I make it up as I go.

Thursday 24 July 2014

Adapt or Die: The Perilous, Uncertain Landscape of Current and Future Video-Game Magazines

So much for me reviving this blog. Super-quickfire update: I'm still freelancing full time, and it's going pretty well, but I'm now also doing a Master of Journalism. I wrote the essay below for one of my electives, The Contemporary Publishing Industry. It's roughly 4,000 words long, and it goes into detail on the current state of video-game magazine publishing.

It's not as thoroughly researched as I would have liked, since I had to put the whole thing together in a couple of weeks between (and during) big freelance feature assignments a couple of months back. But hopefully it'll provide some insights, and I'd love to see someone carry it on further. Game mags need to change, fast, but I believe they can survive, if only someone figures out a way to balance their commercial imperatives with an approach to content that just isn't possible on the web.


Magazines are changing, fading, transitioning — or rather more often being dragged kicking and screaming — into an interconnected world built on clicks and taps and share-ability, and in the video game media, especially, they must now grapple with the concept of irrelevancy. Readers, for the most part, have moved online, while advertisers grow reluctant to spend big on full-page ads, and there’s often little difference in the content published — online has now even adopted deeper analysis and long features to run alongside its usual quick-hit fare. Typical video-game players are in their 30s, with 59% of Americans and 65% of Australians — split equally between men and women — reported to engage in the hobby for at least an hour a week (“The ESA Industry Facts”, 2014); “Digital Australia”, 2013). And the games industry generates $66 billion a year worldwide (a billion of which is in Australia alone) (Nayak, 2013; “Digital Australia”, 2013). Yet despite this colossal interest in the medium, major video-game magazines are failing — or, in the case of now-defunct titles like GamePro and Nintendo Power, have already failed — to retain a viable audience either in print or digital form (or both together). This research paper will explore whether the fading fortunes of games magazines is a sign of their impending doom, or rather a wake up call that they must adapt — and fast — or face a grisly end. It will consider the current state of the English-language video-game magazine industry, in both print and digital forms and across commercial, independent, and hobbyist levels, as well as in contrast to web-based games media, then through this analysis chart a possible course for the future.