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I was at Barnes & Noble the other day. I rarely go there any more but once in a while get the urge to get a magazine or two. So I was looking at the latest PC Gamer. I used to read this thing in the past. This one looked mildly interesting because they had a longer article on the newest WoW expansion.

The price tag per issue is up to $9. I flipped through and they had few articles and mostly ads. How do they even stay in business at that price? With the Internet, this magazine especially seems mostly irrelevant. I would have paid maybe $5 if the articles looked interesting, but $9? Even at $5, I doubt I would buy more than 2-3 issues a year.

I guess I am kinda surprised such magazines are not already replaced by digital media.

That is the reason they still have magazines on the shelf. For people who don't know that PC Gamer and GameInformer have a digital version of their magazine for $1.99 a month or a paper copy for $19.99 a year.

It's sad, isn't it? I had a PC Gamer subscription for a couple years in the mid '90s before the computer I had became too obsolete, and it was a lot thicker with proportionally fewer ads than the ones you get today, plus it usually had a CD with demos, Doom maps, and the odd utility.

bthylafh wrote:

It's sad, isn't it? I had a PC Gamer subscription for a couple years in the mid '90s before the computer I had became too obsolete, and it was a lot thicker with proportionally fewer ads than the ones you get today, plus it usually had a CD with demos, Doom maps, and the odd utility.

Saw this post and remembered why I eventually cancelled my subscription. It got to a point where I flipped through and counted the ads ... and it was pretty much close to 50% full-page advertising.

http://www.rockpapershotgun.com <- Easily my favorite PC gaming website.

I've never been much of a PC Gamer fan though I do recall a time when the price was somewhat justified. I started reading gaming and computer magazines right before the great shrink started happening. I have some issues of Electronic Gaming Monthly that are literally 4 or 5 times the amount of content of issues just a year later.

Digex wrote:

That is the reason they still have magazines on the shelf. For people who don't know that PC Gamer and GameInformer have a digital version of their magazine for $1.99 a month or a paper copy for $19.99 a year.

I guess if that model works for them the paper copy will eventually die out. $19.99 a year is still too much for me (I don't want to read it every month) but much more reasonable.

Washer, what is the "great shrink" you refer to? Less non-ad content in magazines, less games produced per year?

Hawkwing74 wrote:

Washer, what is the "great shrink" you refer to? Less non-ad content in magazines, less games produced per year?

Just the general evaporation of content in magazines. I can't refer to the whole industry or even just specifically gaming/technology, but the magazines I was subscribed to all seemed to start including more ads with less real content at about the same time.

My wife somehow manages to get a free subscription to Parents magazine, and flipping through that while sitting on the can, I'm just grateful she doesn't pay for it. I get a "free" subscription to Game Informer because of Gamestop's discount card. Equally ad-filled absent-minded can-flipping time wasting.

I really enjoy Gameinformer.

I got a 3 years subscription for 20 bucks 3 years ago. I just recieved my last issue. The magazine has gone through some major editorial shake ups and some rather horrible design and layout shifts but the writing on the whole is always good. Probably the best professional reviews I've ever read. They can give a game an 80 and still give it game of the year ya know. They use the full range of the review spectrum and are probably the only mainstream publication to critique the CoD franchise back before it was cool.

Sad that so many mags are dying off due to the digital age. I still enjoy a read every now and then, but that white text on black background just hurts my old eyes.

Oh, and I miss the 5 lb. Computer Shopper which was chock full of ads, but brings back fond memories of dip switches and manually assigned IRQs and DMAs.

Walkintarget wrote:

I miss the 5 lb. Computer Shopper which was chock full of ads.

Not me. Newegg's on-line catalog is tons easier to use to get to the same point. I remember spending two hours finding the best deal on a 47 MB SCSI hard-drive in Computer Shopper. I could do a similar search on Newegg or with Froogle in less than 30 seconds.

Walkintarget wrote:

Oh, and I miss the 5 lb. Computer Shopper which was chock full of ads, but brings back fond memories of dip switches and manually assigned IRQs and DMAs.

I remember those - I never tried to order anything from their Ads but it was a good bathroom reading/browsing material before the era of tablets and other portable internets devices:

TwistedKestrel wrote:

bthylafh wrote:

It's sad, isn't it? I had a PC Gamer subscription for a couple years in the mid '90s before the computer I had became too obsolete, and it was a lot thicker with proportionally fewer ads than the ones you get today, plus it usually had a CD with demos, Doom maps, and the odd utility.

Saw this post and remembered why I eventually cancelled my subscription. It got to a point where I flipped through and counted the ads ... and it was pretty much close to 50% full-page advertising.

The only gaming magazine - or computer magazine of any sort - I've ever had a paid subscription to was Nintendo Power, and I cancelled that sometime around issue 105-110 (having been subscribed since around issue 50) for much the same reason. They only started running ads in the first place sometime after issue 100, and it was quickly up to enough volume that I felt the remaining content just wasn't worth the subscription price.

Of course, the reason they started running ads is that they felt they couldn't afford to continue producing the magazine on just the subscription revenue... but the ads themselves turned off some people enough to lose them those subscription fees. Probably not enough to outweigh the ad revenue, though.

Yep, Bill and Alice's 'Pepsi Lab of Doom' was always a great read. I agree that it was nothing compared to Newegg's search, but to me it was sorta fun to scan each page, looking for the best deal on a Geforce 1 SDR card, or a 120mb Quantum hard d rive. The search to find the cheapest price by some shady, fly by night e-tailer was a quest all unto itself. We have come a long way, but I wax nostalgic when seeing an old issue of Computer Shopper.

I still have subs to Maximum PC and Wired, as I find both worth a read, but I don't see print media lasting more than another 6 years as well.

I have a box somewhere with my old computer mags in them: Electronic Entertainment (which later became PC Entertainment, which later became PC Games), PC Gamer, Electronic Gaming Monthly, PC Computing, and a bunch of other PC and business computer magazines. All were good reads back in the day, but the advent of the Internet made their content old news by the time of publication, and even though I prefer to read something in-hand rather than on a screen, there's no getting around the fact that magazines have content that's at least several weeks old.

Walkintarget wrote:

Oh, and I miss the 5 lb. Computer Shopper which was chock full of ads, but brings back fond memories of dip switches and manually assigned IRQs and DMAs.

Back when the PC hobby was fun. Good times.