One of my newly found favorite regional blogs, The Age's Screen Play blog, has commented on new Australian game magazine sales numbers, revealing along the way that: "IDG last week closed Australian GamePro magazine, leaving only one Australian multiformat games magazine left in the market: Next Publishing's 15-year-old veteran warhorse Hyper."

It's noted: "Australian GamePro joins an increasingly long list of gaming magazines axed in the past few years, including Australian editions of Edge, Play, GamesTM, XBM and PC Games Addict... PC Powerplay is now the only Australian gaming magazine remaining that submits to an official ABC audit, so it is fair to surmise that it would be Australia's highest selling games publication. Yet it now has circulation of just 20,000 copies, a nine per cent fall in the past six months."

We've also previously mapped the print-magazine curve in the U.S., and indeed, things aren't looking that much better in the UK, excepting mags such as Edge which make a prestige differentiation effort.

This is all hardly surprising, perhaps, but Jason Hill's final Screen Play comment is on the money for all regions, even though it applies to his: "The few remaining Australian gaming magazines are going to have to triple their efforts to provide readers with compelling, original and in-depth Australian content if they are going to remain relevant in the face of fierce competition from free, web-based competitors."