Game Informer, one gaming’s longest-running magazines, shuts down after 33 years

digitaltrends.com:

Game Informer, one of the longest-running U.S. print magazines focusing on video games, is shutting down. The outlet published a statement Friday on X (formerly Twitter) that announced the closure after 33 years.

At the time of writing, the Game Informer website is down. I was reading the subscription page for this article and it suddenly refreshed to a white screen with just the statement on it.

According to Kotaku, all staff were called into a meeting with GameStop HR and were told they were being laid off and the publication was closing immediately. At least one employee was on a work trip at the time. Game Informer’s head of video Alex Van Aken posted on X that there are some people on staff that haven’t heard the news, at the time of this writing, and that somebody “higher up” spilled the news.

The magazine was published and owned by GameStop ever since an acquisition in 2000 with Game Informer’s previous owner, FuncoLand. It was available as part of GameStop’s PowerUp Rewards Pro program. However, the constantly embattled GameStop business often hit Game Informer, with multiple rounds of layoffs over the past decade. The last was in 2022, around the time the company wanted to pivot to crypto and NFTs and became a “meme stock” and its share price soared (a thing that just recently started happening again, although not to the level of the original trend).

Game Informer was one of — if not the last — mainstream print magazine covering video game news published in the U.S. Other countries like the U.K. still have publications like Edge and PC Gamer that are available in print.

In March, editor-in-chief Matt Miller announced that Game Informer was getting its own standalone subscription. The statement noted how tough it’s been to get a copy of each monthly issue over the past few years, and that the team understood it was coming during a hard time for the industry.

“Even a brief look around the gaming industry right now can be sobering. Hard times, layoffs,