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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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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
$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.