New Cut-off dates for 2018

[kitsunebi]

In following with the rules specified on our home page, as of January 1, 2018, all defunct magazines dated up through December 2008 are allowed to be scanned.  Magazines still in publication may be scanned up through the December 2003 issues.

[te72]

Schweet! Are there any still in publication that were in publication in 2003?

 

Another four years and we could host the entirety of PSM / PTOM.

[kitsunebi]

6 hours ago, te72 said:

Schweet! Are there any still in publication that were in publication in 2003?

Sure, lots.  I'm sure I'm forgetting some, but:

English

PC Gamer USA, PC Gamer UK

PC Powerplay

Play

Hyper (unconfirmed - might have stopped publication several months ago)

GamesTM

Gamesmaster

Game Informer (not allowed)

Edge

Official Xbox Magazine

Japanese

Famitsu

Dengeki PlayStation

Dengeki G's Magazine

Dengeki Nintendo (the same mag has undergone several name changes since the SNES days)

Nintendo Dream

Comptiq

Tech Gian

BugBug

MegaStore

[te72]

Had never heard of a lot of those, if I'm honest. I can't read anything other than English and Spanish, so the Japanese mags are out of my reading list haha. I'm guessing a large portion of those listed in English are UK based?

[kitsunebi]

4 hours ago, te72 said:

Had never heard of a lot of those, if I'm honest. I can't read anything other than English and Spanish, so the Japanese mags are out of my reading list haha. I'm guessing a large portion of those listed in English are UK based?

Yeah, the USA is a dead market for print media.  PC Gamer is the only mag still published in the USA, and these days it's just a reprint of the UK PC Gamer.  Game Informer is also American, but I don't consider it a magazine so much as a promotional piece for GameStop.

The other English mags are all from the UK, with the exception of PC Powerplay, which has been Australia's premier PC gaming mag since 1996.

[E-Day]

5 hours ago, kitsunebi77 said:

Yeah, the USA is a dead market for print media.  PC Gamer is the only mag still published in the USA, and these days it's just a reprint of the UK PC Gamer.  Game Informer is also American, but I don't consider it a magazine so much as a promotional piece for GameStop.

The other English mags are all from the UK, with the exception of PC Powerplay, which has been Australia's premier PC gaming mag since 1996.

Official Xbox Magazine is till kicking around too. But that too is a reprint of the UK version from what I can tell. The only Future published magazine that is still 100% American (or North American if you will), as far as I know is Maximum PC. Though if you want to subscribe you have to go through Future's UK website or call their UK offices. I'm not sure how much longer that magazine is going to last though, as their Statement of Ownership states they only had 26,328 paid subscriptions and about 9,100 sales through newsstands. It's the last PC magazine left, since Computer Shopper, PC World and PC Mag all went digital.

I saw PC Gamer on the newsstand and saw that they were at issue 300, but they did not promote it at all on the cover or have anything inside the magazine talking about it.

There are a few print magazines that you can't buy on newsstands, but have to get through online subscriptions or Patreon. Our market is dead for gaming and (almost dead for) computer magazines, but the hobbyist stuff like scale modelling and quilting and those sorts of things are plentiful. It will become a niche market for niche topics.

I actually like Game Informer. It's a bit dull in layout and a lot of the games they cover, but they seem to be honest when it comes to reviewing games.

EDIT: it looks like the cutoff dates weren't adjusted last year, as the 2007 issues of some magazines like Nintendo Power still say "Not Allowed".

[Phillyman]

E-day and myself are working thru the list of categories in the Magazine Database. We basically need to get an update on which magazines are defunct and which are still being published. Once this list is complete, I can run a SQL query on the database to update all 18,000 records with the correct "Active/Defunct" information, then right after that I can run another query to set the new "Allowed" field for all of the records. This will flip all the dates in the database

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1X5o1VPsCVDW7k0ZmFkfOim0od3HMlkrRlAqCpywUqeM/edit?usp=sharing

 

[KiwiArcader]

As far as Aussie mags go....

• Hyper is still running as a quarterly title nowadays and is still being released (at least digitally)
• PC PowerPlay is still being released, monthly I believe, although it's been so long since I have seen it on the newstands I may be wrong regarding the frequency
• Atomic: Maximum Power Computing was discontinued in 2012 as it was merged into PC & Tech Authority, a mainstream PC publication similar to Maximum PC but the Atomic coverage is there in name only really.
• PC & Tech Authority - This is up to issue 242 which with a monthly release schedule would indicate it runs back into the 1990's. Originally titled PC Authority
• APC - ex Australian Personal Computer is still in publication and dates back to 1980

[Phillyman]

For 2018, I will look into hiring someone to write me a page that Team Members/Database Mods can go to and flip the Allowed Status in mass.

 

select CATEGORY and if YEAR = X set ALLOWED to 0 or 1

[te72]

While on the one hand, I'm still disappointed with the downfall of gaming mags in the US, largely due to the internet, we probably wouldn't know anything about one another or be able to have a common hobby like Retromags if not for said internet.

 

Darned catch-22's.

[kitsunebi]

4 hours ago, te72 said:

While on the one hand, I'm still disappointed with the downfall of gaming mags in the US, largely due to the internet, we probably wouldn't know anything about one another or be able to have a common hobby like Retromags if not for said internet.

 

Darned catch-22's.

It's more than that.  Without the internet, where would people get ahold of old mags?  I'm not even talking about scans.  Without eBay and the like, your only shot would be stumbling across someone's Nintendo Power collection at a yardsale or something.  Honestly, since I don't play modern games anyway, the death of the American gaming mag hasn't really bothered me.  I'll take the internet over new issues of EGM any day.

[te72]

Oh I'm not debating the usefulness of the internet, it is just disappointing that gaming magazines largely went away, while just about every other hobby has a magazine still in publication. For example, I still have subscriptions to four different car magazines, yet at the same time, the influence of the internet on the car world is undeniably huge. There aren't five, or ten car magazines, there are literally dozens.

 

I wonder how much the ability to do things purely digitally in a given hobby has an effect on this? I mean, I can play racing games, or watch racing on video, but I can't download a car, I have to actually touch it to interact with it. Gaming these days, can be entirely ones and zeros, apart from the interface of the player. Hmm...

[kitsunebi]

A lot has been made of the internet's role in ending the gaming mag, but it definitely isn't the only factor - as you say, other mags continue to exist despite the internet.  The real culprit is that American video game magazines were mostly devoid of any lasting valuable content.

For example:

My father has an interest in history, and used to subscribe to at least one magazine about the American Civil War.  Obviously, there isn't going to be a lot of breaking news about such a topic, so it's true that the immediacy of the internet isn't going to be an advantage over a print mag.  Nevertheless, there is plenty of information about the Civil War available online, all of it free.  So why buy a magazine?  The answer is that it is a collection of original, valuable content.  Each issue was a collection of original researched articles, and so long as the information therein wasn't later contradicted or revised due to continuing archaeological or scholarly discovery, those articles remain sources of valuable information even today.

Now look at your typical gaming mag.  Chosen completely at random, I'll be examining EGM 102 from January 1998 (in other words, before magazine sales could have been adversely affected by the internet.) 

Out of 203 pages:

• 53% Advertisements - 109 pages of ads.  Old ads can be of some interest to a retro site like this, but certainly no one bought the mag at the time it was published for the ads
• 12% previews - These have no lasting value, and honestly had very little value even at the time of publication.  Most of the information is either heresay, based on unfinished builds, or else simply regurgitating whatever hype was printed on the press release.  Even the screenshots printed were often those provided by the publisher and thus not even original to the mag they were printed in
• 12% feature articles - This is really what should be the main content of a successful mag
• 6% reviews - has some lasting value
• 5% strategy - could have lasting value if the strategy was in-depth or detailed maps were provided similar to a strategy guide.  But in this case, "strategy" consists of tips and codes, all of which can much more easily be found online, making this the one section that is definitely made redundant by the internet.
• 3% news - had contemporary value, though the only value it holds now is to be amused by any news that turned out to be false
• 9% other (editorial, TOC, letters, next issue, etc.)

So basically, with reviews and articles making up the only portions of the magazine worth keeping around long-term, there are 38 pages of valuable content to be found, which accounts for 19% of the magazine.  The rest is essentially fluff.

[te72]

I was always a pretty big fan of the editorial personalities that made up my favorite magazines. Ad humor was fun. Original art was always a treat too. I dunno why, but magazines got me excited about the hobby. Anymore, it's "out of sight, out of mind" for me, since the internet can be a massive overload of content. Magazines broke it down into digestible chunks, at least for me.

 

I definitely see your point though.