EGM Magazine Shutting Down 70
Gamasutra reports that Ziff Davis Media has sold a number of gaming websites, including 1Up.com, and will be shutting down their popular magazine, Electronic Gaming Monthly. Some of 1Up's staff was laid off as well, though the new owners want to keep the rest of it intact. The sale was motivated by an unprofitable business model made worse by the recent downturn in the economy. 1Up's James Mielke has made a post about the final hours of EGM, and a glimpse at the final issue, saying, "...the final, secret, unpublished issue of EGM will show up here on 1UP shortly in the near future. You will be able to read every hi-res page, ads and all (last time I checked at least) on 1UP, to see the beautiful job that crew did, even with the guillotine hanging over our heads every minute of the day."
Re:Not only print media... (Score:5, Interesting)
I can't say I'm that surprised. I actually canceled a free subscription to EGM (they had a promotion a year or two back) because it just wasn't worth the paper it was printed on. Being a print publication (and the attendant information lags) was bad enough, but their staff wrote like a bunch of high-schoolers. If I'm going to bother to kill a tree, I at least want some decent writing.
Re:Print is out (Score:3, Interesting)
Most of those gamer magazines have 90% advertising ads in them and takes like 5 minutes to read anything worth while. Most of the time when I pull some of them out of the mail box and start reading/walking back to the house, I am done by the time I hit the door and it's in the the recycling bin.
I don't know about you, but these magazines I get through free offers or side offers when I buy something I usually keep in the restroom. It's something to read, after all.
I'm actually saddened by this... (Score:3, Interesting)
But EGM...it had the same problems that plague game magazines, but sometimes very good stuff slipped through the usual crapfest. I also have fond memories of reading EGM when I was growing up, it was my main source of game news and reviews. I can't say the same about Gamepro or other game magazines, which contained writing that even an average kid could tell was poor.
What saddens me most, though, is the demise of the 1up podcasts. By which I mean the demise of 1up Yours [1up.com], which was very, very fun and much more informative than anything print EGM or 1up itself published. Garnett Lee has hinted on Neogaf that the podcast will somehow survive, but I question how wise UGO's decision was to pull the plug on this show. It's quality content, which they desperately need. And it has a fanbase, which they also need, especially during this transition period.
With EGM gone, the only print game publication worth reading remaining is Edge...in truth, a much superior magazine than EGM ever was, even though it suffers from the same problems that exist in any industry controlled press.
Cutting the fat is good for the industry (Score:1, Interesting)
I'm not so sure that this is a bad thing. Sure, some of the writers there were good at what they did, but an equal number of them just wrote tripe that was painful to read. Seriously, the caliber of their writing was about what you'd see in a high school journalism class. This, of course, leads every jackass with an Internet connection who got a C or better in his/her creative writing class to start up a video game site (searching Google for 'Video Game Blog' returns over 22 million results [google.com]).
So now we have this enormous glut of information, and mediocrity has somehow risen to the top. I have very rarely found anything worth reading on 1up.com and don't really understand why some of its staff got put on such high pedestals. Hsu is a arrogant jackass who thrives on 'shaking things up' just to generate controversy, Mielke has a bizarre condescending attitude about him, Sharkey doesn't own a spellchecker and has trouble writing coherent prose, and so on.
It's not like 1up had a chance anyway, they were going up against sites that value quantity over quality [kotaku.com]. They were going head-to-head with sites who mostly aggregate news with some snarky commentary and could update every twenty minutes of nearly every hour, every day. Anyone trying to compete with that is just deluding themselves into thinking that their brand of original content is going to survive the day.
Most video game players want their information in quick bursts that they read, process, and giggle at the snark, then come back for a few more tidbits later to repeat the process. They just look at the final score for your lengthy, painstakingly-crafted game reviews. They mostly check out previews for the pretty pictures. They do not care about the lengthy article discussing the evolution of the crate from NES to XBox360, and they mostly do not care what you have to say about anything if it takes more than 30 seconds to read.
So, yes, it's sad to see anyone lose their livelihood, but they've been crushed and overtaken by the inexorable progress of the Coalition of Mediocrity that's pervading the Internet and making it nigh impossible for anyone else's voice to be heard over the crapstorm.