Why does the Final Fantasy IX guide keep sending you to a website?
The book is the Final Fantasy IX Official Strategy Guide, BradyGames, published for SquareSoft's 2000 PlayStation game. Owners noticed the same thing on page after page: instead of the tip, secret, or boss detail they had paid for, the book printed a keyword and told them to go to PlayOnline.com for the rest. Veteran guide writer Doug Walsh, interviewed by Kotaku in 2019 about his memoir The Walkthrough, explained how a printed book ended up half finished on purpose.
The licensor could strip the book
A parasitic industry, in Walsh's phraseWalsh calls strategy guide publishing a parasitic industry: guide makers exist at the pleasure of the host. BradyGames paid licensing fees and royalties for the rights to be the only official guidebook, and in return the licensor reviewed the book before print and could strip content. His understanding is that the FFIX authors wrote a complete guide, and that everything later moved to PlayOnline originally existed in the manuscript. At some point SquareSoft told BradyGames about its plans for the portal, BradyGames pushed back, knowing it would ruin the guide and cheat the fans, and tried to get only non essential information shifted online. In Walsh's words, Square was not having it.
Why BradyGames complied
Final Fantasy X was the hostageEveryone at Brady knew the fans were going to be angry, Walsh says, but the company could not risk not getting the rights to Final Fantasy X by refusing, and refusal would also have brought legal trouble under the license. Final Fantasy was one of the few whales of the early 2000s, a series that could make or break BradyGames' year. So the book went to print directing its readers elsewhere. SquareSoft, Walsh notes, never tried that trick again.
An honest limit, printed the way Walsh printed his
He was not on that bookWalsh is careful, and this page follows him: he had just begun writing for BradyGames while the FFIX guide was being worked on and had no involvement in it. His account is what he heard plenty about over the following years inside the company, offered as his understanding, not as a SquareSoft statement. No statement from SquareSoft explaining the PlayOnline decision was found in the sources opened for this page. The guide's reputation, though, is a matter of the book itself: anyone can open a copy and count the boxes that send the reader to a website.