Game Informer magazine, the gaming magazine with a publishing history spanning more than three decades, has evidently been shut down by its parent company, the brick-and-mortar video game chain and meme stock GameStop.
"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," reads a statement posted on Game Informer's website and X account on Friday.
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"While our presses may stop, the passion for gaming that we've cultivated together will continue to live on," the statement continued.
However, along with the end of the longest running U.S. gaming print magazine, another aspect of Game Informer that won't live on is the video game publication's entire digital archive. The GameInformer.com domain name now forwards to a landing page which only displays the shut down announcement. All of the Game Informer website's internal links now also forward to the same page meaning previously published news articles, reviews, and other content can no longer be viewed.
Lost digital archives are becoming much too common
According to ex-Game Informer content director Kyle Hilliard, the magazine was more than halfway done with its next issue when it received the news that its parent company was shutting it down.
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"Game Informer has been closed down by GameStop and the entire, incredibly talented staff (including myself) have all been laid off," Hilliard posted on X on Friday.
The sudden decision to kill off the gaming magazine, which GameStop acquired in 2000, clearly caught Game Informer's employees off guard. As a result, employees likely did not have a chance to archive their own work before the company took the content on its website offline.
Unfortunately, the shutdown and removal of online archives is becoming all too common in the digital media industry as a whole, resulting in content being lost to time. Most recently, Paramount decided to take down the MTV News website along with its digital archives more than a year after the news organization shut down. Reporters as well as fans of the organization lamented the loss of years of interviews and other MTV news-related content. And while the Internet Archive likely has a good amount of Game Informer's content archived, Internet Archive documents are typically incomplete snapshots of the originals, with altered formatting and missing elements.
GameStop has struggled in recent years to keep up with the change within the video game industry from physical to digital media. While the meme stock craze in 2021 helped keep it afloat, GameStop CEO Ryan Cohen recently called for "extreme frugality" as its troubles continue.
Mashable reached out to GameStop for confirmation that the archive is gone, and to ask if there were plans to make it available at any point. We will update if we hear back.
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