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."

Comments

Re:Buy EDGE instead.

[twistedsymphony]

$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.

EDGE is a fantastic publication, unfortunately it's not offered in the USA. Even the UK version of OXM (which is completely different from the US version) is a much better magazine. Last time I looked into importing a subscription it was well over $150/year which is just too much for a magazine IMO.

You make a good point about the cost of printing and personally I would have been more than willing to pay twice as much for the OXM subscription had they offered a higher quality product... nice plastic snap cases for the DVDs larger footprint and more pages with less ads would be well worth a $50/year subscription to me. But even at $24 the quality was so ridiculously low it wasn't worth even that.

It seems to me that some bean counter decided that people weren't subscribing/droping subscriptions because of the cost and then continually added more ads/less content/lower quality to drive their costs lower... it's a damn shame.