Two Ziff-Davis Magazines Cancelled

Starsmore writes "IGN is reporting that Ziff-Davis Media has pulled the plug on two of its magazines: Xbox Nation (XBN) and GMR (the collaborative effort with EB Games), for undisclosed reasons. Andrew Pfister (GMR Editor) confirms the report as well via 1up.com " From his post: "The news has broken over the Intraweb, and unfortunately, the documents are real. As of the February issue, GMR is being discontinued. Subscribers will be the only ones to receive the February issue, and all subscribers will have the option to switch over to another Ziff mag."

Comments

Re:Gaming Magazines = dinosaur

[Anonymous Coward]

People do. The major problem though isn't with the media, it's with the XBox. Current retail figures show that there's a massive mismatch between XBox sales and XBox support sales (games, magazines, etc.) And XBox sales themselves are beginning to plummet.

My understanding is that, essentially, the XBox as a platform is dying. People who've bought XBoxes have generally found the usually mediocre games choices (there are, what, seven decent XBox titles?) together with the clumsiness of the system itself (who wants to either drag that thing over from a cupboard every day and set it up just to play a game when you can leave smaller, more elegant, boxes like the PS2, and to some extent the Gamecube, in plain sight without either uglifying your room) which is just turning it into something people buy and then leave to gather dust in a drawer somewhere.

The XBox does have a sizable web presense, but in general that's because it's the platform the modders are concentrating most upon. If you remove "mod" from searches on the web or on Usenet for XBox, PS2/Playstation2, and Gamecube, really, XBox ends up being a distant third.

For all practical purposes, the XBox is dead.

Re:Gaming Magazines = dinosaur

[Jane_the_Great]

I read gaming magazines. I have subscriptions to both GMR and PC Gaming. While the information may be out of date, it is not like we are talking about stock prices here. A review of a game in a magazine versus a review of a game on the Internet is going to convey the same information - who cares if I have to wait a few weeks to read it? There is a case to be made for being able to drop a deuce and read some game reviews.

Also, I've found that GMR - due to their partnership with EB - had coupons that were occassionally useful at EB. So I got the subscription to GMR, plus the 10% off pre-owned games at EB, plus coupons that I've used to save over $20 this year, for a grand total of something like 10 bucks. So that makes a pretty good case for GMR.

Another point is that the Internet is the best place to get up to date false gaming news. Furthermore, when one reads a gaming magazine, you know that the magazine is paying those reviewers. When I look at some gaming website, I don't know which reviews are astroturf by the company [if they allow user-submitted reviews] and which reviews are heavily influenced by the fact that the owner of the site is trying to get in good with some companies so that they can score some free stuff - i.e. it's a hobby site that the author is not getting paid for and therefore, he'd like to see some type of return. Granted, reviewers in printed material can also be bribed but I feel a little bit safer knowing that they are getting a salary, regardless if they're also being sent Halo 2 action figures.