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The Duel Between Gaming Magazines and Websites
The New York Times has up a piece looking at the ongoing battle between websites and magazines in the world of games journalism. With magazine subscriptions falling every year and a non-stop churn of news online, the article examines the ways that mags try to stay competitive, and the views of the gamers that read them. "The circulation for PC Gamer, a leading magazine from Future US, shrank to 210,369 this year from 300,271 in 2003, according to the Audit Bureau of Circulations. Magazine publishers say that readers want longer features and in-depth articles as a counterpoint to the short, bloglike pieces they find online. But Kyle Orland, a freelance journalist who writes a media coverage column for Gamedaily.com, wondered if that strategy was working, saying that when a large feature is published, it doesn't get read. 'Attention spans are just getting so small that readers don't know what they want,' Mr. Orland said."
That is just plain ridiculous. If I am eagerly anticipating game X, and a magazine has an in-depth 8 page preview- of course I am going to read it. Are we all such twitchy ADD zombies that nobody can maintain their attention for more than a page? I call bullshit on that...
I still have active subscriptions to Game Informer and PC Gamer because they make for great reading while on the toilet...yesyesyes, I know I could just bring my laptop in there, but...well...I'd rather not melt the plastic, if you know what I'm saying...
Plus, while this happens rarely, there are times when I get a gaming mag in the mail and there is an article on a game that I haven't heard of from checking the normal sources online...again, doesn't happen often, but it does happen.
Living With a Nerd
Doesn't a duel imply that both parties are actively attacking each other? Game sites don't -care- about magazines at all, except for Japanese ones where they can scan the page and show that Mega Pony X3 is coming out over there sometime in the future. Local magazines get no attention whatsoever.
Gamers only want game news. The interviews with developers and demos are nice, but the best stuff is always available online somewhere. And any developer that ignores the websites in favor of magazines loses a -lot- of free advertisement that gets to the target -immediately.-
I really don't see anything useful in magazines any more... The stuff they used to have like cheats, maps, etc... All of that is gone. Now the companies sell the maps and walkthroughs directly to the consumer, and cheats are always available online without having to figure out which backissue of Generic Gamer Monthly it was in.
No, it's not a 'duel'... It's 'I'm not dead yet!' Sorry bud, 'You will be soon!'
"If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; But if you really make them think, they'll hate you." - DM
Its all about delay. I have a game informer subscription that came with the purchase of my 360. At the end of the magazine they have what will be featured in the next magazine. Unfortunately, whatever is usually featured next month is already online with write-ups and also videos to go along with it at sites like gamespot or IGN.
Either way though, Its good reading material on the pooper.
... to watch the plagiarizing shills suffer and die.
If sales go down, lower the price.
People on the whole prefer reading something tangible to staring at a screen, especially for in-depth articles, but those magazines put off a lot of people with exorbitant prices (at least on this side of the Atlantic).
Azural - instrumentals
The only time I read them is when I travel on an airplane and don't have access to the net. I'll be at the airport waiting to board, so I'll go over to a magazine rack and pick up a few and one usually is a gaming magazine.
Otherwise, I never buy them, I can read just about anything online for free before paying for it in a magazine.
The one thing they can do, if not already, is get exclusives with the game developers and publish only in the magazine.
The overall problem though I think is, it's cheaper to publish online, and more profitable with targeted ads to boot. The game magazines will probably be all gone within 5 to 10 years.
I used to be an avid Electronic Gaming Monthly SUBSCRIBER, back in the early to mid 1990's...
Modesty is one of life's greatest attributes
My biggest complaint with print media is the ads- almost every other freaking page. I can understand ads when I'm not paying for access to a website, or ads when they lower my subscription costs (not that that seems to have had any effect), but every other freaking page? If I'm lucky, they're back to back, and I can rip out the page entirely.
Even worse, there are some advertisements that act as if they are part of the magazine. For the most part, these have "ADVERTISEMENT" across the top in small-to-regular print, but if the layout is similar to the regular magazine layout, you can easily read a bit before you realize what's going on. I don't want to have to check the top of every damn page to see if I'm reading some advertising bullshit or the magazine's bullshit.
I still like print media- it's useful for when the internet goes down, when I'm on the can, or when I'm on a bus or riding with my family. It's not great for immediate news, but I like it for the reviews and features. However, some of the tactics being taken by various magazines (not just gaming) are making it much harder for me to justify continuous purchase.
If someone wants video game *news*, they go online. A story/new game/preview/delay that I read about today will be in next month's magazine. Old news is no news.
As far as I am concerned, the day of the video game magazine died when Next Generation Magazine died. They simply covered the industry very well from many angles. After its parent company cancelled the publication, I no longer had any reason to read video game magazines, because I could obtain the content online. Sure, I picked up Electronic Gaming Monthly from time to time when they covered a game that I was very interested in, but Next-Gen magazine was the gold standard as far as I was concerned. I'm glad that some of the editors got back together and formed the www.next-gen.biz website.
I have excellent Karma and I am not afraid to Troll it.
I still get two video game magazines (EGM and Computer Gaming... I mean Games for Windows) and I read them quite thoroughly. I also get Wired Magazine, Fast Company, and Game Developer. These are all subjects where I could easily get the exact same information online weeks in advance (and quite often I do), but I simply find it enjoyable to crash on the couch and flip through the magazine. There's still something to seeing video game screenshots in print to me, something I don't get from looking at image after image online. I can't really put my finger on it all, but it must be something or I simply wouldn't subscribe anymore (or seek out the many free offers out there).
The one thing that annoys me are the ads. The ads themselves are usually fine, some of them can be really cool or actually clue me in on something I wasn't aware of before. It's the quantity of ads, there are so incredibly many of them. But I suppose that's why many of my subscriptions are free.
Reviewing just the first hour of video games.
The fact is that we see massive shifts in game technology on a daily and weekly basis. A monthly magazine is just going to be completely destroyed by online journalism. If they want to fix the problem, they need to shift to a weekly or daily format and completely change their organization so that it works that way. You might end up with some issues that are underwhelming, and some that are packed with new stuff, but it'll be a lot easier to keep people's attention when you can keep them coming back for more.
In my website design classes, they called it "heroin content" because it was something that kept the consumer coming back. It's the reason blogs and websites like slashdot or magicthegathering.com have so many repeat visitors, whereas other websites are really just there to establish a corporate or personal presence on the web.
Compare the magazine to a newspaper, and you see the difference between your newspaper and the internet. If your audience is shrinking because of the timeliness of your news, then tell the news more often, so that they aren't tempted to just drop you.
Right now PCG is surviving pretty much solely due to its exclusives, which are an opportunity for big game businesses to prepare news releases ahead of time to a specific audience, and to reach as many people at once as they can, with minimal investment. Somebody needs to point it out to them that it's not working. If they shifted to a more regular schedule, they'd pick up more readers, sell more copies, they might be able to save paper, they'd be able to integrate it with their website and as a result, become a big, respected name in PC gaming again. I read PCG every now and then if there's something on the cover that interests me, but it's really turned into a novelty magazine.
If you can read this, I forgot to post anonymously.
I for one enjoy the longer articles that are in magazines. Not just reviews, but in-depth behind-the-scenes and interviews as well. Online just doesn't cut it for me. I want something I can read on a subway, an airplane, in bed, in a conference room before the start of a meeting, and on the toilet. Can't easily do that with 1up.com.
The short blurby reviews are useless. If I want to review a game I will do research at gamerankings.com. I want something sevreal pages that takes me 10-15 minutes to read.
"You cannot find out which view is the right one by science in the ordinary sense." - C.S. Lewis on Intelligent Design
Mags can't compete with websites for several reasons:
1) space, websites have unlimited space, size, and coverage possible
2) time, websites can publish immediately
3) media, websites can show pictures, video, sound, and link to demos seamlessly
4) cost, websites are a fraction of the cost of anything printed
5) promotion, websites can better integrate with relevant and targeted advertisements
6) user interaction, websites can offer real time discussion of any article or issue
In order for mags to compete they must evolve into something different than what websites can offer. Some ideas:
1) switch to full page color ads with little to no text (I find most ads are quite enjoyable if they are simply/mostly images)
2) focus on quality of reviews and previews rather than quantity, exclusivity, or breaking news, websites can easily beat you on these so you must focus on quality.
3) clean up the format so it is super clear and uncluttered
Ultimately I think all magazines and newspapers will shrink and be shoved in a corner to very specific uses for travel, bathrooms, waiting rooms, basically any public place where you are forced to wait.
If I owned a print only magazine, rather than trying to beat back the online media torrent that will dissolve your format, I would embrace it and move all resources to my online presense, then allow people to print free mini versions of the magazine for use in the public waiting places mentioned above.
My problem is this month's issue of Gaming Magazine is less likely to have the information I want. I don't buy games that frequently, and usually I'm not buying the lastest stuff on the rack. So a magazine including reviews/player's guides for only this month's releases just isn't that useful to me. Instead I can go online and easily find whatever I want to know about this 3 month/6 month/1 year old game without having to track down a specific back issue.
That is a very good point. Magazines are great for stumbling across a game that you might not click-through to on a gaming blog. If your only exposure to a game is through the banner ads that most of us disable, or the single sentence link on a game-sites front page; you might be overlooking something.
Print-based magazines are just as lacking in substance as their online counterparts. Unfortunately, the over-saturation of advertising in print manages to be even more intrusive than it is online. And the lifestyle magazines, gaming including are particularly insane with the advertising. So I find it funny that these guys are talking about the so-called quality of writing in print.
If they were serious about competing with online publications they'd make significant changes. I'd take an approach similar to that seen with design magazines. Improve the overall quality of the publication. By this I mean, choose higher quality paper and good printing.
Don't try to cram every last shred of gaming information into a single issue, especially since the magazine is going to be outdated the day it goes to print. Instead, focus on fewer, higher quality stories. Write substantive reviews that actually mean something and don't come off as marketing.
And to the authors and editors, stop thinking you're celebrities. This is a particular peeve of mine, even online. These guys have a tendency to rub it in the face of the reader that they've gotten access to games before the reader. They seem think they're God's gift to gamers. Just focus on the damn games and stop trying to convince me you're cool.
I might even suggest raising the price of each issue for the sole purpose of reducing the number of ads. Perhaps it may make sense to go to a bi-monthly schedule. It means a longer wait, but it translates into more time to produce a quality issue.
That's the approach taken by some of the design magazines I subscribe and I always feel like each issue is worth the subscription. They're worth holding on to. Unlike most gaming magazines I see which are obnoxious crap barely worth picking up off the newsstand.
Like anything, if you want to be competitive you have to be a bit creative. Complaining about the competition while doing more of the same isn't going to fix the problem.
Sorry, you lost me about 1/2 way through.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
I get PCGamer and CGW (or Games for Windows Magazine as it is now called) and I used to get Computer Games Magazine. Why? Because you can get subscriptions to these and many other magazines on ebay for incredibly low prices. I think I got 4 years of PCGamer for $10. That's like 21 cents an issue. Sure they aren't the cd or dvd versions but still, at that price it is a no brainer.
http://www.popularculturegaming.com -- my blog about the culture of videogame players
The only reason I have bougt a game mag in the last several years is for the occasional demo disk. If the mags included playable demos with each issue I would subscribe to them all. I like to be able to try the game before I drop $60.00 on it and find out I don't like it despite it getting good reviews on the web or in print.
If game companies were smart they would give playable demos to the mags like crazy. Too bad I have yet to see one demo disk for the Wii, it might have prevented me from buying NBA 07, Rapala Fishing and that horrible piece of trash chicken shoot (I thought my 5 & 7 year olds would like it, I was horribly wrong)
-FataL
Actually there is a solution and the Japanese know it. A few years ago a Japanese magazine emailed me requesting to add a freeware tool I had made to the CD they include with their publication and asked if I also wanted a free subscription. Sure I said, but I must say I was not prepared for what I would start to receive every month for the following 3-4 years...
So, their magazine was all about games, and multimedia, and naked girls! There was no coherent order of things, on one page there was a game review with adult ads, on the next there was a nude model pictorial, further "decorated" with (regular - non-nudie) pc-software ads, then an article on p2p full of adult, game, software etc ads. There were "combination" articles, like nudie web site reviews, or adult PC game reviews and always in no "sensible" categorization/order in the magazine. The included CD was similar. Game demos, multimedia software, japanese porn videos, all nicely aggregated within the autoplay interface.
After surviving the culture shock, I decided they probably knew their target audience too well and I should just appreciate the publishers ingenuity.
Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent. Polar Scope Align for iOS
The Vede. When he took over as editor the mag went down the toilet. I canceled my subscription after the format change. Don't blame the attention span of the reader. Look at what changed in the last 4 years if you want to find a cause. This used to be a great magazine, it was sad to see it go. X-Play is now in danger of doing the same thing. Constantly changing it's format and selling out to sponsors. Stick with what works.
Unless you wanna take a laptop to the can...
Of course if you're doing that already....well, I'll never put my finger on anyone else's touch pad again!
My switch away from print had nothing to do with a short attention span. I subscribed to PC Gamer from 1994 until 2001. In the end, I dropped my subscription out of disgust. The magazine kept getting thinner and thinner while the ratio of ads versus actual content kept growing, and the editorial quality fell off of a cliff. At the same time, I could get more timely updates from the internet at a comparable level of quality (which speaks only ill about the magazine's writing).
I've been a subscriber to both the print versions of PCG and MaxPC for something like 8 years now. Back in the early days (I remember the 1st one I looked at had a picture of a then-hot Stevie Case on the cover - maybe I was thinking it was Playboy) you could always count on the same certain writing styles from the various editors - nowdays, I think the EIC moves on every quarter. I think PCG has been through 3 EICs this year - and the current one was a new employee 12-18 months ago.
Hang around for another month Kristen, you actually can form a sentence better then the overly full of himself Vederman ever could.
As a reader of PC Gamer from issue #1 I can understand the falling sub rates. The Magazine in the last two years or so has been in SHARP decline. I am questioning if the next re-up is going to happen for me.
The Mag was originally a VERY good source of news, information and previews in the PC games world. Now its become a big old pile of fluff for the most part. It doesn't really tell you anything anymore. I no longer seem to even be able to get the disc with it when I subscribe, that was always nice.
The articles no longer seem to go in the depth they used to in the past. I think the difference is in the past the articles were written by journalists, now they are written by fan boys. The columns have all but dried up, I can't remember the last time I read an actual interesting one that contained any good information.
Its all flash over substance now. Perhaps its a change in target audience,I think it used to be written for adults. Now its the PC equivalent of EGM or GamePro.
Power Corrupts,Absolute Power Corrupts Absolutely, leaving one person(group)in charge is absolutely corrupt.
Remember Next Generation? I had a subscription for a very long time, quality articles, in-depth reviews along with caption reviews, interviews with developers and company execs, extensive trade show coverage. Thankfully, its back as www.next-gen.biz . Even PC Gamer was pretty good back in the day. I still have a few 3.5" floppies around with demos on them and a stack of demo CDs (including one with the Halo E3 video, ah...what could have been). I stopped that subscription when the discs started containing fewer demos on them, everything got a 80% or better rating, % of ad-content rose, my 56k connection went broadband (thus eliminating the reason I needed the demo CDs), and the net sites improved.
Additionally, many of us older gamers who bought subscriptions to GamePro, EGM, PCGamer, etc. were still young when we had 'unlimited' free time to spend playing games for hours at a time, memorizing articles and cheat codes, highlight the games we wanted in the Funcoland ad, and dream about winning those "Ultimate Gaming Rig, 52"TV, D-VHS, Stereo Sound, big speakers, 4 Systems, 100+ Games, etc." advertisement contests where you just needed to solve successively more difficult puzzles. We've grown up and have higher priorities which take time, so we just look for concise reviews, user opinions, and aggregators like gamerankings.com, assuming we're still playing games. Newer gamers can always remember IGN.com, 1Up.com, Gamespot.com, [insert your fav game site here], etc., but give a cursory glance through the magazines in the store, thinking "I read this X months ago." or "I have the full strategy guide at home."
Is there a fix for gaming mags? No. People will always buy magazines from newstands, especially at the airport/subway terminals, the publishers will just need to adjust their circulation accordingly. Game websites will continue to grow and be purchased by conglomerates, for better or worse.
"The quality of life is determined by its activites."--Aristotle
Dead tree editions are so 20th century!
an Ass... I need to take a Dump... as long as I need to take a Dump... I need to read for 5-10 minutes... as long as I need to read for 10 minutes... I need SOMETHING quick to read.
Wow, the Video Game magazine with Pictures and quick articles and a Letters section. Perfect "Taking a Dump" reading material.
Learn to love it, or accidently flush it.
PCGamer subscriber for over 10 years now...each one read cover-to-cover...on the toilet. My laptop is too cumbersome to comfortably use there (but it's definately doable).
Well worth $20/year (I stopped getting the CD once I got broadband).
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I cancelled my PCGamer subscription because they refused to refund me after I paid up for 1yr and never got a magazine. That kind of customer service will quickly lose many readers. They didn't even offer to start a fresh subscription from that point and send me the magazines for which I had already paid. So I'll stick with my FREE reading online thanks.
~Vexed and loving it!
I will always have game mag subscriptions because they act as a sort of history. Electronic information is generally volatile, and it's quite a hassle to archive it indefinitely - formats change, websites close or prune. Print, on the other hand just demands physical space, and the format only becomes incompatible when the language itself changes. I can't see myself printing out articles, but I'm more than happy paying for the service. I still enjoy pulling out 17-year-old issues of EGM and waxing nostalgic, or having a good chuckle about how things used to be. Maybe having this record of gaming past isn't of value to most people anymore, but I'll have subscriptions as long as print magazines are available.
PC Gamer may have dropped from 300,000 to 210,000 but their cunning plan to cut from the previous, heady 6 pages of actual content, to a leaner 4, along with increasing from 60 to 90 pages of advertising ensures they still make the same revenue targets.
I joke but it's really not that untrue. I subscribe but am left wondering why. The magazine is virtually unreadable with a couple of pages of letters, half a dozen pages of previews, maybe ten pages of reviews (with half given over to one or two games and the rest being shorter than the average web review), a brief hardware section that can't compete with Anandtech or whoever, and a couple of one page columns at the back. All of this scattered through so many pages of ads, fold out ads and inserts that it's just about unreadable. What I can find amongst the ads is so brief (accepting no one's in to every genre) that it's become a half hour read and you're done for your five bucks.
Their challenge isn't that the market's no longer viable (there are plenty of design sites yet dozens of design magazines, there are plenty of digital photography sites and yet endless magazines). The problem is they've made so many commercial decisions, they've designed straight past anything for their readers to actually enjoy.
Bulk the tech section out to a five machines from a given price point multi review, a section on performance tuning, one on things like in game voice, one on graphics cards and you've suddenly got a valid section. Change the three brief columns at the back in to half a dozen that really cover a niche and build their own reason for being there. If you're going to preview games, write something rather than a full page graphic and 30 words. If you're going to review, review everything that comes out rather than two key games and a couple of embarrassed half page pieces that tell people nothing.
Reclaim the magazine for the readers and it might be worth reading. Keep seeing it purely as a vehicle for ads and there's no point in readers picking it up. With no readers, you can't sell any ads.
Example 1: Guitar World lists the best guitar solo ever as "Machine Gun." Incidentally, guitar world writer Andy Aledort was touring with the Band of Gypsies at the time. It is a darn good solo, but also a pretty suspicious coincidence.
Example 2: Rolling Stone gives the new Springsteen album an unprecedented 5 stars. They never give anything 5 stars. (Ok Computer= 4 stars, Nevermind= 3 stars) Incidentally, Springsteen's manager is a former writer. This is not a coincidence.
Example 3: There is the cozy relationship between muscle mags and supplement makers detailed in Game of Shadows. For example BALCO managed to market an entirely fake supplement called TMG. I could keep going on forever. I guess my point is that when I'm reading the internet, there is a short article and a bunch of ads I can completely ignore most of the time. There is also a chance that the small piece of information is a bit of real news, or someone's actual opinion, rather than another advertisement hidden in some flowery prose. Why should I pay for a magazine that purports to review products, when it is actually in the pocket of the reviewee? This bullshit should be illegal.
Game magazines have a similar problem going on. First you have the "official" magazines of the various platforms. Even sketchier, the earliest magazine reviews of games tend to be the most positive. The earliest review of Lair (Play Magazine) gave it a 9/10. I don't know if this happens all the time, but it's just something I noticed
$24 annual seems pretty low, if you want quality go buy EDGE which is the only gaming magazine that I would buy, they don't give it to you for $2 each though... From my own experience with printing 4 color newspapars, it's impossible to good quality and sell for that little.
Over here in Switzerland, I've noticed a lot of Wii and/or DS game mags that are obviously targeted at female adults. They're usually predominantly white, feature fashion sections and models on the front. Some of them have "games my kids could play" sections, but they seem to mainly be for adult females who play stuff like Brain Training on their DS.
No idea how well they're doing, but every few months, a new one seems to be added to the selection.
I guess this is one target audiece which is more likely to buy a magazine than to look up stuff on kotaku.com or ign.com.