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ABC: RIP
The lonely death of the videogames magazine.
The videogames magazine industry released
its new ABC
circulation figures yesterday. Despite being for the traditionally better
half of the year (June to December), they showed a continuation of the
downward trend of the last generation, with some spectacularly bad results
(Xbox Gamer plummeting from 35,000 readers a month to barely 20,000) and
some merely disappointing* ones (Official Playstation 2
Magazine failing again to increase its readership despite the PS2 userbase
still rocketing up at record speed, leaving the mag with barely 40% of the
sales that its PS1 predecessor had at a similar point in that console's
lifecycle).
PC games magazines, which should be immune
to the volatile cyclical behaviour of the console market and ought to
benefit from the ever-growing sales of PC games, also continue to slide,
with the likes of PC Gamer and PC Zone having now shed a third of their
readerships since their peak in the late 1990s despite the continued
growth of PC gaming.
(The number of magazines in the market has
shrivelled too, with many traditional games-mag publishers having
abandoned the sector in recent years, leaving one company - the Bath-based
Future Network - with an effective monopoly.)
Observers
have reacted largely without any surprise to this trend,
attributing it (depending on their viewpoint) either to the vast
availability of online coverage of videogames**,
or to the largely atrocious quality of the magazines themselves, which are
produced on ever-decreasing editorial budgets by teams stretched to
breaking point at the hands of a bloated layer of penny-pinching middle management
which also exerts ever-heavier pressure on editorial teams not to do
anything which might upset advertisers. (A combination of these factors
led almost the entire editorial team of Edge magazine - the last even
vaguely intelligent, content-led publication covering the console sector -
to resign their posts en masse towards the end of 2003.)
Many of those same
observers, however, openly wonder why the many skilled and dedicated
games magazine staff (in whose number they often generously include your
reporter) discarded by the mag publishers over the years in favour of
cheap and enthusiastic school-leavers, haven't got together to do
something about this apparent gap in the market. After all, the industry
constantly tells us that the average age of gamers is increasing, and now
stands somewhere around 29 years old, a demographic which is clearly
unlikely to be satisfied with the sub-teenage tone and content of almost
all games mags. Surely there's a market out there just dying for an
intelligent, conscientious, well-written and funny magazine about
videogames? If none of the existing publishers want to produce it, why
don't we do it, if we're so smart?
The answer is, because the magazine market reflects the games industry as a whole in at least one
regard - the people with money have stitched it up so tightly, for their
own benefit***, that there's essentially no
possibility of anyone who doesn't already have a fortune being able to get
into the market and compete. This correspondent, and most of the other
disgruntled and competent writers who are out there, came to realise this
fact a few years ago, hence nobody's bothering to try to launch a
good games mag. Realise what, exactly? Chiefly, these things:
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- Existing
publishers (not just in games, but games mags and especially Future
actually led the way in this) have ensured that consumers now expect
magazines to come loaded with stuff attached to the front cover every
month. You may as well forget launching a mag without a cover DVD, or
some glossy tips guide or whatever sellotaped to the front, all of which
hikes your start-up costs out of the reach of any reasonable group of
individuals.
- The widespread and
increasing practice of games retailers offering no-quibble refunds if
consumers don't like the game they've just bought, has struck a huge blow
to games mags' original raison d'etre - to advise consumers whether
particular titles were worth spending their money on or not. Why
listen to the opinion of some incompetent, semi-literate chump who might
not like the same kind of games you like - and who isn't allowed to
criticise big games publishers anyway - when you can try the whole game
out yourself for 10 days, form your own opinion and still get your money back if it's no good?
(Or if you've finished it...)
- Games magazines
have inexplicably failed to notice either the above fact, or the
seemingly-obvious one that the internet is far better at providing news
and previews than a paper-based publication with month-long lead times
could ever possibly be. Yet they persist in sticking to an outdated,
outmoded content model of "news-previews-reviews", when those are exactly
the three aspects of print games magazines that have been fatally
undermined in the last five years or so. In the 21st Century, people buy
magazines chiefly not for information but for entertainment, yet games
mags persist in trying to sell (obsolete) information, because it's a lot
easier to get some naive games-loving kid to copy down press releases than
it is to employ an experienced and talented writer to produce original and
entertaining copy.
- As a result of the
above, features - the core content of any grown-up magazine - have been
almost totally discarded by games mags. You'll struggle to find
anything which could be legitimately described as a "feature" in any games
magazine. Those which pay even lip-service to the concept more often than
not bastardise the term to mean "extended PR preview, obtained from a
managed and supervised visit to a developer". (Often, mags will even print
a "feature" which is in fact a couple of pages of pre-prepared
questions-and-answers from the developer, sent out by a PR firm to every
games mag, who all then pretend to have interviewed the developer
themselves.)
- Experienced and
talented writers are so disillusioned at the direction of the games mag
industry, and their treatment at its hands, that they're unwilling to
subject themselves to any more of the same. And since launching a
games magazine is now far too expensive a proposition for individuals,
they have no interest in putting time, effort and emotional investment
into designing and producing one for the benefit of some new publisher
(even if that notional publisher were to exist in the first place) who
would inevitably end up doing all the same things as the others - for such
is the immutable nature of business in capitalist society.
- Meanwhile, there's
a limitless supply of new blood for mag publishers to exploit, in the form
of naive kids who can think of nothing more exciting than "playing games
all day for money". The honeymoon period for a new games-mag staff
writer - playing games; going on lavish PR trips to the USA or Japan;
meeting, interviewing and getting drunk with long-admired game authors -
usually lasts a good couple of years, before the unfortunate novice gets
completely burned out (a typical junior games writer will be expected to
typically put in at least a 60-hour week, rising to 80-90 hours in
deadline week, for an average salary of £9,000 - £11,000 with no
overtime) and/or notices how poorly they're being paid/treated. By which
time, of course, there are plenty of potential new recruits knocking on
the door, so the publishers can continue the circle of exploitation. Any
halfway-competent writer with a modicum of sense will either get out to
become a freelance (and ideally one not writing about videogames at all), get a job in PR, or simply run away screaming and live
in a cave for the rest of their life.
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A lot to overcome, there. But beyond all of the above, finally - fatally -
you've got videogame consumers themselves, who show no desire (at least,
none that they're prepared to back with their wallets) for a better
quality of games magazine. Like the music and movie industries, the games
business has pursued a policy of infantilisation, driving their product
ever more towards the less-discerning and more hype-malleable juvenile
market, which is also by nature highly conservative (and hence more
predictable and more attractive to business). Games magazines with even a
sliver of adult-focused content simply don't sell any more.
The mature and intelligent, yet accessible
and mainstream-aimed Arcade did pitifully (though in fairness it was
dumbed down grotesquely by its publishers before it had any real chance to
build an audience), and even with the benefit of high production values
and 11 years of publication in which to create a loyal readerbase, Edge
remains consistently anchored at the bottom of the circulation charts. Any
magazine, in fact, which dares to stick its head above the parapet and
deviate in even the slightest way from the crushing blandness pioneered by
the original Official Playstation Magazine (which by sheer economic force
became the model for all games mags which followed it) is punished
savagely for it. The consumers who would support magazines like
Amiga
Power, which was prepared to bite the bullet and sacrifice "exclusives" for editorial
integrity, seem to have given up in dismay and left at the end of the
16-bit era.
The depressing conclusion, then, is that if
you're waiting for a funny, intelligent, honest videogames magazine to
carry on the legacy of
Crash, The Games Machine, Zero, Arcade or even
Official Dreamcast Magazine, you probably ought to stop holding your
breath, before you do yourself an injury. Much like the games industry
itself, the magazine industry is locked in the iron grip of a tiny number
of people for whom the status quo works out very nicely, thanks.
Mags now have a symbiotic relationship with
the games industry - magazine hype helps sell games, exclusive previews
and demos of games help sell mags. The interests of the consumers have
long since been abandoned, and the consumers have understandably reacted
by buying fewer and fewer games magazines - but, crucially, still
enough to turn a profit, if those magazines are produced cheaply and
cynically enough, and sold expensively enough. Those in charge of
publishing them know this full well, and will have feathered their own
nests comfortably by squeezing out every last penny of profit by the time
print games magazines finally die, of abuse and neglect, altogether. If
you want a picture of the future of games mags, think of a jackboot
stamping on Duke Nukem Forever.
Official PlayStation 2 Magazine
- yours for just £6 an issue.
*
Using "disappointing" from the publisher's perspective,
there, of course.
** This is nonsense,
though, as most strikingly demonstrated by the spectacular failure of the
print mags' attempts to corner the market in online games coverage.
Despite investing dizzying sums of money in online ventures like Future
Gamer and Daily Radar, and having the enormous advantage of the vast
resource infrastructure of their print-publishing arms to draw on, the
ventures were all disasters and all the games-mag publishers now maintain
only token web presences, usually consisting of nothing more than
"trailers" for their print mags. The only logical conclusion that can be
drawn from this is that consumers want fundamentally different things from
online and print games coverage, yet the publishers stubbornly persist in
producing magazines which are essentially mediocre out-of-date websites on
paper.
*** For example: a
couple of years ago, when bad management got the Future Network into dire
financial straits, they got themselves out of it by sacking over 50% of
the company's staff of around 2,000 to cut costs. The following year,
chief executive Greg Ingham - who had, of course, as CEO been ultimately
responsible for much of the bad management in the first place - rewarded
himself for this shrewd bit of business genius by tactfully taking a
100% pay rise, bringing his salary that year up to £500,000 (a
sum which was equal to almost half of the newly-viable company's profits).
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