Here’s a bit of good news, chums – in the future, games magazines will all be free! But wait. Maybe that’s not so good at all.

Get with it, baby.

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First of all, I ought to explain that statement. All games magazines to be free? How could that work?

The answer, of course, is that in the future, games magazines will all be on the Internet. Things are already moving in that direction – paper mag sales are falling sharply, while games websites attract huge amounts of traffic, with tens or even hundreds of times as many readers as the old-fashioned mags.

So far, so unsurprising. After all, in many ways, web mags are better.

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Internet games magazines are – at least potentially – much better than print ones for several reasons.

Firstly, the games business moves incredibly quickly, meaning print mags’ information is often weeks out of date by the time the magazine gets onto the shelves.

Also, web mags can do things that paper mags can’t, like show you movies of the games actually running. And as the web gets faster, the quality and length of these movies will get even better.

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So what’s the downside? If games fans are getting better magazines on the Internet, and aren’t even having to pay for them, how can that possibly be bad?

The answer lies in how the internet games mags actually make money for their publishers. Web advertising still doesn’t bring in enough money on its own for publishers to turn a profit, especially on some of the big, resource-hungry gaming sites produced by the professional publishers.

So where else does the cash come from?

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I discovered the major source of income for internet games mags while I was interviewing the ex-editor of now-defunct webmag Future Gamer, who is now in charge of the new British edition of major gaming site Daily Radar.

He told me that most of the money made by web magazines comes from big retailers like Electronics Boutique. They pay the magazine to have a link from game reviews straight to the shop’s own site, where the gamer can buy the game he’s just seen reviewed with a single click of the mouse.

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And here’s the scary bit. Not only do the shops pay the website a huge sum of money to offer this service, but the magazine also gets a cut of the profits every time a reader buys a game by clicking the link on the review.

Or, in other words, the magazine directly makes money from getting its readers to buy particular games. And how can a reviews magazine persuade readers to buy particular games?

Hmm, let’s have a good hard think about that one, shall we?

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Of course, I would never doubt the integrity of the journalists working on web mags. But for the first time ever, the publishers of those magazines have a direct financial interest in making sure that games get high review scores.

And since the reader isn’t paying anything for the magazine, the publishers also don’t have to worry about having a responsibility to protect the readers from duff games.