As far as gaming rags go, the past several months have foretold doom for the magazine industry. It turns out that this mighty thing called “the internet” was finally realized by hordes of gamers who recognized that online publications are simply more timely than print publications. After all, with blogs reporting news in near real-time, who wants to wait for a corporate entity to report on the news when their take is neither timely, nor objective?
That’s not to say that blogs are inherently more objective, particularly as some well-read bloggers get similar rewards from companies whose products are pimped. That said, at least there are enough blogs out there to gather knowledge from, such that a more objective picture can be established. Even more importantly, most readers should be able to find bloggers whose opinions match the reader fairly well, whereas finding a gaming magazine with this type of similarity is more difficult. And that’s not even mentioning the cost of gaming magazines versus blogs.
That said, the one area that gaming rags have managed to excel at is the niche market, which the blogosphere may not adequately cover. To this end, we look at magazines like Scrye, which covered collectible card games at great length, arguably becoming the resource for the hobby. Unfortunately, it turns out that even Scrye can’t make it anymore, leading us to the conclusion that perhaps it wasn’t niche enough.
Overall, there are few magazines we can justify buying, and these even make us feel guilty since we’d be just as happy with digital versions such that we’re not taking up valuable shelf-space with treeware. Still, there’s a reason that a gaming rag like No Quarter can make it in today’s magazine marketplace: the material is often impossible to get from third-parties, as who better to write about a product than the company developing it?
We wouldn’t go so far as to say that it’s sad to see legacy magazines go the way of the dodo, though arguably, the requirement that good blogs need to be sought out and found makes valuable information more difficult to reach by the masses, whereas print publications can be found in nearly any grocery store, book store, or applicable hobby store. Still, with less out-of-pocket cost, online publications will continue to become a mainstay for consumers while paper-based publications will continue to dwindle.
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{ 2 comments }
Maybe Scrye was too niche to be a print publication in 2008/2009.
Imagine the operational profit which can be made just by cutting out the production and distribution cost.
Editorial costs stay similar, although good moderators/editors should be able to toy with the bonus communities bring and quickly update content without having to rely that often on external authors. So even editorial costs can be reduced.
Just an idea:
Scrye goes exclusively online and charges for a ‘featured content’ area $19.95/year. The interesting ‘area’ about collectible cards, values etc.
Suddenly Scrye has become from a local niche print publication a worldwide international online publication which at the same time is cheaper for the fan than it was before.
Server costs? Guesstimating based on public traffic resources you could easily run Scrye on a $150/month server.
That’s what we call niche online.
The fact that online publications are cheaper is undoubtedly one of the driving factors behind print publications shutting down, and the social nature of communities built on online publications is another draw for the transition, as you note.
Taking your idea further, a publication like Scrye can still publish all their articles for free, but charge for content like price guides, and even incorporate a “trading” and “buying/selling” system into the “featured content” area. By cornering the online marketplace for this level of niche gaming, Scrye could continue to thrive by simply switching their business strategy to make money off of a new service instead of a news subscription. Still, they would keep their fan-base.
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