The State Of U.S. Videogame Magazines 97
simoniker writes "Wonder how video game magazines are still alive and kicking, in the age of the Interweb? Here's 'a quick tour of all the game magazines you can find in U.S. bookshelves right now', with plenty of commentary and cover scans, from Nintendo Power to EGM: 'The output isn't quite what it was ten or even five years ago, but there's still a remarkable amount of print getting churned out each month -- and what's more, nearly all of it these days is written for 'core' gamers like you and me.'" I enjoy most of Ziff's magazines (EGM, CGW). I also happily pay through the nose for the British Mag Edge, which is the finest gaming magazine in the world.
As said by Dr. Egon Spengler (Score:2)
Re:As said by Dr. Egon Spengler (Score:1)
So, print is dying, not dead.
Re:As said by Dr. Egon Spengler (Score:1)
Magazines are great for long trips, bathroom breaks, reading in bed, etc. and tons of other places a laptop is not very comfortable in (I've tried on the john, gets to be a pain in the ass when wiping). They are alot easier to scan too and find what i want instead of a .pdf or a website that is obnoxiously choked with ads and demanding I sign up to to be a member and get more spam. they definitely are lacking in current news, though. But how can you beat the internet?!
I'm an avid EGM subscri
Re:As said by Dr. Egon Spengler (Score:1)
Bleh, remind me *not* to buy a used laptop from you...
The real state of Videogame magazines.... (Score:2, Insightful)
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Re:The real state of Videogame magazines.... (Score:1)
Maybe it's the fact that all of these are owned by a select few publishers and they are subsidizing the cost of their failures by raising the cost of their more popular mags as well as putting
Re:The real state of Videogame magazines.... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:The real state of Videogame magazines.... (Score:1)
$6-$7 is charged due to the fact that they print hundreds of glossy pages of crap that I never read, don't care to read and often choose not to ever purchase the magazine again.
100 pages of content is something I'd be willing to consider paying more for than 200 pages of content and 200 pages of advertising. At least my $3-$4 for the 100 pages of content (averages,averages...assuming 200 pages costs $6-$7)...is better spent in my mind.
I do
Re:The real state of Videogame magazines.... (Score:1)
blah.
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Re:The real state of Videogame magazines.... (Score:5, Informative)
In the US, magazine distribution is really inefficient -- there are hundreds of thousands of places to buy magazines, and to reach the realtively small number of people interested in a nich publication (games, fishing, knitting, etc), you need to print way more copies than you can possibly sell. Selling through 20 or 22% of your newstand copies is considered good, and hitting 30% or higher is fantastic. That means you're wasting the cost of 70% of your newstand distribution, which is a lot. At best, your newsstand sales might break even.
Then you have subscriptions. The $12.99 or $19.99 you pay for a year of a magazine doesn't come close to paying for the printing and shipping. It's a total loss leader. What it does, however, is ensure a certain level of readership for the magazine (vs. the uncertainty of newstand/retail sales).
This number of readers -- the guarenteed circulation -- can then be shown to potential advertisers, along the lines of "hey, look, a quarter-million people subscribe to this magazine! Our research shows they each spend $600 a year on software! You should advertise, because this is your core audience." And then (hopefully) you sell some ads. Advertising is the *only* place a typical US magazine makes any money at all. This means the magazines have to be advertiser focused. Not by giving good reviews to advertisers' products (in six years in the biz, I never saw that kind of influence from advertising happen, even once -- editors typically have no clue what ads will be in the magazine until the see it come back from the printer), but by trying to appeal to a broad audience that makes their numbers look good to advertisers. Different magazines have different ways to accomplish this (EGM by being very broad and inclusive, PSM by being hardcore, etc), obviously, but the goal -- at some level -- is to being pretty advertising friendly as a product.
The size of the magazine, monthly, is basically set by the number of ads. You have a minimum book size (say 96 pages), and if you sell more than 50% ads (say you sell 60 pages), you may go up a form (usually 12 or 16 pages, depending on the printer) to say, 112. But the goal is to keep the ad/edit ratio pretty close to 50%. In lean months (like the summer), you may be at the minimum size, but have many more edit pages than ad pages, and in the fat months (leading up to Xmas), you may have way more ad pages than edit pages (although you'll likely have double or triple the total editorial pages you had in the lean months).
In the UK, by contrast, lossy subscriptions are less well known, and the smaller total size of the market means that newsstand sales can be managed much more effectively. A magazine may sell 80-90% of its retail issues, making newsstand profitable. This reduces the reliance on advertisers, and means magazines don't have to try to be "mainstream" to be as advertiser-friendly as possible. This means magazines that are much more niche than could be successful in the US (such as Edge, RetroGamer, Scootering) can do very well.
That all said, magazines are a fanastic bargain, and given that the ads are really very targeted, I don't mind seeing them in games mags, the same way I enjoy looking at the ads in car mags or other technology magazines.
Re:The real state of Videogame magazines.... (Score:1)
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Re:The real state of Videogame magazines.... (Score:1)
Yes content is great, but if you can't find it stuck in between all the ads it is worthless to me. I would much rather pay more for a magazine I could actually read then one I had to filp 10 pages of ads between the "content". I don't object to advertising in mags, I object to there being more advertising than content. 5 years ago this wasn't a problem and guess what - I had subscriptions to 3 vidoegaming magaz
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vague question (Score:2)
Re:vague question (Score:1)
technically not allowed ;) (Score:2)
That said, when I was in college, I worked for a bookstore that allowed us 20 stripped books and 13 stripped magazines per month. (Paperbacks only, no mass market or hardcover)
Great perk, almost made up having to straighten up (haha) the gay magazine section. We had tons of mags, and those were the only ones worse f
Honest Question: (Score:2)
Additionally it's very interesting that you should talk about Scientific American. I was a long time subscriber to SA. However, around 2000 or so I noticed a very disturbing trend. The content was noticibly dumbed down (equations were almost totally remo
Re:Honest Question: (Score:1)
Re:The real state of Videogame magazines.... (Score:1)
Re:The real state of Videogame magazines.... (Score:2)
What really shocks me is that I get tons of free magazines from publishers (the only magazine I still pay for is national geographic and there aren't all that many ads in that anymore) who want to bump their subscriber numbers. I'm sure the freebees get factored in to the subscriptions costs.
Re:The real state of Videogame magazines.... (Score:1)
That's not where review bias comes from (Score:2)
The only real way to end the corruption of the review system is to get a set of trusted critics. The movie critics have Roger Ebert and a few others (David Ansen?). Once a critic is trusted enough by the movie-watching public, the critic is able to tell off the studios. If a st
Re:The real state of Videogame magazines.... (Score:1)
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There is no bigger indicator of a magazine's success then the count of 'ad pages.'
Your comment on the ratio of the magazine being 50% ads is also flawed. Imagine the same amount of content but half as many ads - so now it's just 33% advertising. Is it a better magazine? Actually, no, because with less ad revenue, the content is lamer as they can't afford better/more writers.
Re:The real state of Videogame magazines.... (Score:2)
Re:The real state of Videogame magazines.... (Score:2)
What I am talking about is a financially healthy magazine. Someone earlier mentioned that mags are doing badly Because they have so many ads, and I was saying it was quiet to the contrary.
usually when a major magazine sees it's ad pages drop, it is a sign it is struggling and possibly going
Re:The real state of Videogame magazines.... (Score:1)
Too commercial (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Too commercial (Score:2)
Re:Too commercial (Score:2)
Re:Too commercial (Score:2)
Re:Too commercial (Score:2)
Waste of Money (Score:1)
Re:Waste of Money (Score:1)
Re:Waste of Money (Score:2)
I don't find that at all. I pick up Game Informer occassionally and find it very current. Game Informer was the ONLY magazine to have inside information on the Revolution(Wii) with details of the Red Steel game. Online sites were ripping and sharing scans of the magazine to provide online content. On the other side of the coin, they still referred to it as the Revolution long after we knew of its new name. While some areas of magazines will be behind due to pr
Re:Waste of Money (Score:1)
ST Format (Score:2)
Re:ST Format (Score:2)
I have ST Format's last issue. The headline is "All good things" and they made a big thing of it being the last issue.
Re:ST Format (Score:2)
Re:ST Format (Score:2)
Re:ST Format (Score:2)
Commodore Format did the same. But 1995 it was effectively being run as one magazine with Amstrad Action. In mid-1995 they closed Amstrad Action very suddenly (ironically leaving the last issue with the headline 'Publish and be damned!') and the next CF insisted they could survive. Given it shared every staff member with its long dead brother and was by that stage a 24 page magazine for £3.25 we were not surprised to see it die itself 2 months later (although unlike AA it got a farewell is
PC Gamer (Score:2, Interesting)
PC Gamer is my favorite print mag (Score:2)
Re:PC Gamer (Score:1)
Print is far from dead (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Print is far from dead (Score:2)
Besides, the hot surface under the laptop burns the skin when on the toilet.
Re:Print is far from dead (Score:1)
PCGamer US vs. PCGamer UK (Score:1)
To be honest, I used to be a great fan of PC Gamer US: a great thick volume of gaming information released each month. But in and about 2001, they drastically cut down their page count (from 200+ to sometimes 50-ish.) That didn't matter all that much. What did bother me, however, is when the editorial staff started producing reviews that reflected more personal taste for advanced graphics and action tha
The Brits! (Score:3, Insightful)
This goes for just about any type of magazine, be it Maxim, Linux Format, or Edge. The British magazines are of such a higher calibre, it's scary.
There must be a simple answer out there.
Re:The Brits! (Score:1)
Re:The Brits! (Score:2)
Readers
Re:The Brits! (Score:2)
Re:The Brits! (Score:4, Informative)
Because there's so much competition between the UK mags (the lower cost of entry to the market means we have a lot more of them than the US), any mag that regularly bumps up its scores to suck up to advertisers will be spotted pretty quickly and lose trust with its readers. Giving a 9 to a game that the other mags are giving 6 or 7 can be forgiven as personal preference on the part of the reviewer - once. If it happens four or five times an issue, it'll be noticed. (Except where the mag in question is an 'official' one, where people still buy it no matter how inflated the review scores are...)
Re:The Brits! (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:The Brits! (Score:1)
GMR (Score:2)
Re:GMR (Score:1)
Main problem (Score:2, Informative)
Besides that, there's the multimediablitiy (if that's a word) of online cont
Regarding GamePro (Score:2)
I remember being a huge fan of GamePro. I had a subscription and everything. Then one day they did the review that made me stop reading them forever. They reviewed "Street Fighter II: Special Championship Edition" for the Sega Genesis. Every other mag on earth claimed that it fell flat on its face when compared to the SNES version (Street Fi
Re:Regarding GamePro (Score:1)
That's because it was better than the SNES version. I owned both the SNES and Genesis back in the day, loved both consoles for different games, and rented/played SFIISuperUltraHyperMegaEtcEdition for both consoles. The SNES version looked and sounded better, but ah, yes, as no one seems to understand in these days of graphics masturbating fanboys, that doesn't matter. The Genesis version was smoother and played better,
Re:Regarding GamePro (Score:2)
Re:Regarding GamePro (Score:1)
PCXL (Score:2)
Re:PCXL (Score:2)
I hear you! After PCXL went away, I started looking at consoles more for gaming. I miss PCXL's craziness and often hard edged commentary. These days, I read EGM, but it really isn't the same, though it is a good mag.
Re:PCXL (Score:1)
Wish there was one out there that was even a third as good as it was.
Old and Busted (Score:2)
Vat is theez "magazine" you zpeak of? (Score:1)
subscription differences (Score:1)
I'd rather read the print version (Score:2)
The price is nothing to be concerned about unless you're paying sto
Printed magazines? Who needs them anyway (Score:2)
My favorites... (Score:2)
Bruce
Re:My favorites... (Score:1)
US gaming mags may be crap but they are cheap... (Score:2)
For any magazine subscriptions ebay is definitly one of the first places to look.
I personally miss Next Generation (Score:3, Insightful)
Then Next Generation hit the scene, not just talking about games, but about the ideas behind games. And the people who had those ideas.
The Shigeru Miyamoto of Nintendo Power was a cartoon character who's name happened to get associated with Zelda and Mario. The Shigeru Miyamoto of Next Generation was a brilliant gamesmith, a master of the art and craft of games. Richard Garriot wasn't just some nerd making D&D clones, he was a philosopher exploring ethics in this wonderful new and interactive medium.
The topic of graphics in other magazines had some base instinctive appeal (OMGz polyg0nz!). Graphics in Next Generation were high art at the bleeding edge of technology.
In short, Next Generation magazine made me the gamer I am today. Or rather, it didn't make me a gamer, it helped me understand *why* I'm a gamer. And it did so with top-notch production values and a high quality presentation.
I'll never forgive IGN for watering it down and then turning it into NextGen->DailyRadar->kaput.
Re:I personally miss Next Generation (Score:1)
Old fogey magazines (Score:2)
Retro Gamer gets all the interviews of the old-timey developers from UK and the rest of Europe. I'm an old time ST user, so most of the games I used to play originate from that part of the world.