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Game Informer Magazine's Massive Reader Base
The Video Game Ombudsman, Kyle Orland, discusses Game Informer Magazine's two million strong subscriber base and their coverage in the Washington Post. GI is the house organ for Gamestop, making its subscriber base not much of a surprise. What is surprising is that their two million readers puts them within half a million subscribers of "O", the magazine stamped with the Oprah brand, and just outside the top 25 magazines in the country. From the post: "The rest of the article is a semi-interesting look at the life of the editor of the country's most popular game magazine, and I have to say... it sounds pretty awesome! Here's to a gaming mag cracking the circulation top 10 sooner than later."
Seems that it would make more sense to link directly here instead.
By far the best gaming magazine in the past few years was the short-lived GMR magazine, which was EB's version of Gameinformer. It was written by some great people who I've talked to a few times, and had the best articles, reviews, previews, and sense of humor of any magazine out there. It was the gamer's magazine. Unfortunately, the plug was pulled on it a few months ago (in hindsight, maybe because of internal knowledge of the GS buyout?) and it's gone forever now. For those interested, I'd definitely check out a back issue; even if the info is outdated, it's worth it.
The Braying and Neighing of Barnyard Animals Follows.
GI won't receive a cent from me since their whole fiasco with Paper Mario. For those who don't know, they gave Paper Mario and the Thousand Year Door for the Gamecube a low score (something like a 6 out of 10) because the game would be precieved as a kiddy game. While it is true the game is very accessable to a younger audience, the game did have some more adult oriented jokes and dialog that the youngins wouldn't get. GI tried to give the excuse that the reason that they gave the low score is because they review games on how the gaming public would recieve it, not on the quality of the game itself.
"Our opponent is an alien starship packed with atomic bombs. We have a protractor."
My former roommate worked for Gamestop for a while, and had to get a minimum of new subscriptions. I don't think it was too high, but every now and then, he would end up with a new subscription for himself. Every month I still receive three copies of the magazine.
Nice Marmot
Actually, I believe Nintendo Power was only the most popular mag among children. Not hard, given the main competition was "Highlights"
This is a common practice in magazine publishing. It's called a controlled subscription vs. a paid. Magazines generally do NOT make money off of paid subscriptions, they make money off of advertising. Overall paid subscription numbers have been dropping for years. The advertisers do not care whether a subscriber is paid or not, what they want is a large subscriber base that you can validate as being interested in your product. So when Gamespot takes your name down when you get their discount card, they can consider you to be a game playing and purchasing reader of Game Informer. Which is exactly who the advertisers want to reach.
One of the companies I work for is a regional magazine publishing company and most of the publications operate this way. For example the regionl business publication is given away free to chambers of commerce, lawyers, high profile businesses etc.
Sometimes my arms bend back.
You probably haven't heard of Game Informer because you don't shop at a gamestop. That rag is pushed and published by the video game retailer that will account for around half of all game sales after their merger with EB. But then, its not like game magazines were ever much more than corporate agitprop. Nintendo Power certainly started a trend, but they also came from the company who got its start in the business limiting developers to two games a year and stringent quality standards.
I Browse at +4 Flamebait
Open Source Sysadmin
No, EB and Gamestop announced a merger within the past day or so.
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Here:
http://games.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/04/18