenly and harshly.
(MMORPG itself joined the MOBA Network a few short years back, in case you’re wondering.)
We’d love to hear your Game Informer memories—I know reading the reviews and previews section was a highlight of my high school and college years.
