Game Over for Gaming Magazines?

Print gaming publications are hurting. The advent of online gaming news has done to them what the Internet has likewise done to newspapers and magazines: cut subscribers and the talent pool of writers as both shifted their focus to the new medium.

The past 12 months have seen two sizable shake-ups in the gaming magazine world. Nintendo was the first to shock everyone, farming out the almost 20-year-old Nintendo Power to a third-party publisher ("Future Tries to Do What Ziff Couldn't"). Although not strictly a bad sign, this represented the new lower priority of the magazine as part of Nintendo's in-house message. The second and larger of the two is the financial collapse of Ziff Davis Media, publishers of the long-running Electronic Gaming Monthly. Last month, Ziff filed for bankruptcy, and already its Games for Windows magazine has closed its doors. Also last week, 11-year EGM and 1up.com veteran Dan Hsu announced his departure from the media giant.

The ZD announcement has many magazine fans wondering just how bad it really is, and on the surface, everything is looking down for gaming mags. They cannot provide the timeliness of Web sites, and neither can they provide the breadth of media content, from pictures to videos. Furthermore, they simply cannot compete with the no-cost format of sites.

But, even with all this, magazines can compete; they simply must focus—like newspapers and magazines have had to—on different aspects of newsgathering and distribution. One magazine that has done this right is Game Informer. GI maintains its hold on gamers through the use of the usual news, previews, large pictures, tips and tricks, and two things: exclusives and their editorial staff. Instead of fighting with other magazines and Web sites to race out new content, GI secures exclusive images and interviews for large features about upcoming titles. Thus, GI is always first, even if the announcement of the game was online a month beforehand. It's not always the blockbuster titles, but GI's tendency to get this coverage keeps readers turning the pages.

Second, GI's editorial staff is largely unquestioned in its reviews and content. Unlike newspapers, which can be criticized for bias by what they cover, GI covers all the games and has a reputation for brutal honesty when it comes to bad games. See, for instance, the magazine's rating of 0.75 given to "Batman: Dark Tomorrow" for GameCube or its conservative 7.25 rating of "Crisis Core: Final Fantasy VII" for PSP.

The trust of readers is something hard to engender, and GI has it in spades.

But not all magazines can be GI. Each must find its own way of creating exclusive content, whether through longer features or better-researched articles and editorials. They need to stop competing based on the same principles they used in the '90s: They are no longer in the gaming magazine business, they are in the gaming news business.

—Columbia Daily Tribune

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COMMENTS

Since when does GI have a reputation for "brutal honesty"?

Submitted by Anonymous on Tue, 04/22/2008 - 18:12.

It seems your research into the "trust" in Game Informer is woefully inadequate. The magazine is undeniably large, and able to secure exclusives, but this is because it is practically forced upon customers at a large games retailer. Look at it's circulation data...it's not a newsstand product. It's reputation among gamers is that it typically scores games on the "7 to 9" scale - a perception that the larger games media space suffers from in large part BECAUSE of Game Informer.

You're not well informed - no pun intended

Submitted by Anonymous on Wed, 04/23/2008 - 12:40.

Game Informer also holds the dubious distinction of being owned by a game retailer and not a publisher. A cover on GI means getting your game showcased prominently in thousands of stores for free. And they practically force you to subscribe to it by giving you a subscription every time you buy a ten dollar discount card, which gives you a better deal on used games. And while tons of people get it in the mail, the number of those people who actually read it is much more nebulous and suspicious - its newsstand sales are horrid, for example. In other words, it's not a magazine. It's a sales flyer. And finally, the writing is fair, but their reviews are generally not regarded as having any more authority than any other publication's. In fact, if you examine them closely, they tend not to match up to one another. For example, if you look at three games that are averaging a 6 on Metacritic, GI will give one a six, one a 5.5, and one a three. They basically pick easy targets to throw under the bus.

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