Comments on: Is Print Media Still Relevant?

By: Game Stooge » Tips & Tricks Magazine Gets Shelved: The most up to date gaming and tech news blog on the planet.

Wed, 27 Jun 2007 05:20:26 +0000

[...] print videogame industry has lost yet another casualty in the struggle for relevancy amongst constantly updated and aggregated websites, and seeing one of the best magazines in the [...]

By: Jigsaw hc

Jigsaw hc — Thu, 22 Mar 2007 20:38:10 +0000

I’d say it is very quickly becoming not relevant. I only get one gaming magazine (OXM) and I’ll probably not renew it.

By: Jaffo

Jaffo — Mon, 12 Mar 2007 10:43:40 +0000

Print media will survive until a cheap, easy to use hardware solution for reading ebooks etc comes out. At the moment, it’s far easier to flick through and read a mag or book, especially text books, than try to use them on a PC or handheld and pretty much all of the readers that are out now are overpriced and clunky.

By: Drocket

Drocket — Mon, 12 Mar 2007 08:20:04 +0000

The gaming magazines (and magazines in general) are, in the long run, doomed. There’s absolutely no chance, 0%, that paper magazines will exist in 50 years.

The question is how long it’ll take for the shift to happen, and the form that it’ll take. As Sewart said, professional writers can definitely produce higher-quality content than random bloggers, but that’s something that’s just as true with an online magazine as an offline. Will they be able to produce content sufficiently high-quality to get people to pay for an online magazine?

Personally, I’d be willing to *small* pay for an online magazine but it would have to be *extremely* high-quality writing produced from an angle that I’m interested in (for me, I generally don’t care too much for over-hyped previews. I’m far more interested in detailed reviews and behind-the-scenes information about the gaming industry.)

No matter how things wind up working out, the future will be interesting…

By: Derrick Schommer

Derrick Schommer — Mon, 12 Mar 2007 03:50:53 +0000

It is a sad time, but I believe its not going to get any better for print magazines.

The major problem is the 3-month lead time on many of these news mags. You can get game previews 3 months in advance, sure, but so can gamespot and 1up.

I believe the magazines can sustain the test of time if they change their content to be editorial and personal - like a blog written well.

An editorial can stand a 3-month cycle because it’s not time sensitive (in most cases). It is the opinion of someone in the industry - and has merit.

However, the days of need a game mag for upcoming news, demos and such is really going downhill fast when we can get that same info “on demand” via RSS or even a good podcast.

A magazine full of editorials, for instance, PlayBoy magazine (yeah, you can read it just for the articles) is like this. Mostly political, but on the same mindset: editorials that writers submit about a topic, seemingly random at times, is a very powerful tool. Would it survive without the images? I think it could (but wouldn’t want it to).

The days of catching bleeding edge by the horns to report on it is over with the invention of blogs, news, rss, podcasts and other instant forms of media.

Derrick