Why did BradyGames and Prima vanish from the guide shelves?
Neither name was small. BradyGames published its first strategy guide in November 1993, as a division of Macmillan Computer Publishing, and grew to publish roughly 90 to 100 guides a year. Prima Games was founded in 1990 in Roseville, California, when owner Ben Dominitz contracted author Rusel DeMaria to create a guide imprint first called The Secrets of the Games; its Myst guide alone sold in excess of 1.25 million copies across all versions. For two decades, a big game's American guide was almost certainly wearing one of these two names.
Act one: the rivals end up in one house
2013 to 2015In 2013 Random House, Prima's parent, merged with Penguin Group, BradyGames' owner, to form Penguin Random House. The two competing guide imprints now sat inside one company. On June 1, 2015, the imprints were merged, and future guides continued solely under the Prima Games brand. The BradyGames name did not lose a fight with Prima. Both were absorbed by a book publishing merger two levels above the guide trade, and the surviving label was a corporate choice.
Act two: the print economics give out
November 2018 to spring 2019In November 2018, Penguin Random House announced it would close Prima Games by the second quarter of 2019. Publishers Weekly, reporting the sale of Prima's digital assets as the final step in closing the imprint, gave the cause in one sentence: Prima was once one of the largest guide publishers in the industry, but the proliferation of game guide websites led to a severe decline in the demand for print books. The free, searchable, updatable online guide had taken the print guide's core job. What print still did better, permanence, art, and the object itself, was not enough at 90 to 100 titles a year.
Act three: the name becomes a website
2019 to todayOn March 14, 2019, Asteri Holdings acquired Prima Games and shut down the print operations, shifting the brand to gaming tips on its website and expansion into gaming news. Prima's own post that September, titled We Were Just Playing Dead, put the surviving claim plainly: launched in 1990, nearly thirty years as a trusted source for secrets and tips, and now a site, with 1.7 million users cited. In January 2022 the Gamurs group acquired Prima Games. The previously published digital guides were taken down in November 2024. So the names did not vanish in a day. One was retired by merger in 2015, the other was closed as a print imprint in 2019, and what remains of it is a website carrying a famous guide name into a different business.