So you'd like to make (or be a part of) the greatest gaming magazine ever created. Magazines these days are toilet-paper substitutes manned by monkeys throwing excrement at each other between typing up reviews, and you want to do something about this deplorable situation. That's a fine ambition. If everyone writing or designing art for magazines felt the same way about their work, then the overall quality level would undoubtedly skyrocket across the newsstand. You've picked a wonderful time to grasp this dream, too -- while the glory years of 1992-95 are gone, there are still more publications out there than at any other point in history, and the majority of them, believe it or not, are making money.
However... it can be harder than it seems. Launching a magazine, much less making it profitable, takes an enormous amount of money-upwards of $10 million or so, assuming you shack up with a national distributor, and even that’s just the roughest of estimates. It’s not unlike playing one of those "rock star management" sims that got released on 8-bit PCs-to succeed in the public eye, you need to play at a national level, devoting equal amounts of money to the quality of your product and the advertising for said product.
But this is getting ahead of ourselves here. With an optimistic eye towards the future, allow me to guide you through some of the issues you'll have to deal with before you've got that fresh, clean, pine-scented first issue in your hands. You'd like to have a second issue, after all, right?
The necessity of your magazine
Before we get any farther, it might be worth exploring the inspiration for your magazine. Why do you want to get it launched in the first place? Is it because there’s a readership out there that’s not answered to by any current magazine? Is it because you can’t stand anything else on the marketplace? Is it because you’d like to get free games? All (especially the last one) are extremely valid reasons, but it might be worth looking at the current U.S. magazine marketplace before letting your imagination run too wild.
The current scene can be roughly divided into four sections:
- Multiplatform/Casual (EGM, Game Informer, GamePro, GameNOW)
Mainstream mags that attempt to cover as broad a range of titles as possible. (EGM doesn’t do PC games, but the other three try to at least throw computer owners a bone now and again.)
- Multiplatform/Core (Play)
Once upon a time, Game Fan and NextGen/Next Generation would’ve gone in here. While still covering all platforms, the emphasis is on topics that self-titled "gamers" enjoy-RPGs, overseas stuff, obscure stuff, the pursuance of games as art, and so on.
- Single Platform (OPM, PSM, OXM, Xbox Nation, Nintendo Power, all the PC-only mags)
Concentrate entirely on a single platform or hardware makers; tend to appeal to a slightly more hardcore audience as a result.
- Tip Mags (Tips & Tricks, Code Vault)
A highly-targeted sub-genre that concentrates on those kids at the supermarket whose parents won’t let them go on the Internet.
These are generalizations, of course -- in reality, magazines in the same genre often read very differently and try to aim for a variety of age groups-but that’s the basic idea.
U.S. game-mag publishers make their money from two things -- advertising, and subscriptions. Unlike Japan and Europe, newsstand distribution in North America costs so much that most publishers (Tips & Tricks is one notable exception) treat the newsstand as a place to sell subscriptions, not a place to make money. There are around fifteen or so regular game mags in America, with each publisher also producing several one-offs each year, competing for subscriptions and shelf space at your local Borders.
The competition is cutthroat at times, with publishers doing all sorts of shady things (from giving away subscriptions to outright lying about their readership) to increase their circulation. Companies large and small, from gigantic Euro publisher Intertec Verlag to the informal group of guys behind GameGO!, have challenged the U.S. mag marketplace and failed.
So, before you get yourself too worked up about your mag idea, it’s a fair idea to ask yourself: Is your magazine really necessary?
Why good magazines succeed
The first game-exclusive magazines in America debuted between 1981 and 1982, headed by Electronic Games and tailed by a small gaggle of imitators. By 1985 all of these mags were gone, with Computer Gaming World (basically a newsletter) the only survivor. The resurgence didn’t come until 1988, when Nintendo Power, EGM, Game Players’, and VideoGames & Computer Entertainment (and GamePro later) all debuted within half a year of each other.
Every one of these magazines had something that its competition didn’t. VG&CE had exhaustive reviews, GP had tons of strategies, EGM had the Cross Review system and (later) lots of import coverage, GamePro had the nicest-looking design of all, and Nintendo Power... well... had the Nintendo name (although its contents didn’t hurt, either). Every one of these mags became known for something that the others didn’t, and as a result they were all able to find their own niche in what was then an insatiable game-mag marketplace.
Later success stories in the business worked the same way. Game Fan, when it went nationwide in 1992, was completely unlike any other mag before it -- it was amateurish, but its devotion to the hobby was undeniable, and something about it appealed directly to the teenage audience that comprised most gamers back then. The Official console mags have game-demo cover CDs, of course, which basically ensure their perpetual existence.
Most recent magazine foldings occurred because either the magazines weren’t delivering what they were known for (i.e. NextGen) or what they were offering simply wasn’t attracting a large enough audience anymore (i.e. Game Fan). Despite this, though, neither magazine can be called a failure -- they lasted for years and made their mark in the industry forever.
So, assuming you still want to try throwing a new magazine into this hodgepodge, what should you do to give it a fighting chance? Simple: make sure what you’re offering is different from what anyone else is offering. That’s the main secret behind the success of nearly every game magazine out there right now. Research the other mags to bits, and try to differentiate yourself as much as possible. EGM etc. have a natural advantage since they’ve been around for so long and succeeded in establishing a brand name-but there’s no law that says you can’t do the same thing now.
Your audience
As a natural extension of this research process, you’ll have to consider your potential audience. Readership is the lifeline of a magazine. No magazine is purely written for the edification of the editors -- it's written, at the very least, to give the publisher enough cash to keep the operation going. As a result, the first decision you have to make is a philosophical one, and it could be the hardest one of all -- what's the audience you're aiming for here?
This is not a question to be taken lightly. Assuming you'd like to do this for a day job, you must consider what the audience you have in mind wants to read at all times. The issue will ultimately decide not only what kind of mag you write, but whether it survives the initial few months unscathed. And, really, it's far easier to make mistakes in this matter than it is to succeed.
Take two of the more recent failed magazine launches -- GameGO! and incite. Incite had the power of Computec behind them and a barrage of research info that showed no current magazine appealed to casual gamers... so they made a game magazine (two, actually) with uninformed game editorial and vapid celebrity coverage. The casual market didn't like the game sections, and gamers were turned off by the whole People Magazine vibe. Just because your audience likes games and likes movies doesn't mean your audience wants to read about games and movies in one mag, after all.
GameGO!, on the other hand, seemingly tried to alienate people away from the product as possible (one fine quote from their defunct web page: "If you identify more with the latest hackneyed cart racing game, uninspired fighting game, or anything else that the llamas blithely follow, you'll not find friends here"). The content was for a hardcore audience, which isn't bad in itself, but the problem was that all of GameGO!'s articles (including rants against mainstream gaming and an in-depth look at strip mahjong software) were nothing that couldn't already be found online--which is where hardcore fans go for gaming coverage already. For free.
These two mags were aiming for two completely different audiences (extremely hardcore gamers for GameGO!, extremely casual gamers for incite), and though the mags had completely different budgets and editorial styles behind them, neither mag lasted the majority of a year. Why? Because they had fundamentally miscalculated their target audiences.
Think, then, about what your audience should be before you dive too far into your project. It doesn't have to be bullseye-focused, but it does have to be coherent. If your mag tries to appeal to the mainstream crowd, then avoid throwing around jargon needlessly. If you're more targeted like (for example) XBox Nation, then explore your chosen subject to the ends of the earth. Just don't go willy-nilly.
Being irreplacable
And that leads nicely into the second requisite for any successful magazine: the ability to provide something that nothing else on the market can possibly offer. I’ve touched on this lightly earlier, but this "something," by its very nature, is a nebulous thing -- the "it," in other words. Mags like EGM and GamePro have lasted all this time, through thick and thin, because they’ve found this something -- or, at least, they’ve found it in the eyes of their readership.
Again, exactly what this something is depends on what audience you’re shooting for, what kind of editorial voice you’d like to have, and what you’d like to cover. For GamePro/GameNOW it’s a mixture of comprehensive coverage and loads of strategy; for EGM it’s less quantity and more quality, and for the individual-console mags it’s a mixture of detailed writing and fannish devotion.
Obviously your magazine won’t be much good unless you and the rest of the staff are enthusiastic about the topic -- and audience -- they’re covering. So how do you decide upon this main topic? One, keep it simple: "Multiplatform news and reviews," or "Everything about the Xbox," or "Import coverage". Very few people will try to read a mag whose main thrust can’t be summarized shortly like this; otherwise, your focus is lost and you’ll be pegged as shallow. Two, make sure the audience is large enough to support yourselves, and there isn’t lots of duplication in this topic with competing magazines unless you think.
Three -- and this might be most important these days -- ask yourself, and try to be honest here, "Is this something that’s really better off on paper instead of online?" This is the biggest problem for any print magazine these days -- the struggle to keep themselves relevant against the lead-time-free Internet.
Back in the heady days of 2000, I (and most other online writers) were predicting the death of all gaming mags by three years’ time. It obviously didn’t happen -- the print side has all the best writers, they have a lock on most exclusive game scoops, and most readers still attach a sense of importance to print mags that they don’t allow online sites ("if they printed it, it’s got to be right"). As GameGO! has hopefully taught you, though, being a print mag doesn’t automatically make you more prestigious.
Actually getting it done
So, if I haven’t dissuaded you from attempting this yet, then how do you start up your quest for magazine fame and notoriety? The easiest way to begin, I think, is to shack up with another print mag. All you need, really, are a love of games, a few connections and a practical grasp of English. I’m a computer science major, after all, and I did it. Once you’ve acquired a taste for game writing, and you’re still not turned off with all the politics and perceived ineptitude of the typical editorial office, then you can get working on your hot magazine proposal.
All in all, getting where you want to go in the game-mag business really could be rougher. It’s a lot more difficult in magazines devoted to other fields, where things like writing talent (tee hee hee) are required. While I hate to resort to cliches to end this piece, talent is a very small amount of what actually gets anything done -- the great majority is perseverence. So work it.
What? What kind of magazine would I make if I had infinite money? Well...
...I think the biggest problem with print mags right now is the lead time involved. It takes at least a month and change for most monthly mags to get printed up, meaning that any straight "News" section in this mag is worthless to anyone with a net connection. This long lead time is also responsible for the whole concentration on "exclusives" that many editorial departments lavish so much time over instead of working on actually improving the readability of their magazine.
One answer -- and this is both risky and would require millions of dollars to get off the ground -- is to make a weekly magazine instead of a monthly one. If done right, the lead time would be a scant few days, eradicating both the problem of late news and the endless hunger for exclusive game access. Instead -- and this is what I like the most about weekly mags -- you can concentrate on features, columns, reader interaction, weird one-off "theme" issues... in other words, all the things that make magazines worth keeping instead of casting off somewhere after a quick thumb-through.
That would be truly new.
(I just described Famitsu, didn’t I? Oh dear...)
Fenegi
lives in a house constructed of Bases Loaded cartridges
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