Mort, one of the kind and dedicated folks at zzap64.co.uk, has finished scanning yet another complete run of an old British game magazine. This time around it's TV Gamer, an obscure title that has the honor of being the UK's first mag devoted entirely to game consoles...or that was the original idea, anyway.

Launched in the summer of 1983 by London-based Boytonbrook Ltd., TV Gamer began as a quarterly buyer's guide for the 2600, Intellivision, Colecovision, and so forth, its pages filled to the brim with capsule game reviews and tiny little black-and-white screenshots.

This lasted three issues before the title expanded to a full-on monthly in March 1984, adding a slew of features on arcades, portable games, and computers. In this incarnation the mag took on a noticeable resemblance to Electronic Games, the US title that pioneered game mags worldwide -- both shared an affinity for long, text-heavy articles adorned with lots of original artwork and surprisingly few screenshots for a mag covering such a visual medium.

The formula was there for TV Gamer, but the audience arguably wasn't. Consoles were largely seen as a luxury item in the UK back then; for most gamers, the hot platform was the cheap, versatile Sinclair ZX Spectrum, which launched in 1982 and was easily Britain's number-one "game system" by 1984, the year TV Gamer ramped up to monthly printing.

The mag responded by upping its computer content, but by then it was too late, as the audience was used to consulting other mags for that sort of coverage. Eventually TV Gamer merged with multiplatform mag Big K (itself a very obscure title) before closing entirely with the March 1985 issue.

It reportedly took Mort a good three years to track down all of TV Gamer, even though the thing only lasted 14 issues. Funny, it feels like it's taken at least that long for me to find any issues of JoyStik, much less the whole set...but regardless, if you'd like to know how the UK handled console game coverage during the "golden years" of gaming, you could do far worse than to order the DVD from Mort or track down the scans on the net somewhere.

[Kevin Gifford breeds ferrets and runs Magweasel, a site for collectors and fans of old video-game and computer magazines. He's also executive editor at PiQ magazine.]

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A busy past couple weeks in game mags! Not only is the biggest game of the year out in stores, but in a rather magnanimous gesture on Rockstar's part, nearly all the print mags had enough access to GTA4 to get timely reviews into the issues in readers' hands right now. Of course, seeing this $100 million game project that's been all over the mainstream media for weeks get covered by these dinky little 100-page mags is... well, quite a juxtaposition, but...

Anyway, read on to discover how all the top mags handled their GTA4 coverage this month, and how all the non-Xbox/PS3-related mags prepared their counterprogramming. Ciao for now!

   

PlayStation: The Official Magazine and Official Xbox Magazine have almost the same cover style, PTOM featuring Niko Bellic circa dawn in Liberty City and OXM depicting him in the Matrix behind a big GTA4 logo.

OXM has 13 pages of coverage (which includes everything but the kitchen sink and even has a few pages of strategy added to the end) and the blasphemous score of 9.5 out of 10, while PTOM's "exclusive review" (maybe they were the first ones with access to the PS3 version, I dunno) runs seven and plays it a bit more straight, concentrating on the full experience instead of all the little details. (PS3 owners might be disappointed by its lack of discussion about topics particular to the system, but those sort of hardcore folks are probably reading online reviews anyway.)

Both OXM and PTOM have hot exclusive stories on Shaun White Snowboarding, and both even pitch the pieces on their respective covers. Otherwise, highlights include OXM's "Franchise Re-Animator" (a look at old games that could use a revival), PTOM's exquisitely titled "6 Racing Games That Aren't Gran Turismo 5," and their back page written by John Davison, who discusses the obsession of developers to go "mainstram" with their titles.

Continue reading "COLUMN: 'Game Mag Weaseling': Mag Roundup 5/4/08" »

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As promised, I bought every (well, ok, most) game mag in Japan while traveling there on holiday, and I thought I'd tell you a bit about what I've found.

A quick history of J-mags

From the late 1970s, video games received coverage in Japan's PC mags and kids' manga anthologies. The first mags entirely devoted to games popped up in 1982, starting with ASCII's LOGiN and Kadokawa Shoten's Comptiq and continuing with Softbank's Beep, the first mag to also cover arcade and home console games.

In 1985 Tokuma Shoten opened Family Computer Magazine, the first fully console (i.e. Famicom)-oriented magazine in Japan. With a design that shares a lot in common with early-era Nintendo Power, it was a massive success and spawned all manner of imitators, including ASCII's Famicom Tsushin (originally a column in LOGiN), Kadokawa's Marukatsu Famicom, and JICC's Famicom Hisshoubon. This situation remained largely the same throughout the Famicom/Super Famicom's reign, with these multiplatform mags dominating the marketplace and maybe one or two mags covering the Mega Drive and PC Engine.

Things changed in the mid-90s when the PlayStation and Saturn became serious forces in the game marketplace. Along with their "flagship" multiplatform mag, every existing game-mag publisher in Japan also launched an arrage of single-platform mags -- which, when thrown in with all the new multiplatform mags hitting stores, made for an extremely crowded marketplace. The saturation point was reached pretty quickly, and closures began in the late 90s and extended all through this decade, with the rise of the Internet only serving to hurry things along.

These days, the game-mag scene in Japan is in a state of near-monopoly, thanks to Kadokawa's purchase/merger/whatever-you-wanna-call-it with Enterbrain bringing production of the Famitsu and Dengeki stables under the same umbrella.

For the purposes of my survey, I bought every video-game magazine on regular rotation, ignoring any one-offs or specials (zoukan in Japanese), PC game mags (LOGiN is the only one left that is not "adult"), mags devoted entirely to MMO's (there's around five these days), and mags devoted entirely to girl or BL games (of which there are about fifty million).

Continue reading "COLUMN: 'Game Mag Weaseling': Japan Mag Roundup 2008" »

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Well, it's been a very hectic past couple weeks for game mags, hasn't it? While I was out cavorting in Japan (and, of course, buying all the local mags so I could write a survey for GameSetWatch -- but that'll be next week), Dan Hsu left Ziff Davis and Games for Windows closed its doors, meaning that ZD has gone from publishing six regular game magazines (plus specials) in 2003 to only one in the space of five years. And also filed for Chapter 11. (The biggest surprise here is that Chapter 11 happened after all that downsizing, not before.)

Not even Simon Cox, the man behind what ZD's print mags were like in the early '00s, thinks print mags have much of a future with the company, if his comments to Kyle Orland are any measure. I would agree with them -- for a company like Ziff Davis, which (even after all the downsizing it's done) has a great deal of debt, a great deal of overhead, and has been put the brunt of its attention on an online strategy for the past three or so years, print mags aren't the way to the future.

The lack of advertising in the PC game marketplace is no doubt one reason why the marketplace couldn't support both GFW and PC Gamer at once, but I wonder if being published by an outfit as large as ZD -- and not, say, a much smaller company like the ones behind Play or Beckett MOG -- meant that it had to be a lot more profitable to stay alive than what would otherwise be the case.

(I also wonder if taking a magazine aimed mainly at hardcore gamer fans and naming it after after a Microsoft-driven initiative that most of the audience sees as half-baked was such a hot idear, but hindsight is always 20/20 with these things.)

Hsu's departure is also momentous because he, along with John Davison, was the main force behind the transformation of Sendai's old and (let's face it) amateurish rags into seriously well-writen and well-designed publications, stuff actually worth reading if you were over the age of 18.

One could argue that out of all the people in U.S. game print media, he had the most influence over what we have today, both in print and online, looks like and reads like. I first worked with him during that fleeting dream known as Gamers.com back in 2000 and later did a bunch of EGM freelance for him, and never had I had a boss more friendly and even-handed, even though I'm sure I made him want to choke me to death on more than one occasion. I'll be interested in what he does next, and I'll be even more interested in how this affects the hierarchy of things at ZD once April 25 (his last day) passes.

Anyway, read on to get my take on all the game mags of the past couple weeks. Frankly, with GFW gone, and as pretentious as it must sound, it's almost getting to the point where even I have to admit that Edge is the best there is in print-land...

Continue reading "COLUMN: 'Game Mag Weaseling': Mag Roundup 4/19/08" »

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I'm in Japan right now and therefore don't have much interest in sitting down and writing a full column about esoterica game magazines right now (forgive me, Simon, there's just too much beer to drink and it's not going to drink itself!), but I thought I'd at least share a few of the things I've procured while I'm here.

In this picture you can see two items that you probably wouldn't be able to find in your typical used bookstore. On the left is the first issue of Famitsu Comic, a magazine that compiled and expanded upon the assorted manga that Famitsu printed in its mag circa 1991. It lasted a whopping two issues before getting relaunched as Fami-Comi, which enjoyed existence as a seasonal title for a year or two afterward.

On the right is issue number 13 of Game Freak, a fanzine about video games from the early 1980s that was chiefly edited by Satoshi Tajiri with illustrations by Ken Sugimori. This, of course, is the same Game Freak that later became a developer and invented the Pokemon series -- Tajiri designs/executive-produces the games, and Sugimori drew all 151 original Pokemon himself.

Game Freak the fanzine lasted from 1981 (when Tajiri was just beginning college) to circa 1986, by which time both chief contributors had enough professional magazine work to quit the doujinshi scene.

The 28-page zine, mostly written longhand in Tajiri's loopy handwriting, offered advanced strategy and tactics for arcade games; this issue I found teaches me all about getting high scores on Gaplus, the overlooked (and extremely difficult) Namco arcade shooter.

Otherwise, I'm mainly taking my parents to all the touristy bits of southern Honshu until next weekend. See you later!

[Kevin Gifford breeds ferrets and runs Magweasel, a site for collectors and fans of old video-game and computer magazines. He's also executive editor at PiQ magazine.]

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Can you solve the Mystery of the Video Game Scores? I know I can't. It's kind of a mystery to me why magazines care so much about their review score systems and score this and score that. Though, of course, the public's kind of at fault, too. Who remembers how many stars Roger Ebert gave Movie X?

You probably don't; if you remember anything, it's that he either said it's good or bad, along with maybe a couple zingers here and there. If game writing has produced text as memorable as Ebert's, then that's collectively our problem, isn't it?

And now that I've written enough text to (hopefully) clear this opening image, let's move right on to all the game magazines released within the past fortnight. This update may be a mite on the short side because I'm rapidly preparing for a trip to Japan, where I will be this time next week.

Hopefully I can visit all the secret places I know I can find old game mags for sale. (No, I won't tell you where they are. I can't have you go buying them all up before I get there!)

Continue reading "COLUMN: 'Game Mag Weaseling': Mag Roundup 3/29/08" »

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    >

I had the intention of writing this week about Hard Drives, the greatest magazine that Larry Flynt Publishing ever produced (I kid, I kid, but it's close), but I can't find my sole example in the bookshelves. So, how about a little Brazilian programming instead?

Collectors of obscure old video games know that Brazil was an extremely unique game marketplace during the 8 and 16-bit eras. The Odyssey2 somehow emerged as the top console of the classic era, Tec Toy produced all kinds of Brazil-exclusive Sega Master System and Genesis titles, and the marketplace until approximately the mid-90s was mainly occupied by the SMS, the MSX computer, and half a dozen NES-compatible pirate consoles.

There was no dedicated game mag in Brazil during the 80s, when arcades and pinball was where the main action was in the country. (Odyssey Aventura, the locally-produced newsletter for Philips' console, lasted eight issues.) This changed in 1990 when publishing outfit Editora Abril produced Ação Games, a special one-off edition of kids' sports magazine A Semana em Ação (The Week in Action) devoted entirely to console stuff. One more one-off was produced in 1991, and then Abril went out of business. The Ação name was bought by rival publisher Editora Azul, and beginning in October 1991, Ação Games became a monthly publication.

Ação was arguably the most influential game mag of the era in South America. It had an officially translated edition (called Action Games) in Argentina, and before a year had passed, it had no less than four monthly rivals in Brazil: Games, VideoGame, Supergame (Sega-exclusive) and Game Power (Nintendo-exclusive). The latter two combined into a single multiplatform title, Super Game Power, in 1995.

Thumbing through these mags, one gets the idea that Brazilian editors and publishers really loved GamePro. Supergame and Game Power both had official licenses to translate content from IDG's mag, and Ação's visual design was basically a clone as well -- the difference, of course, being that instead of ads for the TG16 and Super NES games, these titles had spots for pirate NES consoles and shady-looking mail order places.

What makes Brazil mags unique, though, is their art -- unlike most other countries where the game industry mostly revolved around pirates, the magazines here were pretty high-quality productions, with lots of original articles and artwork (most of which is actually good, remarkably).

Sadly, most of these mags went belly-up in the late '90s once the Internet took over as the chief source of game info. I admit to not knowing much about modern Brazilian mags; titles I'm aware of currently in existence include EGM Brasil, Official Xbox Magazine, PlayStation (a homegrown PS mag), Gamemaster (another homegrown multiplatform mag), and Nintendo World (which appears to be Nintendo Power in translation). If you know of any more publishing right now, I'd love to hear about them.

[Kevin Gifford breeds ferrets and runs Magweasel, a site for collectors and fans of old video-game and computer magazines. He's also executive editor at PiQ magazine.]

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Being a packrat is a dangerous thing. Don't worry -- my place is not a mess, overrun with stacks of magazines to the point where you can't navigate it anymore. Everything's still nice and neat; I can still keep a facade of normalcy as long as I don't show guests my home office/ferret habitat/magazine room.

But I've worried that I'm picking up a new hobby, one that I don't really need right now. I stop by used bookstores almost whenever I pass one, and lately I've been buying whatever $1 Choose Your Own Adventure books they have.

I do this for the same reasons I collect magazines and collected video games before that -- part nostalgia (I devoured these things as a grade-schooler), part gotta-catch-em-all psychology, part sheer nerddom. Now I'm even starting to peruse eBay and AbeBooks for deals on CYOA and other gamebook series. (I have a strict policy -- don't pay more than a buck for anything -- and so far it seems workable.)

Is this the plight of the geek? The desire to collect stuff of no vital value? Where does it end? In my case, it ends once I run out of shelf space -- which, sadly, I still have a lot of. Could be worse, I suppose -- I could have a taste for all those $60-and-up anime figurines I write about all the time for my magazine. As shelf filler, gamebooks give you far more bang for the buck. (PS: You got any extras, drop me a line at kevin@piqmag.com. Wait, don't. You'll just be encouraging me if you do!)

Anyway, click on for my views on all the new US game mags of the past fortnight. Big things are happening this month (except to book sizes, those are still small) -- nearly all the mags are livid with GTA4 coverage, but one stood out above the rest...

Continue reading "COLUMN: 'Game Mag Weaseling': Mag Roundup 3/15/07" »

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I sometimes feel a little embarrassed writing this column because although I'm arguably one of the most vocal cheerleaders for print game magazines, my actual information consumption habits couldn't contradict that more. Most all of my buying decisions on games are driven by what I read on forums.

If I want to cheat in a game, learn more about an upcoming game, or bitch about a game because I can't cheat in it, then the Internet is right there. (I also subscribe to the local Houston paper mainly because they had a good deal for a year's delivery a while back, newsprint is great for lining ferret litter boxes with, and I just can't get enough of that Family Circus.)

Eagle-eyed readers may have noted by now that I almost never talk about reviews in video-game magazines. That's because, in my opinion, traditional reviews in game magazines should go to the same place that cheat and strategy-guide pages went -- i.e., somewhere where I don't have to pay money for them.

Continue reading "COLUMN: 'Game Mag Weaseling': Down With Print-Mag Reviews" »

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It cost me many weeks of hard work, much endurance, and quite possibly my sanity, but we finally receieved printed copies of PiQ Issue 1 the other day. What a relief! I actually have been working on something for the past little while, and not just been ferrying my bloated body to and fro between the office and my condo for no reason! What a refreshing experience!

I don't want to reveal the cover until readers begin to receive the mag, but you can see a small snippet of it to the left. As you can see, we've got a thrilling expose into the world of dirty toilet seats. I'm thinking about a multi-spread feature on graft and corruption in the plumber's helper manufacturing industry for Issue 2, so stay tuned.

Anyway, enough tooting about my own mag -- let's start looking at all the lovely game magazines (and also Beckett Massive Online Guide) that were released over the past couple weeks. I wanted to do more commentary, but I've got a deadline-induced cold, so I'm going to lie on my couch right now and watch RoboCop.

Electronic Gaming Monthly March 2008 (Podcast)

Cover: Revenge of the PS3!

Fortunately for all of us, the cover is not devoted to a preview feature. It's divided into eight "reasons" why the PS3 will do lovely in '08, and doesn't descent into preview-land until the final reason -- the games, of course. The rest of it is a nicely researched, well-written look into the full situation surrounding the system right now.

The other bit that caught my eye: "Funny Business," three pages of game developers telling humorous stories about their careers. fun, although for some reason the images on one of the pages are all pixelated, as if someone saved a PDF at the incorrect compression setting or somesuch. Ah well.

Continue reading "COLUMN: 'Game Mag Weaseling': Mag Roundup 3/1/08" »

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This is something I've been tracking down a long time -- examples of Japanese magazines Yugekishu and its unofficial continuation Bug News. They are rarer than hen's teeth in Japan and tend to cost the most money I've seen thrown at old computer/game mags on Yahoo! Auctions when they pop up -- sort of the Japanese equivalent to Electronic Games and old Creative Computing, you could say.

Yugekishu, an A5-sized monthly from publisher Nihon Micom Kyoiku Center (Japan Microcomputer Education Center) that premiered June 1984 and closed up shop with its ninth issue in February/March 1985, is unlike any other PC game magazine I've seen from the era anywhere in the world.

How can I describe it succinctly? Let me give it a shot: You know how people sometimes whine that there's no video-game equivalent to Roger Ebert or Lester Bangs, no truly unique-sounding game pundit whose views are trusted and influential in a way that transcends whatever publication they're written for? Yugekishu (which is Japanese for "shortstop," as in the baseball position) was an attempt to attract the wannabe Eberts of video games and gather their longform reviews and commentaries into a single magazine, one meant for hardcore gamers and industry insiders. In 1984, I remind you.

(Bug News, picked up for publications by Kawade Shobo Shinsha in August 1985, kept the same theme but focused on the entire PC industry, not just games. It lasted for several more years before morphing into a Macintosh and desktop-publishing mag in the late '80s.)

What makes these magazines special? Besides the fact they cover much of Edge/Next Generation's beat nearly ten years before either of those magazines existed, it's also one of the few examples of a nationally distributed Japanese game mag that actually, uh, says things. There are, and have been, tons of game mags in Japan, but (from my admittedly removed perspective) they are in even more of a symbiotic relationship with game publishers than their US and European counterparts.

Famitsu's cross reviews are about the only chance you have of seeing any non-cushioned negativity thrown against a game in the entire mag, for example, and they can get away with that because like EGM, they've established a brand name for their reviews that goes back decades. Other mags can't, and real opinions are surprisingly rare -- often, even when they're there, they're concealed in the form of user-submitted reviews and such. To put it a more charitable way, game mags are meant to be a guide and resource that happens to be entertaining, not the video-game equivalent to Cahiers du cinéma.

Yugekishu and Bug News were different. The editors wore their biases on their sleeves -- they loved Infocom and most of the big-name American RPGs; they hated nearly the entire PC game output of Japan, which at the time was mostly porn and knockoffs of overseas games (hey, the more things change, huh?). They didn't bat an eye at writing six-page reviews of games like Castle Wolfenstein and Softporn Adventure, discussing the role of war in games and other forms of media and so forth.

They published extensive strategy guides with professionally-drawn maps and exhaustively-researched enemy and item lists. They ran multi-page interviews with industry figures, some original and others translated from Softalk, which they had an informal licensing agreement with until that mag's closure. All this in 1984!

US computer mags hated reviewing games in the 8-bit era -- the great majority of the time, the reviewers saw it as something beneath serious criticism. This mag was different. Not even the British mags of the time treated game coverage this seriously. Yugekishu was a magazine at least 15 years too early, and its existance as an obscure mag, just barely supported by a tight-knit contigent of hardcore fans in its native country, is almost as sad as the lack of a real tradition of game criticism in America.

[Kevin Gifford breeds ferrets and runs Magweasel, a site for collectors and fans of old video-game and computer magazines. He's also Executive Editor of PiQ, a new magazine hitting stands in March.]

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I must admit to not paying a lot of attention to Retromags, a project to scan up old, historically interesting game mags and distribute 'em over the net. I feel a little ashamed because they've uncovered more than a few things that surprised me, because I hadn't really seen examples of them elsewhere. Case in point: all the places the name "Nintendo Power" showed up where you wouldn't have expected it.

  

Nintendo Power Flash was Canada's equivalent to the Nintendo Fun Club News, a free newsletter distributed to NES buyers that sent off for it. The difference is that the seasonal, 16-page Power Flash is quite a bit younger than that, premiering with the Summer 1988 issue and continuing on for at least five more installments until 1990, when the US-based Nintendo Power received official Canadian distribution.

Why didn't they just publish Nintendo Power up there from the start? Because Nintendo of America had no Canadian distribution until 1990 -- they handed that job over to Mattel, as they did with certain parts of Europe. I have heard that the Canada arrangement came to a halt when Mattel sued NOA over grey-market imports of NES hardware and software over the US border or something like, though I haven't found any details behind this claim.

Regardless, Power Flash is an interesting anomaly, partially Canada-made content from readers and partially a clone of NP content, right down to the screenshot maps and Japan-style original art (except the art's different from what was in NP itself). I'd like to get some issues of my own, but they seem to show up only rarely on eBay and it's not like I'll just happen to run into any here in Texas.

Neither, likely, will I run across examples of this Australian edition of Nintendo Power, another 16-page newsletter that was presumably distributed for free to buyers. This summer-1991 issue is the only one I've ever heard of; the content is mostly straight from the US Nintendo Power, so I assume it's an official publication from whoever distributed the NES in Oz at the time. (I have to assume because there's no contact information within the mag itself, which claims to be "edited" by Mario in the table-of-contents page.)

Finally, here's something I'm a little embarrassed hasn't been in my collection until now -- Pocket Power, a free booklet distributed by some theaters to anyone who bought a ticket to see The Wizard (as shown in this TV ad). Pocket Power is essentially a 40-page edition of NP, offering a couple features on the movie and Fred Savage and filling out the rest of the pages with quick, NP-style game previews. The content seems to be sponsored (every page features large company logos in a way that the real NP never would), but it's also mostly original, which makes me wonder if you can really call an NP collection complete without this little thing on the side. I wonder how many of these they distributed?

Regardless, thanks to Phillyman and the other people at Retromags for bringing this stuff to my attention.

[Kevin Gifford breeds ferrets and runs Magweasel, a site for collectors and fans of old video-game and computer magazines. He's also Executive Editor of PiQ, a new magazine hitting stands in March.]

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I'm back! And holy cow, take my advice, don't launch a new magazine! It takes a lot of work and you wind up forgetting to clean the litterbox too often!

I have a ton of mags to catch up on, all of which you'll find under the cut; apologies I don't write my usual depth, but there's a huge stack to get through.

But before we begin, I thought I'd show off something I found amusing. On the top left you have the Japanese box art for Mystery Dungeon: Shiren the Wanderer. On the right, you have the US magazine ad for the game, as seen in this month's Nintendo Power. Holy cow! Shiren's gotten kind of edgy! And Koppa (his white weasel companion) went from cute and merchandisable to eat-the-faces-off-babies demented! I haven't seen such a breathtaking concept-art transformation since the glory days of the NES! Thumbs up, Sega! Moving on, though...

Continue reading "COLUMN: 'Game Mag Weaseling': Mag Roundup 2/2/08" »

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I didn't notice for a whole month (the publisher sent an email announcement that wound up in my junk folder), but Hardcore Gamer magazine is lowering its frequency from monthly to quarterly:

"Due to the massive shift in the video game journalism industry to a more online-focused strategy, we have decided to also shift our main focus for Hardcore Gamer to a a model that better takes advantage of our website, HardcoreGamer.com.

At the same time, we will be providing unique content within the printed version of Hardcore Gamer so that the two no longer conflict with each other."

All current subscribers will get extended to the Winter '08 issue, which is nice. Not so nice is the fact that subscriptions still cost $24.95, meaning that if you subscribed last month expecting to receive 12 issues, well, you're getting four instead - sorry! Don't like it, here's a refund!

Of course, subscription fulfillment houses are like this for every magazine in the US, so I can't complain too loudly. What I'm wondering about is what the editors will do with the quarterly issues -- they haven't said much publicly, other than they'll concentrate on non-timely things and really, really hope the paper quality can remain the same. How's that for optimism?

Now, HGM has been an anomaly for its entire run, starting up in 2005 at a time when print mags were just launching their current shrinking contest and offering up a design/writing formula that went out of style when the GameFan generation grew up.

Still, I can't help but like the little guy anyway -- it shows spunk and enthusiasm, and it plainly couldn't have survived this long unless it had decent support from its readership and ad base.

Nonetheless, I think it serves as the latest reminder that while video game magazines printed on paper are not a thing of the past, game mags that follow the tried-and-true, outdone-by-the-Internet-a-decade-ago formula of previews and reviews most certainly are.

[Kevin Gifford breeds ferrets and runs Magweasel, a site for collectors and fans of old video-game and computer magazines. He's also Executive Editor of PiQ, a new magazine hitting stands in March.

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As some of you may've heard, Newtype USA (the mag I worked for) will be discontinued with its February 2008 issue, which will be on stands in a little while. In its place, we will be launching PiQ, a magazine that covers the entire range of (for lack of a better term) "genre entertainment".

There's still much work left to be done on PiQ before I have anything more interesting to say about it, but this re-launch is one reason why I've been following the discussion around EGM and (pictured) editor-in-chief Dan Hsu's public revelation of his title's occasionally rocky relations with game publishers. He discussed his views of game PR and his duties as EIC with the Media Coverage corner of GameDaily, and the whole thing is worth reading, so go have a look. One long quote in particular caught my notice:

"The thing that always guides me is something my first editorial director told me on the day I interviewed at EGM...I brought up an old EGM editorial where the editor said that Capcom has pulled advertising [they later reinstated it], but EGM wouldn't change its ways to win them back. I asked the editorial director about that, and how can EGM survive without advertising...how does the magazine deal with that pressure? He told me, 'As long as you write for the readers and not the companies, the readership will come, and the advertisers will have no choice but to advertise with you'...Eventually, the companies all come back because they need to reach our audience...I know that sounds cocky, and I don't mean it to be, but that's what keeps me going, even when things are looking bad and down for us...We are unwilling to bend on this. I'd drag EGM down with me or quit before we compromise our integrity."

This is a very commendable credo for Hsu and his staff to work under, especially given how much prestige his mag's review scores are often given online. EGM's editors ought to be proud of their boss; I know I was back when I freelanced for EGM in 2003-05 [ish], when I couldn't imagine myself ever wanting a job in any other print-media game mag. And yet, the contrarian part of my mind, the part that can't help but play the devil's advocate (or simply wants to be a prick), can't help but say: Does not compromising your integrity mean having your average book size go down 40 percent between 2002 and 2007?

I'm not suggesting that EGM is suffering for its policies needessly. In fact, the ABCs will tell you that its circulation is higher than it's ever been, and I still think it's the most influential mag in the US -- a position that's the result of many years of consistency in its policies. However, every print-mag editor is facing a reality where they are almost nobody's first choice of media on any given game title -- not readers', nor professionals'. Very few gamers buy a game because EGM said it was hot; they buy a game because an amalgamation of websites, magazines, and their friends said it was hot. More than ever, they're a cog in a machine of hype -- and the way print media can escape this machine is by playing up the inherent advantages of print, concentrating on features, opinion, pretty pictures, the complete package, and not fighting an unwinnable battle with online.

So what does "writing for the readers" mean at this point, then? Every mag grapples with this question, and they all have varying degrees of success at dealing with it. I give nothing but the highest of praise to EGM for doing things like publish opinionated previews -- and being willing to deal with the fallout afterward. That sort of thing we need to see more of. However -- and I say this with the utmost of respect -- I wonder if basing so much of the integrity of one's magazine on what amount to a bunch of numbers is really the best place to put one's efforts. Would it perhaps be better to take some other approach, concentrate on other parts of the mag and so forth? Didn't Gerstmann-gate teach us that an over-reliance on scores in your media trivializes your content and could even set you up for trouble?

These are rhetorical questions and not for me to answer, but obviously, we at PiQ are trying our best to come up with a product that interests and entertains the readers we want to attract. I think that it's time game-mag editors rethink this fundamental topic, too, especially considering that book sizes (not to mention reader mindshare) ain't getting any bigger anytime soon.

That said, here are all the mags of the past couple weeks. Back to the tiny issues again, sadly...

Continue reading "COLUMN: 'Game Mag Weaseling': Mag Roundup 1/12/08" »

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Best New Trend in Game Mags: A serious effort -- particularly in Game Informer's part -- to bring serious industry news back into print media, after several years of aping Maxim. Edge is no longer the only place in print for intelligent trend coverage.

Worst New Trend in Game Mags: Your choice: the endurance of boring preview features, or 100 pages becoming the new standard size for mags outside of Christmas -- at least until "88 pages" replaces it.

Biggest Surprise: Official Xbox Magazine bustin' out some really informative and funny features, the best of which remains Dan Amrich's quest to get kicked off Xbox Live as quickly as possible (without busting out the obvious racial slurs and potty-mouth antics).

Biggest Disappointment: Strategy Plus -- and, to be more exact, MASSIVE/MMO Games -- closing. The MMORPG-specific spinoff of Computer Games was exploring a beat uncovered by nearly all professional media and successfully made MMO's seem fascinating to everyone without assuming a raft of jargon knowledge on the part of its readers. MASSIVE is a classic example of how launching a mag is like opening up a new restaurant -- you can do everything absolutely right, from the location to the decor to the food itself, and still fail through no fault of your own.

Most Improved Magazine: GamePro. Sure, its new design (introduced with the February 2007 issue) hasn't been perfect -- the magazine still has a tendency for standard, easily overlooked covers, and its page count is still down from the rest of the game mag crowd. However, thanks to trashing all vestiges of the old GamePro and aggressively expanding the range of its coverage, GP has succeeded in not only being relevant to its target audience again, but actually being readable (and enjoyable) by gamers of any age.

Least Improved Magazine: PlayStation: The Official Magazine when compared to PSM, its predecessor. The late era of PSM always seemed short on content compared to its multiplatform rivals, and P:TOM has inherited the gestalt fully. Hopefully 2008 will see the mag settle down, find its voice, and start really rockin'. (I still wonder what happened to that Blu-ray demo disc, though.)

Best Cover: Probably Play Magazine's June 2007 cover, the one with Castlevania: The Dracula X Chronicles on it. Although Game Informer's GTA4 cover (May 2007) comes close.

Worst Cover: Game Informer's September 2007 issue, featuring some blurry guys in black and some really cheesy PR-speak coverlines to advertise Borderlands.

Cover The Editors Probably Regret The Most Now: Play's Bullet Witch cover (March 2007), a title later heralded as "worst of 2007" by GamePro.

Best One-Off Special: Edge's The 100 Best Videogames, which is bigger, cheaper, looks fancier, and reads more engagingly than most real video-game books.

Best Launch: Future's Nintendo Power. They changed nothing, which means they retained all the benefits of the world's most underrated game magazine without so much as breaking a sweat.

Best Thing About 2008: There probably won't be quite as many game magazines closing this year. Maybe.

[Kevin Gifford breeds ferrets and runs Magweasel, a site for collectors and fans of old video-game and computer magazines. He's also an editor at Newtype USA magazine.]

Posted by Kevin Gifford at 12:01 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Happy new year, everyone! How were all of your holidays? I'm still sifting through all the junk I got and/or bought for myself, not to mention all the game mags of 2007 in preparation for my year-in-review piece, which I'm planning for next week.

For now, though, I'd like to talk about the last few mags of '07, the first January issues. Hot exclusive features seem to be the order of the day right now, and none are hotter presently than...

Electronic Gaming Monthly January 2008 (Podcast)

Cover: Street Fighter 4

This issue is the hype of the moment, no doubt, and everyone inside is incredibly excited about the main subject. ("I'm still rubbing my eyes over the fact that this sequel even exists, much less that we got the world exclusive on it," Shoe writes in his editorial.) However, even Shoe admits that the game is "extremely early" (his emphasis), and the 13-page feature preview is mainly a long, narrative interview with producer Yoshinori Ono about how he'd like this project to unfold. Still, the feature works because Shane the writer shows off his deep fighting-game knowledge, asking Ono intelligent questions (covering everything from combo mechanics to Chun Li's thighs) and keeping things interesting despite the monotony of the screenshots, all featuring the same characters fighting in the same battle scene.

Otherwise the main highlight is a bumper Afterthoughts section featuring postmortem interviews with the crew behind Halo 3, Mass Effect, The Orange Box (again, after GFW's bigger retrospective last month) and Uncharted.

Continue reading "COLUMN: 'Game Mag Weaseling': Mag Roundup 12/29/07" »

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A few quick notes before I sign off for Xmas and all that nonsense. First off, my review of Total PC Gaming last month (Issue 1 can now be found at most Barnes & Nobles, by the way) where I noted I haven't seen an issue of PC Zone in years attracted the attention of PC Zone's editors, who were nice enough to send a couple issues in the mail. (British PC game magazines seem to love this column for some reason. I can't complain.)

PC Zone was the first magazine in the UK devoted exclusively to games on x86 machines, debuting in April 1993 and going up against PC Format, a mag meant to cover the entirety of the home-PC marketplace but in practice mostly concentrated on games back then. Its most immediate predecessor was Zero, a multiplatform rag that was, in some ways, a spiritual successor to Your Sinclair -- all magazines known for having highly irreverent writing and building a diehard community of readers, although not necessarily being huge money-making successes (Zero died after three years). I own a few issues from PC Zone's first year that I bought off the newsstand back in the day, and in its early years, it was often a very silly magazine, with reviews taking very strange offroads and Duncan MacDonald's "Mr Cursor" column on the back page often descending into crazy nonsense.

Wikipedia tells me that the mag largely kept this tone going all through the 1990s, and indeed, even if I hadn't looked at the cover of these two latest issues, I'd be able to recognize the PC Zone influence in the pages. PC Zone is still irreverent, definitely -- regular columns include a Jackass-inspired bit where they try to break whatever game is on the demo DVD as much as possible and "Tat Zone," where they sell off the swag game companies send them on Ebay (for charity) and see how much it goes for. (A notepad with the Crysis logo on it sold for £27.07, causing PC Zone to comment that "you lot are moneyed beyond sense".)

It's not unusual for a game mag to try to be irreverent. What's unusual is the ability on editorial's part to consistently maintain this tone of irreverence across the entirety of the mag, from the cover to the reviews to the DVD coverdisc section to the little fineprint on the masthead. This is one of those few mags that I can turn to any page and any article -- even a review of some gaming mouse or another -- and rest assured that the text will be just as amusing as the big Gears of War review up front. It's a surprisingly rare accomplishment, in this age of every mag doing the exact same holiday shoppers' guides and the exact same preview features, and PC Zone really ought to be paid more attention for accomplishing it. (I can't help but think that dropping the cover DVD and lowering the £5.99 price would go a long way towards that goal.)

   

In other news, PC Pilot has put out a winter special meant to introduce people to the world of flight simulation. You should be able to find it at B&N and elsewhere right now.

It might surprise some people to hear that there's not one, but two internationally distributed mags devoted exclusively to flight sims -- the bimonthly PC Pilot out of Britain, and the monthly Computer Pilot out of Australia. Both mags have been around for a while (Computer Pilot launched in 1996 and is celebrating its 100th issue next month), and both even have their individual niches that they cover. PC Pilot is the more "serious" mag of the two, concentrating on reviews of new planes, scenery packs and hardware, while CP is more about the "experience," featuring extensive reports of flights across this or that stretch of terrain and even including what I can only describe as flight-sim fanfiction -- the past three issues have chronicled the story of Dr. Betzy Wong, flight sim therapist, as she helps a hopelessly neurotic man come to terms with his family and improve his ATC and landing-approach skills. I'm not making this up.

Whenever I develop a curious interest in something, I tend to wind up picking up a magazine or two about the topic, even if I have no intention of seriously pursuing the subject. This is how I've found myself with subscriptions to everything from Make to Armchair General (which, by the way, seems to survive mostly off video-game advertising -- funny, eh?), and it's given me no lack of odd things to read about before falling asleep at night. If you've ever thought "My god, how can they fill up an entire magazine about flight sim crap?", why not pick up this month's PC Pilot and find out? At the very least, you'll satisfy your curiosity.

[Kevin Gifford breeds ferrets and runs Magweasel, a site for collectors and fans of old video-game and computer magazines. He's also an editor at Newtype USA magazine.]

Posted by Kevin Gifford at 8:01 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Astute mag readers will probably note very shortly that PC Gamer and PlayStation: The Official Magazine (and presumably OXM, too, but I haven't confirmed that yet) have yet another Cellplay "bonus insert" inside the January 2008 issues. This one's only 12 pages long (as opposed to the mammoth 30-page section that appeared in the Holiday '07 ishes of Future's mags), and it's also gotten a bit of a redesign, having a very busy look reminiscent of late-90s PC Gamer.

Seeing Cellplay two months in a row is frankly a little off-putting. Is this going to be a monthly thing now, or what? I don't mean to pick on the people behind the Cellplay section -- in fact, the editorial director of the insert is none other than Julian Rignall, a name dearly beloved by any game-mag aficionado. I also don't deny that cell-phone gaming is a big, exciting marketplace and the games on it are becoming more and more fascinating by the moment. But as a subscriber to all of Future's game mags, all I feel is that this is a bunch of unasked-for filler that could've been better occupied with more PC, PlayStation, or Xbox coverage.

I remember back when the late Computer Games debuted the "Now Playing" arts and entertainment section in 2004. Readers were up in arms about the presence of light movie/DVD/comic book coverage in an otherwise fiendishly hardcore PC game mag, but the editors countered that there was no game coverage that could've gone into those pages -- a pretty plain lie, considering how CGM had no problem refilling that real estate once Now Playing finally spun off into its own (ultimately unsuccessful) publication.

In a way, I wonder if the existence of Cellplay is just another testament to the disappointing advertising situation US game mags face these days. Unlike Now Playing, Cellplay does attract a fair number of ad pages that the publisher probably wouldn't get otherwise. But is this extra revenue so important to the continued survival of Future's mags that the higher-ups are willing to sacrifice such a hefty percentage of their flagship titles' pages to this completely off-topic content? Is the corresponding loss in reader satisfaction (and perceived loss of purchase value for newsstand buyers) worth the extra ad bucks?

I'm sure it's a touchy topic for editorialships industry-wide, so I'll leave it for now and get to breaking down all the US mags (plus Edge) released in the past fortnight. It's the last pre-Xmas rush! How are magazines coping?

Continue reading "COLUMN: 'Game Mag Weaseling': Mag Roundup 12/8/07" »

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Here's a complete collection I'm proud of, and I think justifiably so, too -- a complete run of 99'er/99'er Home Computer/Home Computer Magazine, a title that ran from 1981 to 1985 and had one of the loopiest histories I've ever seen in classic computer mag-dom.

99'er, launched in the late spring of 1981, was the only nationally-distributed magazine in the US devoted to Texas Instruments' TI-99/4A, a full-scale computer system that captured a pretty significant chunk of the PC market for much of its early life. (These days, it's known chiefly these days, if at all, for being the first home computer with a 16-bit processor.) It was a pretty eccentric computer, with lots of murky circuitry under the hood and very little public documentation at first, and 99'er was just as quirky from the get-go. It was edited and published by Gary M. Kaplan, a Eugene, OR-based entrepreneur who enjoyed peppering his magazine with long, drawn-out editorials about the computer, the marketplace, and anything else that struck his fancy. (He's not the Gary S. Kaplan who was arrested for offshore-betting shenanigans last year, by the way.)

Gary's magazine experienced its heyday from late 1982 to '83, when 99'er was published monthly and its pages were packed with dozens of teeny-tiny advertisments from garage-based software outlets across America. Like most PC mags of the time, its primary focus was on BASIC program listings, with some software coverage and tutorial content rounding out the book. Trouble began in October 1983, when TI announced the cancellation of the 99/4A series and 99'er abruptly disappeared. It was relaunched in early 1984 as Home Computer Magazine, a book which continued TI99 coverage but also include stuff for Apple, Commodore and IBM systems, making it a multiplatform magazine in an increasingly crowded marketplace.

The magazine begins to achieve legendary status in my mind starting in mid-1984. That's when Home Computer abruptly stops carrying any form of outside advertising, lauding itself by calling it an "unprecedented move" that "will set the standard for editorial quality, integrity, and readability for the entire industry." Kaplan's motives may not have been entirely noble here, however -- the move coincided with the settlement of several lawsuits filed by advertisers who claimed 99'er misled them about the magazine's circulation. (Kaplan simultaneously launched Home Computer Digest in September 1984, a subscription-only supplement to Home Computer Magazine that did include ads.)

Home Computer continued in this fashion until late 1985, when the magazine abruptly went under again. No word was issued from Eugent until April 1986, when subscribers received a letter stating that HCM had folded and their subscriptions would be fulfilled by Home Computer Journal, a new magazine that came with a disk of software. The catch: Each issue of HCJ was valued at $25, meaning that that company could mail a single issue out and immediately settle all outstanding subscriptions, no matter how long. Many customers complained to the US Postal Service about this, but only a few allegedly received any monetary reimbursement. (HCJ itself lasted four issues before closing.)

So in short: crazy publication history, nutty editorial team, tons of goofiness between the pages. What more could you ask for out of an early-80s computer mag?

[Kevin Gifford breeds ferrets and runs Magweasel, a site for collectors and fans of old video-game and computer magazines. He's also an editor at Newtype USA magazine.]

Posted by Kevin Gifford at 8:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

   

A couple of developments in PC game mags occurred recently that're more related than you'd expect at first glance. First, Imagine Publishing's Total PC Gaming debuted on British newsstands this month with a print run of 40,000, becoming the first computer games magazine to launch over there in many, many years (over a decade, maybe?). Editor-in-chief (and, apparently, Game Mag Weaseling fan) Dave Harfield was nice enough to send me a copy of Issue 1 in the mail for review.

Visually and stylistically, TPCG doesn't stray too far from the Brit-mag norm. You've got bright, long reviews and previews done up with a clean, white background and featuring all sorts of little extra gubbins on the side -- spec discussions, development status, how the game looks at different detail levels (a neat addition), and so on. Reviews are scored out of ten and seem by-and-large forgiving so far, with only one game -- sleep-inducing Taiwanese MMORPG Bounty Bay Online, which gets a 2 -- scoring below the "average" mark. Hardware reviews get a lot of page space in this mag, too, signifying a dedication to covering the after-market modding marketplace with a fervor you don't see in print too often.

TPCG's innovations include:

- No disc. US mags mostly shed their discs a couple years ago, but the British PC mags still sport them. This one drops them for obvious reasons (you can get it all on the Internet! Duh!) and is subsequently two pounds cheaper than PC Gamer's UK edition, despite its larger page count and book size.

- A dedicated MMO section. GFW and PC Gamer US both have regular MMO coverage, but TPCG features 20 pages of it in its own "sub-magazine" after the reviews well. "MMO Worlds" reminds me a lot of the MASSIVE of old -- it's intelligent writing about MMOs present and future, with this month's installment mainly devoted to the Tabula Rasa launch. These 20 pages alone are already better than anything Beckett Massive Online Gamer's done.

- A dedicated retro section. Classic game coverage has served fellow Imagine mags Retro Gamer and GamesTM exceedingly well. TPCG's "Redux" section includes bits on System Shock 2, Duke Nukem 3D, Amiga emulators, and Portal, the 1986 Activision game that invented the "visual novel" genre eight years before the Japanese popularized it. A great start, I'd say, especially considering how many obscure old PC releases are out there waiting for someone to discover them.

Speaking from what experience I have with Britmags (I have yet to see an issue of PC Zone), I'd say TPCG is among, if not the best UK PC mag already. It's big, nicely written, dedicated, and never too boring. I'd love to see something like it over here, but given the American mag industry's situation these days, I'm sure it'd never happen without extensive modifications.

TPCG is also notable for featuring the work of Lara Crigger and Kelly Wand, both of which used to contribute to Computer Games magazine. There was pretty extensive online talk that CGM and sister mag MMO Games (formerly MASSIVE) were going to relaunch in some way sooner or later, but sadly, the idea seems dead in the water now -- this month's issue of Games for Windows includes a notice (reproduced above) that old CGM subscribers will receive GFW for the outstanding remainder of their term. Having been both a CGM and MMO Games subscriber, my GFW subscription now extends into late 2009. Brilliant! It's sad to see CGM go permanently, but with all the main contributors to the mag having moved on to bigger and better things, the party was definitely over long before Ziff bought up the subscription list.

After that lengthy intro, let's move right into the US mags of the past two weeks. Click onward for more!

Continue reading "COLUMN: 'Game Mag Weaseling': Mag Roundup 11/24/07" »

Posted by Kevin Gifford at 6:01 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

The first issue of PlayStation: The Official Magazine arrived in the mail a few days back, and since it's the first major US mag launch in a while, I thought I'd devote a full column to it.

Future Publishing's PTOM (the replacement for PSM) is grossly divided into five sections:

- System Update: The news section, encompassing a couple interviews, Blu-ray movie reviews, Adam Warren's comic (formerly on the back page), and a digest of the latest happenings. The two main bits this month are a piece on the PlayStation Eye (with Dr. Richard Marks extensively quoted) and a post-Tokyo Game Show talk with Kaz Hirai.

- Previews: Your typical magazine previews section. This one kicks off with three pages on Soul Calivur IV and continues with large looks at MGS4, Haze, Crisis Core: FFVII, and so forth. A "PlayStation Gallery" at the end fills out the section with some capsule previews.

- The feature well: The cover story on Gran Turismo 5 takes us to Polyphony Digital HQ in Japan, where Kazunori Yamauchi discusses his goals with the new game and shows off all the incredible detail going into the models. A holiday buyer's guide (titled "Holiday Buyer's Guide," which should offer some insight to its originality) is the typical game and gadget-themed Xmas gift roundup.

- Reviews: PTOM rates its games on a five-star scale with three stars set as "okay" and five signifying "exceptional" and earning the game an Editor's Choice award. No review is larger than two pages (as opposed to the multi-page cover features reviews sometimes earn in PSM and OXM), and there's a small page of hardware reviews in the rear.

- PlayStation Network: The "miscellaneous" section of PTOM, similar to the one GamePro has in the back of its book. This issue has multiplayer strategies for Warhawk (online tips will be an ongoing part of this section, it looks like), letters, and quick reviews of PSN titles. A welcome-to-the-mag piece by SCEA head Jack Tretton fills up the back page, which you can tell was written by a true PR aficionado because the name of Sony's current top console is spelled out as "PLAYSTATION®3 (PS3™)" in the article, a custom the rest of the magazine thankfully avoids.

And that's the long and short of it, basically. The mag is 132 pages, 30 of which is the AT&T cell-phone game "special advertising supplement" appearing in all Future game mags this month, so it seems safe to expect the usual book sizes and ad ratios here as in most other titles.

PTOM is about what you'd expect from a US game-mag publisher. The mag has a very clean look, making it look like a cross between EGM and Future's PlayStation Official Magazine UK, and many pages and reviews feature small captions on the sides with some random piece of trivia related to the article it's near, a nice little touch. (The mag is also about half an inch wider than PSM, although it's still got nothing on Ziff's super-wide OPM.) On the writing and coverage end, however, not a great deal has changed from the PSM days -- the text style is authoritative, if not all that excited, and it's not terribly different from the way a lot of online game sites are written.

The biggest surprise might be that the Blu-ray demo disc promised in Future's press release is not included or mentioned, something the editors confirmed on the psmonline.com blog (PTOM doesn't have its own website yet for some reason). There's some confusion in the blog comments about whether the mag will ever have a demo disc, but I'm willing to bet it'll get one as at least a special bonus once in awhile eventually. Otherwise, where's the major, killer advantage in being Official? Or is it more the case of Future saying to themselves "Well, we're the only PS mag left in America now, might as well bite the bullet and pay the licensing fee"?

It's also worth noting that the "FREE Two-Sided Poster" touted on the cover isn't quite accurate, unless it's referring to something available on newsstands only. [ADDENDUM: The newsstand PTOM does come with a real double-sided poster. Odd that it still got advertised in both the newsstand and subscriber editions, though.]

Overall, PTOM is a nice leap forward from PSM visually and undoubtedly serves the needs of its PlayStation-fan subscribers well, but those expecting something revolutionary will have to go expect somewhere else for now.

[Kevin Gifford breeds ferrets and runs Magweasel, a site for collectors and fans of old video-game and computer magazines. He's also an editor at Newtype USA magazine.]

Posted by Kevin Gifford at 12:02 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

The holiday season for game mags is right upon us, and that means plenty of review covers, ad pages, Ken Levine interviews (he and/or his game appear in nearly every mag this month except Nintendo Power)...and, for most titles, circulation statements.

Around this time of year, you'll often see mags publish an official-looking circulation statement toward the rear. These statements of ownership have been popping up in U.S. mags since the early 1970s, and for the dedicated statistician they're a treasure trove of information -- especially if the mag in question doesn't otherwise release any official circulation figures. So why do publishers print them? It's the law -- required by the U.S. Postal Service if the mag wants to take advantage of their special Periodicals Class mailing rates, which most US game titles do. (The exact numbers are way too complex to get into here, but we're talking about a postage discount of up to 40 percent compared to plain ol' regular mail, depending on assorted circumstances.)

Despite the discount, not all game mags go for the Periodicals Class discount. This can be for one of two reasons: it's not worth all the extra paperwork and USPS bureaucracy, and/or the publisher just doesn't want to make its circulation records public at all. Still, these statements are valuable for mag dorks like myself -- I'll list circulation figures for all the mags below, then comment on historical trends in some future column.

For now, let's check out all the US mags of the past few weeks. Prepare for more BioShock coverage than you ever imagined...

Continue reading "COLUMN: 'Game Mag Weaseling': Mag Roundup 11/10/07" »

Posted by Kevin Gifford at 12:02 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

   

There was an interesting article written the other day by Rebecca McPheters, who used to be the publisher for Child, Fitness, and assorted other mainstream magazines. What she had to write about is something that game magazine publishers have had to wrestle with for much of the 21st century -- circulation (the number of copies you distribute every mont) is actually a pretty crap way to measure how many readers you have.

"Because the strength of a print brand is in its ability to generate audience -- and stronger brands tend to produce more readers-per-copy than brands that are less strong -- circulation-based pricing has done more than any other single factor to reduce the range and quality of print options available to advertisers... Our current circulation-based system has both reduced advertising revenues and increased circulation costs. It has put print into a dangerous downward spiral as consumers increasingly expect to receive media content for free and yet magazines' advertising pricing is predicated on a paid circulation model." (my emphasis)

In other words, Rebecca's saying that maintaining a large circulation (and charging advertisers based on that circulation, independent of whether there are real pairs of eyes to back that up) shouldn't be first priority for magazines anymore. To back that up, she brings up the MRI -- Mediamark Research and Intelligence, a surveying firm that releases readership data for magazines. This data includes something called the "readers-per-copy" for a magazine, showing how much a mag gets passed around or how many people take a look at any given issue, whether passing it around friends, picking it up at the dentist's waiting room, or just browsing through it on the newsstand. Comparing the MRIs with the circulation figures, Rebecca notes in the article that "overall audience has increased by 2%, while circulation has declined by 7%" in the past decade.

What do MRI's stats look like? You can download a sample off the net, which includes a couple of game mags on it. For the spring of 2007, MRI said that Electronic Gaming Monthly had a total adult audience of 3,441,000 people, about 3 million men and the rest women. GamePro had 3,836,000 people in its audience, while Game Informer cleaned up with 5,039,000 audience members. Note that Game Informer's MRI audience is "only" about 68% larger than EGM's, despite having over four times the paid circulation. If you put enough credence to the MRI's numbers, it means that GameStop is spending a lot of money printing, mailing, and distributing those two million-odd copies of GI each month, yet not being as efficient in attracting an audience with those printed copies as EGM and GamePro is.

Which begs the next question: How realistic are the MRI's figures, and how much do advertisers care about them? Judging by GI's current position as the game mag with the most ad pages in the US (and also the one with the most non-game-related advertising), it doesn't seem like ad buyers consider them a heck of a lot when making their decisions. GamePro boasted about its MRI figures on the cover between 2002 and 2006 (you can see two examples of that above), but dropped it since many folks ina nd out of the industry assumed the "three million readers" claim was a fabrication or massaged number, somehow.

Still, if Rebecca has it right in her article, GamePro -- and, really, a lot of game mags -- might have the right idea. It's little secret that many mags (not just in games) have lost a ton of circulation over the past handful of years. However, an increasing number of publishers are arguing that the treadmill of keeping circulation up only serves as a needless expense that doesn't do anything for the audience or the bottom line. So perhaps we'll see a trend unfold over the next little while of game mags dropping circs and telling advertisers not to worry -- the eyes are still there, they just read the product differently than before.

[Kevin Gifford breeds ferrets and runs Magweasel, a site for collectors and fans of old video-game and computer magazines. He's also an editor at Newtype USA magazine.]

Posted by Kevin Gifford at 12:01 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Man, is there anyone out there in the US who has bothered to collect more Japanese magazines than me?

I'm running out of shelf space in the "study," so I finally decided to move the brunt of the Famitsus into the closet, since I refer to them the least these days. So now they lie in storage, waiting patiently for the day when I get a hankering to find out what review score they gave to F-Zero or Terranigma. Someday.

Anyway, we're rapidly approaching the holiday season in magazine-land, and already we're seeing some mags up their page counts rather dramatically. This particular update is a little light after the monster one last week, but it's only going to get more interesting from here on out...

Continue reading "COLUMN: 'Game Mag Weaseling': Mag Roundup 10/20/07" »

Posted by Kevin Gifford at 12:04 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I haven't been trying all that hard lately for the simple fact that I'm running out of sensible shelf space, but my mag collection continues to grow -- numbering 6671 individual volumes, if my Excel files are to be believed. A lot of this is explained by the fact that I get everything released in the US regardless of how silly it is, but I am also rapidly approaching completion on a lot of titles...the most recent of which being Play. The US one.

You wouldn't think it'd be so hard to get all the Play issues, but I had trouble with it for some reason. I'm sure it has to do with the fact that Dave Halverson's mags never have astronomical circulation figures, but at the same time, it's not like Play is ancient history -- it only started in 2001, after all. Yet, to get the very last issue I needed (February 2002), I wound up having to beg Play staff 'cos I just couldn't track down a copy anywhere else.

(It doesn't help that Play's numbering is a little confusing at the start. The first issue in 2001 is the "Premiere Issue"; Feb '02 is then "Issue 1", and so forth. The staff must've realized this was a little odd, because the May '02 edition is "Issue 5", skipping the number 4 entirely and more accurately representing the actual number of issues released.)

Play is the sort of magazine that quite literally no other publisher could release right now. That's because big-time publishers, like Ziff or Future, have higher standards for what they consider a "successful" magazine -- to a large company that publishes multiple mags, a title merely being profitable isn't enough. Let's say that Magazine X makes around $500,000 in profit per year after everything's accounted for.

To a large magazine publisher, one whose revenue goes into the tens of millions, that may not be enough to make it worth their time to continue the title. (Ziff, at its height, was infamous for cancelling magazines that still had positive cash flow, including the still-missed Creative Computing in 1985.)

But to a more small-time, private operation -- such as Halverson's Fusion Publishing -- any mag that pays the salaries, covers costs, and earns a bit of extra on the top is worth keeping in circulation. I'm not going to start spouting nonsense like "Play has passion, the big publishers don't" because that's oversimplifying things to the extreme, but it's a fact that small publishers have different priorities from the big fish in the mag biz.

And certainly, I'm glad that Play is still going strong after 70 issues. The first year or so frankly wasn't all that good, but once Halverson and crew got into the groove, the mag really began to succeed covering the "hardcore" angle of GameFan and Gamer's Republic while actually looking like something you'd want to read.

I've talked in the past about how I consistently love their cover design, and their internals are always nice and subdued, too, letting the pictures do the talking. They'll undoubtedly face continuing challenges in the future -- the rapidly-contracting anime marketplace, for example, which provides a fair chunk of their ad pages -- but I hope they'll be around for a long time to come.

(PS. Did anyone keep their copy of GameGO! or Stuff Gamer? I'm looking for both, so email me if you have 'em.)

[Kevin Gifford breeds ferrets and runs Magweasel, a site for collectors and fans of old video-game and computer magazines. He's also an editor at Newtype USA magazine.]

Posted by Kevin Gifford at 12:08 AM | Permalink | Comments (5)

Ohhhhh Doga, there's no excuse for yawning! Not when there's all this amazing mag-stuff happening!

First off, despite the pretty ho-hum Internet reaction the news seemed to get, Future's procurement of the "official" title for their US PlayStation mag is enormous news for the entire media. It, along with Nintendo Power, means that Future is the biggest name in US print media (something that would've been impossible to imagine half a decade ago), and no matter which way you slice it, it's something of a blow to Ziff, who gave up the title almost without comment late last year.

But it's not as if Future is invincible here. First, the presence of a Blu-ray disc with each issue will make the new P:OMUS (?) quite a bit more expensive than PSM was, which may erode profitability if it cuts down the circulation too much. Second, I worry that the new mag probably won't be that much different from PSM, with largely the same staff and largely the same design decisions going into it from before. I'll look forward to seeing the first issue, definitely -- if it's less PSM and more like the official UK PS mag, I'll consider it a great success.

But let's move on to the rest of the November-issue mags, in which we'll find that NP and PSM are far from the only mags to enact major changes under the cover...

Continue reading "COLUMN: 'Game Mag Weaseling': Mag Roundup 10/6/07" »

Posted by Kevin Gifford at 12:11 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

   

The November Nintendo Power arrived in my mailbox the other day, and as managing editor Scott Pelland writes in his opening letter, it's officially the last one that Nintendo of America is producing. As was widely reported elsewhere, after 20 years and 221 issues (only one of which Pelland himself isn't on the masthead for -- the very first one, July/August 1988), production of NP will be handled by Future, which has already been producing Nintendo: The Official Magazine in the UK for nearly two years now.

I think Scott's editorial letter is worth reading even if you don't read NP regularly, so I'll reproduce it here:

"For nearly 20 years I have had what many people would consider to be the best job in the world. (No argument there.) And the same thing could be said of my talented colleagues -- the writers, designers, editors, and incredible support staff that have weated the details every month to bring you the world's first and best official video game magazine. Nintendo has been our home, and our parent, too, supporting and guiding us as we have tried to tap into our passion for both the games and the print medium to inform and entertain our loyal readers.

In fact, although some masthead names will change, I am convinced that Future's new team is not only dedicated to carrying on with the traditions and quality you expect, but will deliver exciting new content and benefits, such as an annual holiday bonus issue. Subscribers will continue to receive NP monthly in the mail, and newsstand patrons will find NP in more locations than ever before. So please join me as I say welcome to the future, and to Future US."

So not a heck of a lot of information on what Future will do with the mag, other than the fact it'll be 13 issues a year just like every Future title. This issue of NP has a full preview of games covered in next month's edition, so I'm assuming we'll see the December issue right on schedule, though I don't know what the editorial lineup looks like yet.

Perhaps not all that much will change with the new publisher, but I still think it's a good occasion to look back on what Nintendo Power accomplished. At its peak, NP was the premier outlet through which gamers got their info and strategies. For a time from its inception to around 1995, having a game make the cover of NP was a major advertising coup for whatever third-party publisher managed the feat, because full coverage in the mag had a direct effect on sales of the sort that good reviews in Famitsu are purported to have over in Japan.

Its total circulation was in the millions until the N64 era proved harsh for Nintendo (and the Internet made traditional tips-n-strategy mags obsolete), and few game mags ever did more to define the tastes of a generation of console owners. Even now, the mag remains pretty unique in the marketplace, with a very singular approach to coverage, interviews and game-preview coverage you don't see anywhere else, and a general feeling of "fullness" (sorry to be vague here) even though it's the same number of pages as any other game mag these days.

Not bad, really, for what's supposed to be a glorified company newsletter. I hope that Future is able to keep the tradition of excellence going.

[Kevin Gifford breeds ferrets and runs Magweasel, a site for collectors and fans of old video-game and computer magazines. He's also an editor at Newtype USA magazine.]

Posted by Kevin Gifford at 8:02 AM | Permalink | Comments (5)

The local B&N decided to get in a few copies of PlayStation Official Magazine UK this week, so I decided to pick up one and see what's up.

PS:OMUK (not to be confused with PlayStation 2 Official Magazine UK, which is also still in operation and comes with a PS2 demo disc) is the only mag in the world, not counting the assorted continental European versions, to include a PlayStation 3 Blu-ray demo disc with each issue. I'm sure Future must've paid Sony quite a lot of money to convince them to put together a disc just for the European marketplace, and it's not a terrible disc either -- this one includes demos of many of the really important PS3 games released so far, including Ridge Racer 7, Resistance, Genji, and so forth. Nothing hugely new (and nothing you can't find on the PSN, really), but then again "official" UK mags love to pack their discs with ancient demos, filling them up as much as possible.

What's the mag look like inside? Well, a lot like how it looks outside, in fact -- extremely light 'n airy, with nothing but white backgrounds, easy-to-read text, and the occasional bit of original clean-line art demonstrating this or that feature of a game. The content is nothing terribly special, although there's a heck of a lot of it: ten pages on Resident Evil 5 (which seems to have all been written based off the old trailer and a lot of clip art), a couple of neat features on assorted topics (Folding@home, of all things, as well as a roundtable discussion of guitar/music party games), and then the usual previews and reviews.

Will I buy it again? Not for $15, no, but compared to -- uh -- the only PlayStation-specific magazine left in the US, this is an extremely high-quality product.

Anyway, let's check out all the mags released in the past fortnight! And God, all these specials! They're driving me to the poorhouse!

Continue reading "COLUMN: 'Game Mag Weaseling': Mag Roundup 9/22/07" »

Posted by Kevin Gifford at 4:08 PM | Permalink | Comments (6)

   

If anyone remembers the IBM PCjr today, it's as a major market failure and as one of the computer industry's greatest examples of hubris coming to bite a company in the arse. Originally announced in 1983 and launching in March 1984, the PCjr ("PC Junior") was IBM's first attempt to market a computer for the home -- a system that was kinda-sorta compatible with the more business-targeted IBM PC, with enhanced three-voice sound and 16-color 320x200-pixel graphics.

Heavily rumored for months before its official announcement, the PCjr was presumed by many industry wags to do the same for IBM in the home market what the original PC did for the business sector -- i.e., allow the companay to completely dominate it. It's easy to forget, but this really was the general opinion of much of the industry in early 1984 -- you could say that Apple's January '84 Macintosh Super Bowl ad was appreciated more by the general public than by people who drew their salary in computers at the time. The magazine biz was no different, as two different magazines debuted on US newsstands before the PCjr was even available for purchase: PCjr. from Ziff Davis, and jr from Wayne Green Publications, later CW Communications. (Only one Mac mag -- IDG's Macworld -- debuted with Apple's computer.)

For Ziff, launching PC