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Comment by phendrenad2 | Hacker News Reader

Gaming magazines were magical 30 years ago when game companies were black boxes. Games just appeared on shelves one day and you had to rely on the publisher's brand name as a guarantee of quality. Simpler times. You could maybe get a highly-editorialized sneak peak from a gaming mag a few months early.

Now, it's almost like games are made in public. Everyone knows what you're working on thanks to leakers and court filings. Every developer's life is analyzed and used as fodder for the rumor mill. Companies are basically forced into early-access because the cost of a bad review by a prominent influencer post-launch is too high.

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Additionally, those magazines were a good source of game hints. Nowadays, most games are developed with the assumption that players will already have the knowledge passed to them from the Internet. You don’t see nearly as many games where the emphasis is on discovering tricks and quirks. It’s now about cold optimization or just going through the motions.

That’s not to say games were better back then. But the newer generations will never know the joy of checking the mailbox every day and seeing that brand spanking new issue of Ultra Game Players Magazine, then being the only kid in the neighborhood to know about the next gen console specs, and feeling cool about it.

> you had to rely on the publisher's brand name as a guarantee of quality

I only relied on the pictures on the box. ;)

>Now, it's almost like games are made in public

well, as public as a celebrity. You'll get all the juicy gossip and drama but almost none of how the sausage is made. Dev talks at places like SIGGRAPH and GDC are absolute gold mines for public info that would be closely guarded secrets 20 years ago for AAA games, but those are still rare and far between.

>Companies are basically forced into early-access because the cost of a bad review by a prominent influencer post-launch is too high.

I think this is a pretty recently dying sentiment these days. AAA games feel buggier than ever and the launch for some may as well be an open beta. They want to get players in now and fix it later after hoping they recoup costs. And I guess it still works enough to keep doing it.

The Internet existed back then, but 20 years ago there was no real great way to get discussion on the newest games. gamefaqs.com existed, but it wasn't comprehensive by any measure in letting you figure out if a game was worth trying.

Game Informer on the crapper was the best use of time. What probably killed it for me/caused me to cancel my subscription was the rise of cellphone use on the toilet.

30 years ago, there was usenet and the rec.games.* newsgroups. Some FAQ writers from that time are still highly regarded within the current scenes in those games

I burned my lab print quota in school on said FAQs :)

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