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The Media Entertainment Games

Electronic Gaming Monthly Coming Back 45

Posted by Soulskill from the back-from-the-dead dept.
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."
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Electronic Gaming Monthly Coming Back More

Electronic Gaming Monthly Coming Back

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  • Advertisements (Score:4, Informative)

    by eldavojohn ( 898314 ) * <eldavojohn@gSTRAWmail.com minus berry> on Saturday May 30, 2009 @11:04AM (#28149887) Journal
    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.

    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 ... 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.
    • 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.

  • Someone is coming out with a new paper magazine on electronic gaming? Why? Who will subscribe?

  • So Ziff Davis shuts down FileFront [slashdot.org] and is revived by its original owners [slashdot.org]; now EGM is revived by its original publisher.

    ZD also already filed for Chapter 11 last year [wikipedia.org], 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. :)

  • 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.

    • Re: (Score:1, Troll)

      by Mantrid ( 250133 )

      Have to have something to read while taking a dump!

    • It's true that it's a tough sell with all that's available on the internet. I think they'd do better if they had more of the things that are inconvenient to use from the internet. Maps. Smaller but graphical walk-through guides. Codes. Anything that I'd want while I'm playing games. I'd rather have a fold-out map from a magazine sitting next to me while playing a game than having a laptop to zoom in on and scroll to the side every once in a while.

      The reviews are nice but if I'm looking to buy a game I'll

    • Not to mention that I've heard from many gamers that EGM lost its point many, many years ago. Most magazines nowadays are just sale pitches for games, full of reviews. UK magazines are better, with more features, but they still suffer from it.

      The only good magazine remaining is Edge, because they're critical, put actual thought into their reviews and will destroy a game if it really sucks, advertising revenue be damned. Well, except when they review Nintendo games. They're less critical on them in general.

  • Not going to be a monthly (Score:1, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward

    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!

  • Continued subscriptions? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by hansamurai ( 907719 ) <hansamurai@gmail.com> on Saturday May 30, 2009 @11:37AM (#28150131) Homepage Journal

    Will my original subscription which was supposed to run through the end of the year be continued? Or was it conveniently lost?

    • i would assume that since ZDM, who we all paid our subscription fees to, no longer owns EGM that our old subscriptions will NOT be honored.

      Here's the deal. ZDM, six months after shuttering the magazine, still has not decided what to do for those of us who still hold subscriptions. i'm willing to bet they're not going to do ANYTHING, and instead are just hoping we'll all forget we paid them money so they can keep it. Eff that.

      Call EGM customer service: 800-779-1174. Ask for a refund, they'll give you one. Do

  • What idiot came up with that idea? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by nausea_malvarma ( 1544887 ) on Saturday May 30, 2009 @11:49AM (#28150225)
    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.

    • Re: (Score:3, Funny)

      by fat_mike ( 71855 )

      I paid for a EGM subscription and I'll pay for it again. I like not having to squint at someone's ridiculous font. I like turning pages. I like not having to "Next Page" through fifteen pages of website ad bullshit to read an article that wouldn't even take up one print page. If I'm sitting somewhere for less than 10 minutes I'd rather pull out a magazine than get my laptop out and mess with it.

      I like large pictures, not the ones on websites that you can't see "What is that? Oh great, I can't enlarge th

      • I don't suspect there are enough customers like you to sustain a print business model for EGM. The benefits you list, are few, and some are not even benefits (you don't HAVE to read the comments, and you can always change the fontsize in your browser). Ultimately the greatest benefit is price: Websites and Magazines are both loaded with ads, but websites tend to be free. Most people are willing to give up the tangibility of print for cost savings.

        • Re: (Score:1)

          by fat_mike ( 71855 )

          I was talking about print formats in general. And yes, I do believe there are enough people to sustain a business model but there aren't enough advertisers anymore.

          The main problem is that there is a whole generation of people who are used to having things handed to them. They don't understand economics, they want everything for free and they whine and bitch a lot if they don't get it. Or mommy and daddy sue somebody.

          Whatever, re-read my post. Think about all the things you use paper/print for. You re

  • 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

    • No kidding, I've never understood PC Magazine/World et al. If you're that big a computer nerd, you'll be building your own machine, and if you're not, is it really worth a $9 magazine to decide between a $899 Dell and a $879 Gateway with nearly identical guts? Just pick the one that looks nicer on your desk and get on with your life.

  • brutally honest? Not what I remember... (Score:3, Informative)

    by solios ( 53048 ) on Saturday May 30, 2009 @12:27PM (#28150491) Homepage

    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.

    • GamePro seemed to be targeted at eight year olds, with more of an emphasis on the comic avatars of the editors than actual games

      Ah, yes. I remember someone once commenting on that aspect of GamePro. It went something like 'We tried to get in contact with the writer to discuss (an error in an article) but it turns out that GamePro's switchboard only works by real name, and they provide no way of converting "Sister Sinister" or "Bro Buzz" to a real name. Rather convenient for them.'

      When I was young, I read Compute's Gazette and Game Players. Now, the only ones I buy are Retro Gamer (seems appropriate) and Games magazine (because a p

    • I managed to pick up EGM only starting in 93, so I don't know about its glory days. What I do remember though was that it was all fluff and little substance. The rumors section was occasionally ok, but couldn't make up for the rest of the crappyness. The magazine of choice for me starting in 95 (I think - I don't have the first magazine in front of me) was Next Generation. It also completely died with its first relaunch, but it was the closest thing I could find to a serious gaming magazine.

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by CronoCloud ( 590650 )

      Oh, and a ridiculous over-emphasis on fighting and action games.

      Hadoken! Finish Him! Yeah, SNES/Genesis era EGM was crap, if you weren't a fighting game player. Goddamned Sushi-X. I always added a point to any Sushi-X review of a game that wasn't a fighting game. the strategy sections were filled with SFIIfoo/MKfoo strategy. Ken VS Ryu, Ken Vs Chun Li, Ken Vs Vega, Ken Vs. whatever. Pages upon pages of move lists, fatality lists, Kombat Kodes.

      And then there were the fighting game fanboys, writing lett

  • 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.

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