Octopus Overlords

Ok let me get out front here and say I have not purchased a magazine in 5 years or more. But I do still gawk at the covers and see the pricetags. These babies run $7.99 on up. And you get 100 pages or less it would appear. These scant pages are filled with pictures and 85% advertisements. They are getting all this ad money and yeat charge near $10 for a pithy little scrap of paper magazine. I find this to verge on robbery!

Oh sure you might get a demo cd. But you can get all this free online. Why do they bother? Probably to make you think its worth the cost. Each disc most likely costs them 1 cent, but they'll ad in $5 for you in the cost of the magazine Im sure.

Todays PC mags are just a ripoff for a shadow of what they once were. In the mid 90s you could buy a 300 pager filled with all your dreams for about $3.99 or so. I had tons of them. I spent weeks reading through a new one, taking my time, enjoying it all.

Those same mags are either dead in print or dead to me if they are still sold. They are nothing now and it makes me sad.

I agree, especially considering most of their revenue is via advertisements there is no reason to charge outrageous prices per copy.

Hell, look at comics! I took my kids to the comic store the other day and was shocked at the $3.99-6.99 pricetag on comics.. Wtf is that? It's 10 pages long and you chage that? LOL

Bill Harris's blog had a good article where he took PC magazines, and removed all ad's, reviews, and previews, and measured how many pages were left.

I think the winner was Computer Games with 26.

The ratio of content to ads is pretty static, and always was. There is a lot less advertising now, hence smaller magazines with less net content.

I used to buy one or two computer magazines every month for years. But when the magazines rose in price, and decreased in content, I stopped buying them. Especially (as was pointed out before) why would I buy them when I can download demos online? And there are many websites where I can see the latest gaming news without waiting a month.

Video killed the radio star.........

I think that can be applied to the internet(especially high speed) and gaming magazines.

The only one I get is CGW because I got a freebie 2 year sub, Its electronic, but thats OK.. At least if I find the ad interesting I can click on it and go to the games page without typing LOL

I get 4 magazine subs free with my Fileplanet subscription, including CGW and PC Gamer. Otherwise i'd never pay for them - they mostly end up next to my toilet and read during downtime.

If you buy a year or more subscription the price really isn’t that bad, most work out to be about $2 an issue.

That said I get all but one of my magazines free now so price doesn’t worry me any more.

dbt1949 wrote:Video killed the radio star.........

I think that can be applied to the internet(especially high speed) and gaming magazines.

That's exactly it. By the time I read it in PC Gamer, CGW, or PC Games, I've already read it three weeks earlier on Blue's. By the time I see the screenshots in a mag, I've watched the trailer elsewhere.

I don't have any paid subscriptions, although I do have a couple of freebies. To put the difference in perspective, I recently stacked the October and November 1998 issues of PC Gamer on each other. All of 2004's issues combined were about 3/4 as high as those two issues.

those are exactly the reasons i cancelled my subscription to PCGamer a couple years ago after getting them every month since their second issue. what used to be a large, well-written bit of gaming news and reviews slowly turned into little more than a pamphlet with articles that tried harder to be entertaining than informative. add to that fact that magazine news is often outdated thanks to the instant access to info as it happens on the internet, and i saw little reason to keep my subscription running. i do miss the days of a reading a great gaming mag though...

I subscribe to all of them pretty much. I read them in the kitchen while cooking. I let my pc gamer subscription run out. I want to pick it up again but I'm searching for one of these amazing deals like 3 years for $4 or something that sometimes run.
Right now my favorite if Game Informer

My ig problem with the print magazines was they fell victim to the "weblog effect," where they decided I bought their magazine because I was a fan of "The Vede" or whatever instead of wanting game related content. I'm not really interested enough in the staff of PC Gamer to care about their favorite childhood toys, what they had for lunch last week, or the DVDs they're watching.

Also, the "we sit around all day and goof off" schtick is pretty old and tired too.

I've bought maybe two magazines in the past two years, I just stopped buying them. Air travel is about the only time i'll buy one, but even then I may just stick to books!

Pretty sad when a magazine costs more than a good novel!

I still subscibe to all 3, mostly because if I have a choice, I prefer to read something I can carry around from room to room, or take with me to work.

I still buy them for the CDs or DVDs. Since I don't have high speed access yet, getting demos and patches makes the mags worth their price.

Gaming magazines are obsolete. If I want to read something in the bathroom, I'll bring a book. Otherwise, the internet has nullified their reason for existence.