Who still publishes print strategy guides?
Print did not survive by competing with free websites on speed or price. It survived in the opposite direction: fewer games, slower work, heavier books. The two names that define the surviving model are Piggyback, founded in Europe in 1999, and Future Press of Hamburg, whose hardcover FromSoftware books have become the modern face of the form. Both sell the guide as a made object first and a help text second, because help alone is free now.
Piggyback: four games a year, on purpose
100 percent complete, 100 percent productionGamesIndustry.biz describes Piggyback, established in 1999, publishing guides for about four games a year in PAL territories, all released simultaneously in English, French, Italian, German, and Spanish, plus at least one North American guide annually. Head Louie Beattie explained the model in interview: focus on four titles a year and do them absolutely completely, typically 20 to 30 people working six months on a guide; print in Germany on Heidelberg machines using 135 GSM paper, stitch bound, because other guide manufacturers do not offer that. The positioning line he repeats is 100 percent completion and 100 percent production values. For Final Fantasy XII, Piggyback added a limited edition hardcover, its first, after market feedback that die hard fans wanted a guide that was also a collector's item, with the limited quantity itself adding collector value.
Future Press: the FromSoftware books
Books of Knowledge, and the selloutsFuture Press's Elden Ring guides show the same model at modern scale. Books of Knowledge Volume 1: The Lands Between, Future Press, first published November 2022, runs 512 pages in hardcover, with premium binding and paper, more than 100 maps, a double sided world poster, and a ribbon bookmark. Volume 2 runs 528 pages and carries an exclusive interview with director Hidetaka Miyazaki. GameSpot's guide coverage records the demand pattern that follows such books: Volume 1 sold out, was restocked in December 2024, and promptly sold out again; the Dark Souls Trilogy Compendium, a 480 page hardcover reissued for the publisher's 25th anniversary in April 2024, was sold out for over a year; the Sekiro guide disappeared years ago. The newest entry in the line, the Elden Ring Nightreign Official Companion Guide, Future Press, is a 400 page hardcover announced at $45 for a September 30, 2025 release. Scarcity here is not a marketing pose. Small print runs of expensive books genuinely run out.
What changed, in one line
From shelf filler to print runBradyGames at its height published 90 to 100 guides a year. Piggyback built a business on four. That ratio is the whole story of the surviving print guide: the mass market for printed help belonged to the internet, so the printers who remained took the part of the old guide that the internet could not copy, the paper, the binding, the art, and the shelf presence, and made that the product.