Ooh, they're bad this time around - even worse than the last lot. As far as I can tell they've all either stalled or dived, with the possible exceptions of OXM and NOM. OPS2M is down to 188,000 despite everyone expecting it to sail past the 200,000 mark about two years ago. Heh.

Interestingly, Paragon now have the best-selling independent mags for the GC and Xbox, with CUBE (32,709) and XBM (30,036) trouncing their Future equivalents.

And Xbox Gamer, with its tits and everything, sank to 20,573.

Who'd have thought it, eh?

How many people read Edge, or any of the other all-format magazines?

I assumed the official playstation 2 magazine must have been doing quite badly, because they keep sending me free ones along with my Edge subscription (which I only subscribed to for the free T-shirt, which they never bloody sent me). Without the free dvd I assume you get in the shops, OPM is a bloody embarrassing pile of shit. The free dvd better be good to get 200,000 people buying the magazine. Otherwise there must be a large amount of bloody morons around (says a man with an Edge subscription. I'll shut up now, lest I be accused of hypocrisy).

Edge gets 27,000, the same as CVG. The best-selling multiformat mag is GamesMaster on 53,000.

Future keeps sending me free copies of OPS2M, too. I really wish they wouldn't as it is, without doubt, a huge load of shite.

Xbox Gamer down from 35,000 to 20,000? Couldn't happen to a nicer magazine.

PSM2 down from 59,000 to 44,000.

PS2 Gaming Max down from 24,000 to 13,000.

Official mags stalling at half the sales of the last generation's.

Reap what you sowed, you useless fuckers.

Surely these results are going to be causing mass panic at the publishers? It must be the most dismal set of figures... well, ever. But still, look on the bright side - Future has just gone and bought a couple of mags which sell about 20,000 copies each. Hurray for them!

I hadn't seen that figure for PS2 Max - I expect the staff are looking for new jobs as we speak.

For a magazine which costs £6. What an awful piece of shat.

For comparison Gamestm was on about 25,000 around Christmas.

It costs £6. Dear God. My faith in humanity sinks ever lower...

The official PS2 mag really does irritate me. I actually sold my soul to them a few months ago and bought an issue because I really wanted the demo disk, but I can asure you it'll never happen again. I mean, it wouldn't be so bad that it cost so much if it was actually possible to read the thing, but £6 for a demo disk is bloody expensive. If they can't be bothered to write a decent magazine, they could at least have the decency to sell it for under a pound...

I still can't get over the that - £6*200,000 is £1.2 million spent each month on it. Thats just frightening. You'd think for that money they could hire some decent writers or something.

Well, out of that £1.2million:

£600,000 - newsagents' margin
£300,000 - manufacturing costs
£250,000 - Sony licence fee for "Official" status
£49,500 - Future executive and middle-management salaries
£499.50 - freelance budget

leaving 50p to pay the actual mag team with.

Stuart, just curious; during your time at Amiga Power, for which did you get paid the most? Freelance, or employee of Future Publishing?

Freelance is by far the better-paid, in terms of pounds per hour.

I wonder if it'd be cruel to now suggest that's still more than they deserve.

NOM is as bad as OPSM2, if you ask me.

I recently got it for the Smash Bros. soundtrack CD, and it ended up in the bin within days. Sad fact is you can find better-written stuff for free on The Internet (and lots of gaming websites are rubbish as well).

Amen.

Still, that's what capitalism is all about. Undercut your competitors into financial ruin, buy them out, then sack all your employees and just reprint press releases. Oh, and start publishing roughly five billion magazines about cross-stitching. And then get big fat government grants so you can buy that other yacht you've been after.

Seriously though, if you're a publisher, then why publish a decent mag employing a principled intelligent staff (who are aware of their duty to their readers and their employment/union rights) when you can just sell a shoddy, sub-tabloid rag written by idiots for marginally lower sales figures but priced so you make more profit?

Trouble is, if readers are not sufficiently informed to recognise a quality magazine, they won't notice or care when things start to go wrong and therefore can't help to improve the mag in meaningful ways. Bit like politics really.

That sounds about right. Surely, by now, there must be enough decent-but-disgruntled writers milling about for someone with a bit of gumption to fund a quality magazine that would simultaneously attract both them and the readers to whom gaming is more than an occasional fancy? It's not that I'd expect such a gorgeous thing to storm the market... I just want a great, that's genuinely GREAT rather than merely passable, games magazine to exist again. On paper.


As for the faltering increases in sales shown by the ABC figures, publishers have been slow to recognise this for what it is due to the general assumption that magazine sales would mirror console sales as the industry emerged from the so-called "transitional period." Hopefully it should now be a little more obvious that dumbing down content, replacing stupendously fantastic writers with Kelly Brook's tits (I'm scarred for life, I tell you) and placing style-guides before wanton creativity is not the way forward.

Gah! I'll happily repeat this as many times as it takes: In my experience it's not the writers that are at fault but the environment (that's the magazine industry in general) itself... it's simply not conducive to quality journalism. You've every pressure, as a staffer on any reviews mag, to roll out a production-line publication that acts as little more than an extension of the games PR machine, yet comparatively little support should you want to actually do your job of protecting the consumer. It's not a matter of conspiracy, as some would have it, just of market forces placing impossible demands on teams. To give you a non-Future example, when I joined Play they were putting out 14 issues a year with less than a full compliment of full-time staff (incidentally I've never worked on a games magazine that had a full quota of permanent team members... it just doesn't happen in my experience). When you're in that kind of environment a lot of the things that are ideal get left behind (like a live-binder, postmortems, developer visits you just don't have the time for, comprehensive feature planning, food etc) and quality can suffer as a consequence.

Now, given the circumstances, I'm proud of what my colleagues (yes, even the subbers :P) and I achieved -- critical previews (rather than hastily re-written press-releases) were routine, we covered some cracking import gems and marked on the conservative side -- but I'd never deny that we were a good way off what we would have been capable of had a more reasonable set of resources been available. And when I consider that the team following my tenure had the additional responsibility of producing PlayTV on top of everything else, I find myself amazed that they didn't forsake games journalism in preference of something far more humane. Like Triad cockling.


So sure, I can understand where calls for better writers come from, but when the industry is actively attempting to retard its own content and the demands of production restrict what can realistically be achieved, such calls are misguided. Even if you got hold of the world's best writers, putting them into a situation where they have to either produce compromised material or leave would mean you'd still see no improvement in prose. More fundamental changes are required for that.

I can't argue with any of that, except maybe the "live-binder" bit, because I've got no idea what that means. For a painfully-exhaustive response, go here:

http://ds.dial.pipex.com/thumbs.aloft/wos/abc-rip.htm

It didn't realise games magazines debased themselves to that degree. It was inevitable that games journalism would turn out this way really - look at the awful toadying 'interviews' that are done with celebs every time a high-profile film comes out nowadays.

I recommend everyone to get hold of the Dr. Strangelove DVD and watch the promo interviews with George C Scott and Peter Sellers. In it, you'll see a deeply uncomfortable George C Scott pretending to have a phone call with an imaginary interviewer. The video was sent out to regional TV stations who put in their interviewer's face and voice to pretend that they are having a nice chat on the phone to Scott.

Previews, developer interviews and news are three sections I can never bring myself to look at.

Previews seem to be almost glowing hype-fests that give games publishers positive quotes to stick on the box, even when the whole thing is shot down in flames at review time. I get the impression that positive previews are some hoops that mags have to jump through to get review copies/advertising.

Developer interviews are just tedious. I speak as a developer.

News in print mags is always hopelessly out-of-date and foot-shootingly similar to the raw press releases that we can now all read for ourselves.

I stopped getting PC Zone as it was too expensive, dull, and I only really read Emu Zone. Still get Edge and Gamestm though. Curiously, both mags with more features and no covermounts, but still with the unreadable sections outlined above.

How much do our giveaway OPM copies inflate the circulation figures? Does Future send out OPM with every other subscription? Or do they have massive overstocks?

Well, it always seems to be the issue before last, so presumably they're returned copies that they want to get rid of. I'm not sure if free copies get included in ABCs, but it wouldn't surprise me.

Freebie copies ARE included in the ABC, but I don't know if that includes copies of the previous issue.

Ironically, of course, what they don't send out with the free copies are the discs, the only possible reason for anyone ever perhaps even slightly wanting OPS2M.

Excellent! A waste disposal tactic*. I shall expect a box of spent uranium with my next electricity bill.

CdrJ

*As used almost identically in science fiction novel 'Bill, the Galactic Hero'

Curiously, over at GamesIndustry.biz they make out that the picture for single console mags is quite rosy.

God knows how they deduce that. For example, I could swear that 'Play' is down from this time six months ago, but they describe it as 'healthy'.

Publishing company bosses are making lots of money - ergo the market is healthy.

It's an extraordinary headline. "Not quite all games mags plummeting down toilet", it may as well read. But bless 'em, they do like a positive spin, which is why I expect they ignore things like Xbox Gamer losing more readers than everyone else gained put together.

This all makes me sad - again - that digiworld died.

So whose left there now? And what effects this going to have on it? Have they put out any copies since everyone left? And is Tony Mott editing that and the teletext pages?

Man, I remember good magazines, and I'm only 19. When I was younger, I bought Super Play purely because the captions made me laugh like a loon - and they're still funny as hell today. It did get a little worse under Alison's editorship, but still 10 times better than any other mag. And when it died, NMS (now NOM) copied almost everything Super Play did, going as far to review Secret of Mana 2 (in Japanese) with a +90% rating. For a Japanese RPG.

Over the years, the only other magazines I got were Sega Saturn Magazine (which turned really excellent towards the end of it's life, as it had no games to talk about any more), some PS2 mag from a couple of years ago which seemed to be the polar opposite of OPS2M - a ruddy good read which was actually critical of the badly designed machine, but then was killed dead for no given reason, and now, Edge, because I've nothing else to read.

I did get Arcade for a bit as well. That was quite amazing, given that Future decided to kill it dead for no apparant reason. I've got a question for the Rev: why is it that only official magazines can carry demo discs? I'm sure that a whole pullava of PSOne magazines carried discs.

Bang on. For "a little worse" I'd substitute "more serious" which I always thought was a big shame but there you go.

I still buy NGC on the off chance that it will magically become as good as it was when it first began (with most of Super Play's staff, natch).

It amazes me today that with all the forums and all the arty-fart progs available to people that theres seemingly a dearth of 'true' mature underground magazines or rather fanzines.

It's a physical folder (maintained by a magazine's designer) that contains a printout of the current version of each completed editorial page, allowing anybody interested the opportunity to flick through an in-progress approximation of the final tome. Essentially it gives writers the chance to ensure that finished articles match their original vision and have had no heinous mistakes introduced during subbing before it's too late to do anything about it.

If only they would, then there might be a viable possibility of starting afresh. Looks to me like the poor-but-profitable model could limp on for some time though [glances briefly at the world of pop music and begins to cry].

And even if they don't publish another issue of either, their market-share still just went up and they can show investors a pie-chart with an even bigger "Future" wedge. Acquisition isn't necessarily about getting hold of what you want, it's about getting hold of what you don't want others to have.

Nobody has the time (or wealth) to do it for free, so you have to ask people to buy your publication... and that's a stunningly big problem. Not because people don't pay, mind, but because UK readers buy their magazines almost exclusively at newsstand and if you can't get in there (which carries significant costs) then you ain't gonna shift many units.

Could there ever be a 'Careless Talk Costs Lives'-type videogames magazine, that's somewhere between fanzine and magazine proper, that could be sold mainly at games shops/via mailorder? Or is getting mags into shops like Gamestation and Game as hard (expensive) as getting WH Smiths to stock them?

Hmm... that's a good idea... a very good idea....

It's not all that great an idea, as Careless Talk Costs Lives didn't make any money, and none of its staff or contributors (as far as I know) were paid anything at all during its entire run. Good luck finding games journalists prepared to put in an entire magazine's worth of work for nothing for two years, as well as the upfront investment required to get it going. Digiworld barely managed two months on that basis, and that was with upfront costs of next to nothing.

Mmm, I long for the days of N64 Magazine again. NGC's not too bad, but it's just so obviously neglected by Future. It still has better writers (and designers...) than most other console mags if you ask me, though.

The idea appeals to me because I'm one of those highly principled idealist DIY (in a 'punk', not Better Homes sense) kids, although I do understand what is and isn't practical in the real world.

Of course you're right that trying to get decent journalists to write for free (or at least without a guaranteed initial return) would most likely to be fruitless.

But I think there's still something to be said for the subscription-only model. One of the problems for Digiworld is that you were aiming at a very specific audience and, for 'reasons', sadly the opportunity to make yourself known to a sufficient proportion of the audience was never realised. And also people are lazy freeloaders who don't know a great thing when they see it and won't pay for anything decent online. But we won't get into that.

With a different type of magazine, it could be approached differently. You would need quite a bit of upfront investment, which would be a problem, but once you had gained enough coverage - probably though online promotion (a website for the zine and getting blogs and other indie games sites in on the act) as well as adverts in other magazines and games stores if they'd allow it - things might look better. With a subscription model it'd be a more or less secure source of income, you'd at least have base level of readership from the outset so you'd know the minimum you'd have to work with.

So the people working on the mag wouldn't be dealing with an unknown quantity. It'd be persuading people to subscribe which would be the biggest challenge, I imagine, and ultimately the point at which the whole thing could collapse. Once people HAD subscribed and word of mouth began to spread, it might start to get interesting.

Like a videogame version of Fracture, hey Shrinkwrapped?

Where did that second quoted paragraph come from? I sure as heck didn't write it.

Anyway, the chief problem, as noted in the article, is simply lack of demand. If I was to create my vision of a perfect videogames magazine, it wouldn't be all that far removed from the early issues of Arcade, and Arcade was a flop. There are a number of likely reasons for that, including Future's cretinously early panicked dumbing-down of it, but the harsh truth is that the games-mag audience just didn't seem very interested.

I certainly don't want to make something more "intellectual" than Edge, which is the direction that's been taken by the recent attempts at an indie-style games fanzine (Blessed and State). Both of those, to my mind, took gaming way too seriously, in an attempt to imbue it with an artistic and cultural gravitas that it simply doesn't merit. Like it or not, games simply DON'T have the cultural significance of pretty much any other "artform", for a variety of reasons, and treating them as if they do is a blind alley leading to nowhere fun.

State and Blessed are both well-intentioned, and highly commendable exercises in getting off your arse and doing something rather than just moaning about it, but both tend towards the academic and the pretentious, and obscure the enthusiasm that presumably made the authors want to do them in the first place. The thing that made Arcade, Zero, YS etc so great was that the enthusiasm for their subject shone through - and not in the hollow, truthless, hyperbolic sense of the likes of CVG or Gamesmaster, but in the genuine love with which games and the culture of gaming were portrayed - and that gave the mags a personality which people identified with.

(Because you have to be a freak to love inanimate objects, but those magazines didn't seem to their readers like inanimate objects, they felt like people, with character and soul. When a new issue came in, it felt kinda like going to the pub with your chums. It's why Edge, for example, has remained stuck at the same readership figures in its entire 11-year history - the dry, anonymous, detached style is completely at odds with what the most recently-departed staff, at least, were trying to convey, and however much you might like or admire Edge, it's impossible to love it, because it won't let you. It's no accident that the most popular bits of Edge are the four opinion columns, because they're credited to people. The stubbornly persistent refusal of various Edge editors to see this is one of the most depressing things about the entire games-magazine business.)

The practical difficulties of getting an independent games mag off the ground are huge. But by far the bigger problem is that it's unlikely a significant number of people would buy it even if you did. What people tell you they want, and what they're prepared to actually hand over their cash for, are usually two very different things.

They're the only reason I still bother getting it, to be honest.