In a possibly poorly informed opinion on a topic well worn into the ground, I wanted to share my thoughts on the end of Nintendo Power. While everyone one of us knows Nintendo Power the relevance of Nintendo Power today has dwindled greatly from its original Mt. Everest dominance. Was the announcement about Nintendo Power really surprising or did Nintendo Power die years ago and the life support was finally pulled? Nintendo Power entered the magazine world in 1988 with its first cover spilling the details about Super Mario Bros. 2. While Nintendo Power wasn't the first on the scene it did bring much to the table. Nintendo Power was in a unique position being published by the manufacture and publisher that had taken the console market by storm effectively monopolizing the news and information about its own products that everyone wanted. Not only did it cover news and information but gave gamers an inside look into hints and tricks to help them through games during a time of less widely available information.

Nintendo Power was well entrenched by the time the SNES came around and in my own opinion was one of the main differences in the console wars between Sega and Nintendo. If the user base is high enough you can feed all the information on why you are better than the competition while the consumers give you money to do it. The dominance continued through the N64 but took a huge blow when Sony stepped up to the plate. Sony and the Playstation 1 and 2 effectively crushed Nintendo as the premier console. Now that there was a successful console from someone other than Nintendo a paradigm shift occurred away from Nintendo. Many like myself continued to subscribe to Nintendo Power but finally the night in shining armor was wounded. I believe this was the beginning of the end to Nintendo Power. Nintendo had chances to save Nintendo Power but failed to make a major difference with the Gamecube but it did stabilize it for a time. Their final chance to save Nintendo Power was with the Wii that catered away from the user base that had built up Nintendo and to a more casual crowd. Even then I feel that Nintendo Power still would not have saved itself due to the increased competition with in the game industry from Sony, Microsoft and GameStop’s Game Informer.

Game Informer was another huge force that drove away subscribers. Why subscribe to two magazines when you can subscribe to one and it would cover all the systems. Now with the web I can pull up stories as they break. I don't have to wait a month like I did in 1997 to find out about new announcements. The advent of the Internet and the find anything now aspect, really drove down publishing as a whole and not only with gaming publications.

The final nail in the coffin came in 2007 when Nintendo contracted out the publishing to Future US. This to me showed that Nintendo had lost interest in its own product and were slowly giving it the boot. In my opinion the Nintendo Power era died a slow prolonged death that was foreseeable for many years.

Again I wish to reiterate that this is strictly my opinion and that yours may differ to it. Feel free to state your opinion and give me advice on improvement.