The decline of the gaming magazine
MCV has stats on how print mags are doing in the UK, and it tells an interesting story. Basically, all the Playstation magazines are in decline, and the Nintendo and XBox mags are on the rise.
But declining along with the PS mags, alas, are the PC mags, despite the fact that PC gaming is going great guns (see the last article I posted).
The issue, of course, is that it’s going great guns in a completely different arena. The center of gravity of PC gaming has shifted away from hardcore games. Once upon a time, a title like BioShock would have been a PC exclusive, and today everyone is excited about seeing it on the 360.
The new PC game consumer won’t likely read any magazines about the industry, because they are a primarily casual consumer. And in that fast-paced a market, stuff like lead time for print is even more devastating than it is for the packaged goods industry.
Interestingly, Computer Games and Massive, which were undergoing some troubles, seem to have been picked up by a new publisher (though I haven’t heard if the same editorial crew remains — Steve? Cindy? you there?). I don’t know what the strategy is to try to deal with this overall market shift.
And at the same time, we also see folks like Totilo and Croal having extended discussions about why they like casual games so much now…
5 Responses to “The decline of the gaming magazine”
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Well, of course one of the big problems the print folios face is that people want real-time info that can’t be provided by a publication that is (generally speaking) 4 months ahead of (or behind, depending on how you like to look at it) itself.
In order for the print magazines to “make it” they almost always require the support of a publisher, and that publisher generally wants to make money and have some sort of control. This, I think, contributes to the difficulty of maintaining an editorially strong magazine.
Online is where it’s at. Readers get new material much more frequently than once a month. The news is timely. The editors have more control (lacking a publisher) and more resources are available to support good content rather than being focused on distribution. Advertising can be handled in a way that it doesn’t have to dominate the “publication”.
Witness the fate of MOG (Massive Online Gaming) magazine. It’s downfall was the result of (I believe) contractual issues with different publishers. A good deal of MOG’s “remains” rolled into GamersInfo.net (I think that’s the site) which–unless I’m mistaken–has done pretty well for itself.
I used to be all about getting that hardcopy in my hand every month, but now I can’t even imagine subscibing to a print magazine for gaming. On the other hand, if they could digitize and distribute the way I’ve seen some other magazines do it (MIX, Dr. Dobb’s) then I might change my mind. After all, I think websites still have a problem matching the design quality of some of the better print magazines.
It also seems that AFK magazine, is also done. Shame, i like the approach.
I think chabuhi said it well. Online is just too immediate compared to the lead times of print publishing.
That said, some minor points:
1. A four-month lead time would make print publishing worthless if games took only a few months to create. But the bigger (and higher-profile) games take years to build, significantly reducing the pain of a multi-month lead time. If print publishing for game magazines is dying, it may not be due solely to the delay in information getting to gamers.
2. As the big newspapers keep insisting, immediacy isn’t always great. Being able to throw something online in seconds means that fact-checking sometimes gets skipped, with unfortunate consequences for more than one party. So print publishing still has at least one competitive factor in its favor.
3. Online publishing has another obvious advantage over print; namely, portability. The growing ubiquity of wireless networks and small browsing devices may have more to do with the decline of print magazines than lead time issues. I bought a copy of [i]PC Gamer[/i] for the first time in many years a couple of weeks ago while waiting for my wife at the airport… but if I’d had her iPhone with me and could have been surfing, there’s no way I’d have bought the magazine.
If the information gamers want is online, and it’s easier than ever to get to, then maybe print magazines really are now becoming the dinosaurs that the Internet futurists told us they’d eventually be. We consumers will just have to become more careful in which online information sources we trust to check their facts before publishing them.
Me, I miss the days when [i]Byte[/i] used to include code listings, but I guess that makes me somewhat dinosaurian as well…. 🙂
(Ex)CGM Steve here.
While I may consult, or at least offer some freely ignorable and likely useless suggestions, I’m not involved with the relaunch of either magazine.
Gamers want an interactive experience. Magazines just don’t offer the ability for the reader to publicly argue or respond to the writers and share their own opinions the way an online forum or even this blog format does. Letters to the editor are screened and often come months after an article has slipped out of interest if they are even published.
On top of that the information in the magazines is months behind what has been passed around online discussion boards and gaming blogs.