The skies are gray over our hobby as one of gaming’s oldest institutions, Game Informer, is closing its doors. This morning, GameStop abruptly pulled the plug on Game Informer magazine and its website, laying off its entire staff as it “is about 70% done” with the next issue, according to Chief Content Officer Kyle Hilliard.
The official Game Informer X account shared farewell message Titled “The Final Level: Farewell to Game Informer”, you can find it below:
The abrupt closure comes after a tumultuous period for the Minneapolis-based magazine. Facing pressure from struggling owner GameStop, Game Informer had already gone through multiple rounds of layoffs since 2018, reducing the size of the outlet. In March 2024, Game Informer launched a up-to-date subscription, separate from GameStop’s loyalty program, for $19.91 per year. Before today’s events, GI employees seemed pretty joyful with how that was going.
It’s unclear if GameStop plans to issue refunds for existing subscriptions, but it’s not a good sign that the entire Game Informer site is already gone. The site now links to the same closure statement as above.
Game Informer was founded in 1991, at a time when gaming was less popular and it was much harder to keep up with everything that was happening in our hobby. For millions of people, the monthly Game Informer was required reading, not only for the major exclusives on newly announced games that the magazine reliably delivered, but also for the wide range of games it covered in a single issue.
If you were a kid in the 2000s, like I was, chances are you didn’t fully understand how Game Informer ended up on your doorstep. We started getting the magazines in the mail after my dad signed up for a GameStop membership—he never opened one, but I couldn’t get enough of them. In elementary school, I kept a bulky stack of Game Informers in my desk that I read every chance I got. I didn’t have the attention span to read most of the articles, but I could spend hours marveling at the screenshots, the site design, and the sharply written captions.
The pile got heavier and heavier over the years, and while I eventually got rid of some in a move, my favorite Game Informer issues still enjoy a place on my shelf. I still have an issue of Borderlands from 2007, when it was supposed to look completely faded and Mad Max-esque. I remember reading and rereading an issue of Assassin’s Creed so often that the cover fell apart. I always made time for the reader’s letters and fan art pages—I think I liked that it brought out the personalities of the GI workers, even if I was too adolescent to learn their names. Game Informer was the thing that taught me that writing about games was something you could do professionally. That’s gone now.
Yet Game Informer’s legacy lives on. FromMaxan independent newspaper founded by former Game Informer employees who were laid off, is organizing Game Informer Archive Project on Discord to aid preserve the legacy of the magazine that has been created over the decades.
