The Duel Between Gaming Magazines and Websites 84
The New York Times has up a piece looking at the ongoing battle between websites and magazines in the world of games journalism. With magazine subscriptions falling every year and a non-stop churn of news online, the article examines the ways that mags try to stay competitive, and the views of the gamers that read them. "The circulation for PC Gamer, a leading magazine from Future US, shrank to 210,369 this year from 300,271 in 2003, according to the Audit Bureau of Circulations. Magazine publishers say that readers want longer features and in-depth articles as a counterpoint to the short, bloglike pieces they find online. But Kyle Orland, a freelance journalist who writes a media coverage column for Gamedaily.com, wondered if that strategy was working, saying that when a large feature is published, it doesn't get read. 'Attention spans are just getting so small that readers don't know what they want,' Mr. Orland said."
Nonsense (Score:4, Insightful)
That is just plain ridiculous. If I am eagerly anticipating game X, and a magazine has an in-depth 8 page preview- of course I am going to read it. Are we all such twitchy ADD zombies that nobody can maintain their attention for more than a page? I call bullshit on that...
Why I still get a couple gaming mags in the mail (Score:5, Insightful)
Plus, while this happens rarely, there are times when I get a gaming mag in the mail and there is an article on a game that I haven't heard of from checking the normal sources online...again, doesn't happen often, but it does happen.
Re:Nonsense (Score:4, Insightful)
If it's an 8 page preview because it has 1 paragraph and 15 ads per page, then it's not going to keep many people's attention.
Next Generation Magazine and sometimes EGM (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Why I still get a couple gaming mags in the mai (Score:3, Insightful)
That is a very good point. Magazines are great for stumbling across a game that you might not click-through to on a gaming blog. If your only exposure to a game is through the banner ads that most of us disable, or the single sentence link on a game-sites front page; you might be overlooking something.
Evolution of Gaming News (Score:3, Insightful)
Remember Next Generation? I had a subscription for a very long time, quality articles, in-depth reviews along with caption reviews, interviews with developers and company execs, extensive trade show coverage. Thankfully, its back as www.next-gen.biz . Even PC Gamer was pretty good back in the day. I still have a few 3.5" floppies around with demos on them and a stack of demo CDs (including one with the Halo E3 video, ah...what could have been). I stopped that subscription when the discs started containing fewer demos on them, everything got a 80% or better rating, % of ad-content rose, my 56k connection went broadband (thus eliminating the reason I needed the demo CDs), and the net sites improved.
Additionally, many of us older gamers who bought subscriptions to GamePro, EGM, PCGamer, etc. were still young when we had 'unlimited' free time to spend playing games for hours at a time, memorizing articles and cheat codes, highlight the games we wanted in the Funcoland ad, and dream about winning those "Ultimate Gaming Rig, 52"TV, D-VHS, Stereo Sound, big speakers, 4 Systems, 100+ Games, etc." advertisement contests where you just needed to solve successively more difficult puzzles. We've grown up and have higher priorities which take time, so we just look for concise reviews, user opinions, and aggregators like gamerankings.com, assuming we're still playing games. Newer gamers can always remember IGN.com, 1Up.com, Gamespot.com, [insert your fav game site here], etc., but give a cursory glance through the magazines in the store, thinking "I read this X months ago." or "I have the full strategy guide at home."
Is there a fix for gaming mags? No. People will always buy magazines from newstands, especially at the airport/subway terminals, the publishers will just need to adjust their circulation accordingly. Game websites will continue to grow and be purchased by conglomerates, for better or worse.