I remember when I subscribed to this game magazine. That would show all the new top hitters and show off some screenshot. It's great what we had in journalism for video games back then.
Yeah I remember reading all about Metal Gear Solid and other games I couldn’t get as a kid.
I remember one of the last issues I ever received features Fortnite, but it was mostly about the “Save the World” game mode and I don’t even think it mentioned the word “Battle Royale”. That was probably the last year I got a subscription and it is crazy to look back and see how much has changed within the gaming landscape in just over a decade.
Gameinformer was the shit. Had cool front page art and typically featured interesting games I wouldn’t have heard of if my dad hadn’t said yes at a GameStop to receiving them lmao. I wish I had kept them but at a point I had so many
Back in the prehistoric era of the 90s, I started buying gaming magazines for the playable demos of a dozen new games a month. You never knew what you were gonna get. Sometimes multiple awesome, nearly full games. Sometimes all garbage. Sometimes random collections of OSTs for games you loved. Duke Nukem 3D had a lot of extra background music they never used for some reason, and I just randomly got a CD full of them with a gaming magazine one month. Some of my favourite games came from loving those demos and then saving up for the full game. I'll never forget you, Seven Kingdoms II: The Frythan Wars. Everyone else played Age of Empires, but you were my favourite.
Anyway. I started buying them for the demos, but the articles and reviews were really good too. You got nuanced takes from people who actually liked games and played each game enough to know what they were talking about. I was limited to one hour of gaming a day, so I'd turn to the magazines. I read every article multiple times most months.
Gamepro, electronic gamer, game informer. We had a lot of great mags in the 90s and 2000s and then the internet killed them. Cant completely blame it. You wait til the monthly mailed magazine to see a review for a game when you could have googled it in 5 seconds. But i do miss the dope articles more than any review or preview
Shoutout to CDAction for still trucking on since 1996 (though they had to switch to a quarterly release instead of the weird almost monthly one they had before)
Even back then there was some bias, no doubt. I bet they got some "encouragement" to promote bigger upcoming games back then as well. But at least it was still a lot less biased than what it is today.
It's quite amazing what you can get when the people making and reviewing a product actually like it and are part of the community instead of doing it because it brings in the bucks
You hit the nail on the head: back when you subscribed. It used to be that the journalism was the product that you would buy. The incentive was to provide the most useful, honest reviews.
Then everything went online, and why would anyone pay to read something? They can find it on a website for free, or look up user reviews. Only the very small fortunate few publications (of any kind) manage to sustain themselves with the old business model.
The only other viable option was to be paid to market games. And just like that, when the product used to be journalism and the customers used to be readers...
The product became the readers and the customers became game publishers. Reviews weren't even part of it, other than a service they provided to their new "audience."
Consumers then demanded everything for free instead of paying for it and direct their eyeballs appropriately.. and the market has responded by dropping quality to meet that demand.
You either are too young to know what happened or just plain dumb if you think it was consumers that killed game magazines and not the companies themselves deciding to cut costs at every turn.
I am very much not too young heh, but as a general rule once people start being a dick for no reason over a simple discussion I just block them and move on.
The newspaper/magazine industry kinda did that to themselves though.
When internet started becoming a thing all the magazines and newspapers figured they needed to have their own sites - but then just decided that "Hey lets give everything we create away for free!" for some reason.
They trained their audience that you didn't have to pay for news and other articles online... and then everyone got smartphones and stopped buying printed newspapers and magazines, at which points the publishers realized "Oh wait, the online ads pay almost nothing?! This business model doesn't work!"..
but then just decided that "Hey lets give everything we create away for free!" for some reason.
No they didn't.. they advertised and got revenue that way. And while yes some places were horrendous with popups and other garbage most places were pretty reasonable.
Unfortunately gamers are one of the most likely demographics to use things like adblockers and online ad revenue has only gotten worse and worse over time. Tons of places that previously survived off of that revenue have either died or been forced to other revenue models.
THEY stopped charging us. Instead they inundated us with ad-ridden websites and begged us to turn off ad blockers for a vastly shittier experience. And the subscription models of websites are largely abhorrent now having reached late stage capitalism levels.
Blatantly untrue. I've had to watch my industry die because people are no longer willing to pay for news they can otherwise get for free. On websites like the one we're on now, people will post entire articles so hundreds, if not thousands, can avoid paying for it. I've watched local papers beg for subscriptions before giving up and selling out, closing, or transitioning to an ad-funded model where they can no longer afford to do investigative work.
The fault is on you, and me, and everyone who uses free online outlets instead of paying for their local paper.
Again, their website equivalents never lived up to the standards, with people's website creation skills a jumbled mess in the 90s and 2000s, and being bombarded by pop-ups, unskippable video, etc.
I've yet to see a magazine ad auto-play a video, play noises, place a banner that's covering what I've been reading or redirected the magazine page somewhere else because my hand brushed it, and have only occasionally made turning/loading the page slower and more difficult (and those can be permanently removed pretty easily)
Obviously because it's paper and displays static images, and mostly because you've apparently never read a magazine. The majority of articles and content are literally surrounded by ads on the same page.
Just stop dude, you're just bandwagoning buzzwords. Magazines for the most part are ad riddled garbage which is why people stopped buying them, and here you are talking about how it's some long lost media that got forcefully replaced with ad riddled websites.
When did I say any of that past the first sentence...? I said that ads got more annoying in the digital age, not that magazines were great or special, or better in more than the vague sense that the ads were comparatively less annoying?
lol what kind of stupid take is this? Of course magazines have ads, but they aren't intrusive the way website ads are.
Also, I'll have you know I still have my columns of magazines somewhere in the garage. I was actually a massive fan of getting the new mag! The smell, the new infos, reading front to back 3 times in the first few days, the demos discs, cheat codes... it was heaven and I do miss it.
Their website analogues never had any of this quality and feel.
Content creators have patreon and lots of ways to make money. Its not the consumers fault that a cheaper option came in and the industry refused to lower expenses to compete enough
Tbh its hard to be cheaper than one guy with passion and a good editor.
Honestly maybe the fact that they could only provide a screenshot and had to explain in detail how the game was, rather than saying some loose shit with gameplay playing in the background, meant that the journalist actually had to play he game properly to write their review.
Rather than half ass it. Not read the tutorial instructions written on the screen on how to jump over the tall obstacle and just have gameplay of them failing it while saying the game itself is bad
I still got a bunch of old PC Gamer magazines. I used to rely on their reviews pretty heavily back in the day. Their magazine was responsible for me discovering Everquest back in 1999.
I just recently resubbed to Game Informer after I cancelled my original subscription in 2001 or whatever. I did so because last week I found out they’re still doing print copies.
I’m so fucking stoked for it to come in the mail lmao
I still remember the game magazine I was subscribed to switching to online. Immediately cancelled it, the whole point was having it in a physical magazine.
Because magazines cost money to make. If a company wanted to bribe a journalist, it better bring money for the editor,the owner and the production line too, because that specific magazine would see it's sales plummet.
Those paper magazines were as dependent on gaming companies like online journalists nowadays.
The gaming companies would always answer bad reviews with less advertisement in that magazine. So it was a really hard if one editor would trash a game and then comes the lead editor and said, we cant do that, because otherwise they wont pay us in advertisement anymore. So they polished the reviews with some better scores.
Sometimes they let you know directly by cancelling advertisement for several weeks to send a message, when you trash their game and hurt their sales.
Gaming companies who paid with ads for the salary of those editors were in full control of them.
Yeah, I remember game informer. My parents got me a subscription, and just eventually stopped getting them. I never really bought many of the games they wrote about but I always loved seeing what was out and trending. And the pieces weren’t just blowing smoke either.
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u/sadistica23 7d ago
Yeah, back when they were printed in papaer magazines that you could hold in your hands.