Inching closer to my 60s (relax father time!) I have a few years still, but being able to separate the wheat from the chaff is getting easier. Look at the gaming news this past week centering around Gamestop shutting down Game Informer Magazine is a good test.
Gotta ask the question few others seem to be asking: who still reads gaming magazines? Really? You can get the stuff all online almost immediately. News happens now and gaming magazines, bless their hearts, are dinosaurs in the modern age of the internet.
We were all about gaming magazines when the kids were growing up, when I was growing up the magazine of choice for me was Compute! You’d type in programs out of for the Commodore VIC-20 and later the C-64. We rotated subs from Nintendo Power (probably my favorite) to EGM to GamePror and others. I’d buy the magazines when we didn’t have a sub at the grocery stand. Game magazines were all the rage.
When we didn’t have the internet.
The internet spoiled our patience. The internet is now, now, now. Magazines are yesterdays, weeks, months ago, frozen in archaic print scheduling demands. It’s tough times for the print magazine business no doubt and am sure it’s sexy and popular to go with the masses and rage against those Gamestop bastards, how dare they closed down the longest running game magazine in the United States?
But maybe, just maybe, it was the right business decision.
What I don’t understand about this move is not keeping the online going. Make Game Informer an online magazine. From there you can decide if you still want to cover gaming news, which is fiercely competitive and expensive or do something like we do here: focus more on less timely stuff. I know, I know, this commentary/opinion piece is based on news. We do some of this, primarily because it’s a way of marking a spot in time, to be able to reference back in the future on what happened. So, doing some news makes sense, but having to break news and/or be at the forefront of it and be one of these many other headlines shown below? Sigh. You just get lost in the sauce.
Some of these headlines, unsurprisingly, are playing fast and loose with the facts. Take Mashable’s headline, for example. The Game Informer archive isn’t “killed”, at least as of this writing.
Using the app (Android link: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.gameinformer.tablet) you can buy past magazines for $3.99 each and download the newest July 2024 Game Informer magazine for free. Might want to do that sooner, rather than later.
Checked out the newest issue of Game Informer and, again, and respectfully it isn’t something that the gaming world in 2024 needed as a print magazine. Could be online and almost as cool. I’ll admit there is something nostalgic about reading a print magazine, with the glossy color game pics, that is lost online, but can’t say if I was in charge of GameStop I’d want to dump a bunch of $$ into a gaming magazine in 2024. Think most readers, if they are being business savvy honest, probably lean the same direction.
Maybe I’m wrong. Goodbye my friend. Sometimes we have to let our old friends die and just remember those good times we had. Those that want to hold onto that era of gaming past can still collect those out of print magazines. The Internet Archive has a bunch of scanned magazines and there’s Zinio where, yes, you can read digital versions of print magazines. Even new issues of magazines still in print, the ones that still push on, despite the odds.
See, readers, despite my 55+ senior age status, I’m not completely in love with stuff in the past.
Are you still reading and subscribing to print gaming magazines in 2024? Sure, it’s sad to see Game Informer go away, and especially disappointing to see more game industry related jobs fall by the wayside, but don’t see why this publication can’t live on as an online-only magazine. Perhaps, print on demand for readers that want that option? Maybe Gamestop will reconsider this model?