In a recent post, I was talking about what we should do to award game journalism, and in the comments, I noted: "I actually feel that a lot of the better, looser game writing out there would be less well recognized by formal aggregations of (largely print) journalists. Having said that, we got Game Developer and Gamasutra nominated in the definitely non game-journalist centric Maggie Awards, so I'm not against that type of thing."

Well, myself and the other editors zoomed down to Los Angeles last night for the 56th Annual Maggie Awards Banquet, and the April 2006 issue of Game Developer (which featured a postmortem of Ubisoft's King Kong game, our regular/canonical salary survey, and an interview with Will Wright, among other things) won the Maggie Award for Best Magazine (Computers/Trade).

Our competitors were fellow CMP pub Network Computing, the independent Microsoft-themed mag Redmond Channel Partner, the embedded-specific RTC Magazine, and our former colleagues at Technology & Learning, so it's good to see a game-centric pub triumph in a much more IT-led category - at least, it is for us!

If you look at the finalists, it's interesting to see just who is sticking around in the print space nowadays - there were web-specific awards at the Maggies, too, but it's definitely a print-biased association. Some sectors, such as health and beauty pubs and regional magazines based in affluent areas, seem to be thriving. Others seem a little more challenged in this increasingly Internet-specific age - especially if they don't already have a strong web presence.

But fortunately we have Gamasutra and Game Developer to synergize each other (something that will be happening a lot more in the next few months, if you'll excuse the buzzwords), and I'd like to thank Jill Duffy, Brandon Sheffield, and Cliff Scorso and everyone else at the CMP Game Group for their amazing work on the mag. Onward!