Slashdot Mirror
Electronic Gaming Monthly Coming Back
skulluminati writes "It looks like the late, great, gaming mag EGM, which was canceled earlier this year by publisher Ziff-Davis, will now be making a comeback. Steve Harris, the founder of EGM, has acquired the trademark and publishing rights to the magazine. As a reader of EGM for 19 years (almost since the beginning) it is great to see the brutally honest, independent voice of the gaming community rise from the ashes."
I never had a subscription to EGM though I did borrow them from my friends and accept old copies to pour over as a kid. To me they were the first game magazine to really put an effort into the layout and design of the magazine ... and also use very high quality paper. This was reflected in the price and I recall having a subscription of PC Gamer (at $20/year) which paled in comparison.
... but at least they'll be nice looking ads and hopefully be kept out of the articles by a well defined line of self respect.
The one problem I had with EGM was the ads. There were so many of them. I grew up on a farm where I read my magazines cover to cover and sometimes more than once. Although the ads in EGM were very well done and artsy (usually) they did get to be a bit much. Sometimes it felt like I had a three pound advertisement of glossy photos in my hands. EGM sometimes felt like my older sister's Vogue magazines: 90% ads because the consumer actually liked them. Now, PC Gamer was by far worse (I suspected most of the articles being written by a worker for the company of the product being reviewed) and I'm not even sure that's around anymore.
I kept every single one of my Popular Mechanics magazines. You will not find a single PC Gamer though or any of the old EGMs.
I appluad EGM and hope they make it back. I often enjoyed their lists and articles, I must admit I wouldn't have noticed if they had gone under aside from the Slashdot articles.
I also assume this means more ads since that model is getting harder and harder to sustain
My work here is dung.
Someone is coming out with a new paper magazine on electronic gaming? Why? Who will subscribe?
So Ziff Davis shuts down FileFront and is revived by its original owners; now EGM is revived by its original publisher.
ZD also already filed for Chapter 11 last year, so they've clearly got some big issues (no magazine pun intended) to deal with. Not that I'm crying for them or anything, but you should probably reject any offers they make you for "synergistic business strategies" lest they kick the bucket and take your site with it. :)
You can hold down the "B" button for continuous firing.
So when can I get a free subscription? Seriously, EGM seemed to be giving out free subscriptions left and right. I never paid for a single issue. That would probably explain the plethora of ads. That must have nearly been their sole source of income. I guess ad rates weren't able to keep them alive so hopefully they can find a better balance in the future.
in another forum and I'll say it here. I don't think video gamers are big into magazines these days. Video gamers that want the sort of information found in EGM are the same people who embraced the WWW with open arms 10 years ago. The last magazine I bought was Next Generation and I stopped doing so 10 years ago when I figured out that all of the info in there and TONS more were already online.
I don't see this selling in large volumes and will only be a hit with people who are nostalgic.
The new title will be:
Electronic Gaming Everytime A DNF Release Comes Out
HUGE SUCCESS!! :D
WOOOO EGM's return!
Finally!
I liked them, they tended to not show mercy to the weak, and didnt care as much about kissing the asses of their advertisers to artificially boost the ratings of their games if they were actually crap!
Print is dead.
Oh, that's very fascinating to me. I read a lot myself. Some people think I'm too intellectual but I think it's a fabulous way to spend your spare time. I also play raquetball. Do you have any hobbies?
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Will my original subscription which was supposed to run through the end of the year be continued? Or was it conveniently lost?
Reviewing just the first hour of video games.
Hobbies? Well, I do like trolling. Oh, and it's racquetball, Mr. Intellectual. Just because print is dying, it doesn't mean people will stop reading.
Hey I got an idea - lets start a magazine in a decade where newspapers and magazines are losing readers, and sell it to a group already very immersed in our competition (the internet). Yeah! Let's charge for the same gaming news that websites offer for free. And where as they update every day, our magazine will be released once a month.Let's base our entire business on the difficulty of reading websites in the bathroom.
I'd like to see independent print for computer magazines, or really, any print. Print is special.
To answer those critics about why this or that media is failing, it is the content, not the media. Good content will succeed almost independently of the format that it is in.
Computer magazines were vibrant, personal and entertaining right up until big publishers like Ziff Davis and McGraw Hill started moving in and changing their formats. One has to wonder where Compute!, Creative Computing and BYTE would be if they had stayed focused on their hobbyist roots. But, the editors of thought that their existing readership would continue if they changed to be PC clone reviewers, rather than the more electronic tinkering types. No wonder all these magazines ultimately failed. Similarly, newspapers take a beating because they thought that, geez, all those old fuddy duddys that bought old fashioned newspapers and read them Sunday morning over coffee before church would keep renewing if they started printing that church sucked and coffee was evil.
Capitalism has evolved to a point where publishers can no longer treat their customers like commodities for which writers may be interchanged. You have to know your audience, have a relationship with it, share its values, and you have to serve it. Any media that does that it is successful, and anyone that doesn't fails.
This is my sig.
Where I grew up, there were four gaming mags readily available - Nintendo Power, Game Players, GamePro, and EGM.
At the time, Nintendo Power was low on ads and high on lengthy strategy articles and reviews (which were really just long form ads, but hey). GamePro seemed to be targeted at eight year olds, with more of an emphasis on the comic avatars of the editors than actual games, and they had a hefty dose of ads. GamePlayers had a pretty solid balance of gaming coverage and advertisements, and EGM...
What I remember of EGM is that it was thicker than the other mags, more than half advertisements (making Wired look like Readers Digest for ad density), and what content there was seemed to be made up almost entirely of screenshots. Oh, and a ridiculous over-emphasis on fighting and action games.
In the mid 90s, if you wanted the most bang for your buck, Nintendo Power was it. If you owned a non-Nintendo system, then Game Players was where it was at. The remaining contenders offered more ads and empty space than actual content, and were priced inversely - EGM had the highest price tag and boasted the thickest page count... but when you cut out all of the ads, all of the fluff, and boiled it down to actual gaming coverage, you came up several pages short of the content of Game Players or NP, and your wallet the lighter for it.
I don't miss EGM for the same reason I don't read Wired - the internet - even without adblock! - gives me a much more favorable Ads-to-Content ratio, with the added bonus of not paying five bucks for a two paragraph review and two pages of screenshots of the latest Final Fantasy that comes with twenty pages of Madden 09 strategy.
Print is dead.
Oh, that's very fascinating to me. I read a lot myself. Some people think I'm too intellectual but I think it's a fabulous way to spend your spare time. I also play raquetball. Do you have any hobbies?
i also collect mold, spor
Print is dead != reading is dead.
I rarely read paper books anymore. I switched to reading from a screen instead. It's still reading.
I collect molds, spores, and fungus.
Reviving EGM... why?
Around the time of the demise of the Dreamcast, the magazine has been of very poor quality with an emphasis on LIFESTYLE and CULTURE and less on the games and related content (previews, reviews, etc.)
And to add to what it used to me, throw in actual stratagies for games like GamePro used to do.
I get some kind of sick pleasure when someone posts a phrase like "brutally honest, independant voice" or "it was the best platform game of that decade" as if it were something any right-minded person would agree with, and then read as other people disagree. There's something about a person stating an opinion as a fact that really irks me, and I enjoy reading arguments questioning the assumption.
haha I feel the same way. It's never seemed pointful to me.
"Computers are useless. They can only give you answers." - Pablo Picasso