GameStop Reportedly Shuts Down Game Informer Magazine and Removes Its Website

Game Informer magazine, the gaming magazine with a publishing history spanning more than three decades, has apparently been shut down by its parent company, the brick-and-mortar video game chain meme stock GameStop.

“After 33 exciting years of bringing you the latest news, reviews, and insights into the ever-evolving world of gaming, it is with heavy hearts that we announce the closure of Game Informer,” reads a statement posted on the Game Informer website. website And Account X Friday.

The tweet may have been deleted

“Even though our presses stop, the passion for the game that we have cultivated together will live on,” the statement continued.

However, along with the end of America’s oldest printed gaming magazine, another aspect of Game Informer What won’t survive is the video game publication’s digital archive. The domain name GameInformer.com now links to a landing page that only displays the announcement of the closure. All internal links on the Game Informer website now also link to the same page, meaning that news articles, reviews, and other previously published content can no longer be viewed.

Lost digital archives are becoming all too common

According to the ex-Game Informer content director Kyle Hilliard, the magazine was more than half way there finished his next issue when he received news that his parent company was closing it down.

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The tweet may have been deleted

“Game Informer has been shut down by GameStop and the entire incredibly talented staff (including myself) has been laid off,” Hilliard posted on X on Friday.

The sudden decision to shut down the video game magazine, acquired by GameStop in 2000, has clearly drawn attention Game InformerThe company’s employees were caught off guard. As a result, employees likely didn’t have a chance to archive their own work before the company took its website content offline.

Unfortunately, the shutdown and deletion of online archives is becoming increasingly common in the digital media industry as a whole, resulting in the loss of content over time. Most recently, Paramount decided to Dismantle MTV News website and its digital archives, more than a year after the news organization shut down. Journalists and fans of the organization alike have lamented the loss of years of interviews and other MTV news-related content. And while the Internet Archive likely has a good portion of Game Informer’s archived content, Internet Archive documents are typically incomplete snapshots of the originals, with altered formatting and missing elements.

In recent years, GameStop has struggled to keep up with the video game industry’s shift from physical to digital. While 2021’s meme stock craze has helped keep it afloat, GameStop CEO Ryan Cohen recently called for “extreme frugality” while his difficulties persist.

Mashable has reached out to GameStop to confirm that the archive is gone and to ask if there are any plans to make it available again at some point. We’ll update you if we hear back.