[FilterSweep]

GameFAQS.com has been around since the 90s. They housed both user-submitted and commercial guides/tips/cheats/etc, and free.

Now, this guy has a great principle on the tech giants being a threat for a competitive, efficient economy, but I'm just not with him on this one. His only marketable niche would be to get the top paid gaming professionals (like the Dota 2 team that won $6million this month), and provide a market place for the top talent to coach, but he didn't see that, and it's a very small niche to begin with.

[TodPunk]

I agree. The reason game guides make money at all is because they have shops like Gamestop pushing those guides with every purchase. Not many a gamer is going to pay even $5 for a video guide they have to watch the entirety of if they just want to know how to do X thing when that's freely available in multiple forms elsewhere. For specific things gamefaqs and achievement guide videos are already a well established free "product".

A business is not just "people want X." It has to at least fit the "ENOUGH people want X and are willing to pay for it or are valuable enough as users in order to be sold to advertisers." The morality of that can be debated to death and isn't very interesting, but the reality of it is something we seem to miss a lot.