Ｔｏ ｂｅ ｈｏｎｅｓｔ， Ｉ ａｌｗａｙｓ liked Game Fam more than EGM. In the UK we had to import both of those mags at around 6 pounds each (Quite a lot for a mag in the 90's) so I always felt EGM was a bit of a rip off with adds on every other page. They did have some nice exclusives mind you but Game Fan always seemed to have the better games featured. Yakumo
Never really read EGM but its a shame to see magazines go because its nice to down and read a weekly/montly mag from front to back and you can always remember stuff from when you got the magazine whereas i don;t get that when reading articles onlines In the past i was an avid reader of Official uk playstation then Official playstation 2 magazine, then subcribed to Official xbox and then untill a good 4-5 month back Official 360 magazine but every so often i'd go for a multi format magazine depending on what was in it.
what will us gamers read on the shitter now? That said, What Killed EGM? The Reality that their most beloved April Fool's joke one they pulled TWICE...actually became a reality. Gouken/Shen Long is real now Fools!
Also proven by PC Magazine. They are only online now (they will still make magazines, just as PDF's), there was a full page in the last issue about it. The issue is siting on my desk, ill scan it for ya. :nod: EDIT: Scans Cover: Interwebz only notice:
Printed media can't die out since the begining of Time Man has needed something to read while taking an epic shit
lol. I hated when game magazines started costing alot....but it was pretty cool when you could get a demo disc with the old PS magazine...back in the internetless console days and stuff.
The writing's been on the wall for magazines about technology and gaming for a while now. If you have a savvy reader base then of course they're going to get their news on the net, and if you're regurgitating press releases or just writing reviews then the web is going to fuck you up, no question. To my mind, Wired is the best example of a magazine adapting to a new era - they unashamedly fill their paper edition with 80% glossy adverts, but make it worthwhile by including a handful of quality, lengthy, fascinating articles. Wired were also pretty quick to offer these exact same articles online for no fee - in other words they adapted their revenue model so that they were completely supported by advertising, both online and off. If the paper edition makes any money then that's great, but they pretty much give it away for free anyway (unless you're in the UK, where it costs £4.50. Fuckers). Interesting and well-researched articles are honestly the only thing for me that can make a magazine worthwhile, and I'm not talking about "100 greatest gaming moments" kind of crap. You need a hook, an edge over the gaming blogs - as far as news and reviews go, I couldn't care less about the distribution medium, I'll go with whatever's the cheapest and most up-to-date. Game journalists should pick a topic and write something unique, and use the fact that they're paid journalists and have research leverage to back it up with interviews. I appreciate that no gaming magazine can have the reader base to financially support sending their staff half way across the world in the way Wired can for their tech journalists, and they probably don't have as much clout with the companies whose staff they want to interview, but honestly, that's kind of the problem - there are too many magazines publishing exactly the same shit. I don't think that trimming the excess is inherently a bad thing. Back on topic, it's sad to see people out of work, and I hope they settle elsewhere quickly. (edited for poor English)
my bets are the laid off will join up with former boss Tsu or was it Shoe or Hsu whatever the hell his name is and start a new magazine/website picking up where EGM left off
Guess I'll have to update my old page honouring EGM and Super Play to contain eulogies for both of them... :-( Take a look: http://www.disgruntleddesigner.com/chrisc/Archive/magspecial_index.html
That's the biggest issue I've seen with print media for game magazines. They don't really offer anything different from the online counterpart, their pretty much printing the same exact story with sometimes even less info and by the time it hits the stands it's already way out of date. I remember what made egm strong durring their 64/psx days were articals such as how to build your own arcade, or play imports. They were even doing stuff no one else was covering in media such as fan translations. Hell there last great effort was there japanese issue where they tried to investigate why japans presence in game development has died down so much. Stuff like edge and play magazine have unique things like doing looks at well known or obscure retro games and even interviewing the developers on them about that game only!!!! Look at the history of a developer is another good one too. I forgot which magazine did it, but they did a great article on the making of msr for dreamcast. Well without dragging this post on, if magazines want keep up with the blog and regular news sites, they need to offer something that is not offered online. Otherwise it's a form I see shrinking more as time goes on.
Honestly, I havent had a subscription to a video game magazine since around 2001 or 2002. Its just way easier ( and more cost-effective:icon_bigg) to check a website, usually more informative. I do miss the old days of EGM though :crying:
sad really. I haven't read an EGM in 8 months or so....still sad considering i collected them for, gee 7 years.... Print media really is dying. Being in the design industry, its an interesting time, as where we were doing all our advertising via full page ads/brochures/mailers we're now moving to email and web based stuff. Great for me, but nothing beats the smell of 1000 freshly printed annual reports! what's worse, is that the digital medium provides much less in the way of creativity versus traditional physical design. Ryan
If you wanted to argue that in practice web pages tend to have less creative design than magazines I'd kind of see where you were coming from... but as a format, paper is massively more restrictive in terms of what you can and can't do than the web.
true, but i think i was referring more to the more abstract unique uses of physical media. Magazines are quite restrictive, but even mags like WIRED can do stuff that web can't. I mean still, if you have complete freedom and aren't bounded by the size/shape etc than the physical medium is always going to produce a more interesting concept, given the creator can envision such a design. This coming from a web designer lol
Maybe I'm just unimaginative, but I can't think of anything a magazine can do that a webpage can't emulate. On the flip side web pages can do vastly more things than paper can, being an interactive medium and all. I think a magazine's greatest asset is its tangibility. That's something the web can never have in the same way.
meh, you can do that with a laptop too. Hell i went over an illustrator file while taking a dump the other night.....
