The decline and fall of hard copy game mags

So my copy of OXM arrived this morning apparently, I haven't opened it yet but i assume that is what it is by the package.

With all the coverage of the 1up and the longest running American gaming magazine closing recently i can't help but wonder who'll be the first UK mag to call it quits.

I'm long enough in the tooth to remember the heady days of 80s with CVG, Commodore User, ZZap and Sinclair User. The first mag i bought was Commodore User when i was 10. I remember reading it religiously, and i still have it along with a large collection of others in my parents basement. Like many other kids I used to scrimp and save my money to buy these mags and they were good reads well worth the £1. Even moving through the late 80s and early 90s with mags like CU, Amiga Format, ACE they were packed with news, reviews, previews and feature articles each month.

My "mis-spent" youth can probably be encapsulated by the fact that I can't really remember birthdays or Christmas from my childhood beyond vague memories of cake, chocolate, Star Wars toys and James Bond movies, but I know exactly where I was and in which magazine I first read about the mythical Konix mulitsystem or April fool story run by Commodore User that said you could upgrade your C64 to an Amiga. I was gutted when ACE was closed by EMAP, I had just paid for my first ever subscription and they closed the mag.

The slow death of the 16bit home computer era in the UK I think started the slow decline of print media here. When gaming went from computers to consoles the higher end of the mag market slowly disappeared while publishers pushed more and more glossy, garish mags like Games Master with little content, loads of pics and a useless demo CD.

So here we are 15 years later. The standard charge for a mag seems to be from £5-£7 which would appear to be paying for an almost redundant free CD or book. Edge magazine tries to cater for the high brow gamer, but i think that it is missing the mark, the features can be too specific and it would be called an industry mag now. Each platform has it's official mag, and at least 2 others (from the same publisher sometimes). You've got to ask yourself, why would you by a games magazine these days, with Ign, euro-gamer, Games-industry.biz, kotaku, etc and the plethora of quality podcasts you have all the news and rumours uptodate any time you want and free of charge. If you want a demo, download it from xbl or PSN. There is something to be said for having something to flick through when your offline but even for readability I generally find I'll have read OXM in a couple hours and then unlike my magazines of yesteryear it goes straight in the recycling and if i want to read on the move now I'll just break out my mobile.

So the long farewell to the majority of print media is well and truly underway, no doubt to be accelerated by the current economic conditions.