Why buy a magazine when I can easily scan for reviews on the Internet? In GM’s case, the more pressing question was “Why should I buy a local magazine with 2-3 month-old reviews?”. If there was a magazine genre that had taken a hit from the Internet age, it was definitely videogames. There were so many content related issues to address as soon as GamesMaster came out.


1. Why the minimal local reviews?

If any of the big name publishers had satellite offices here, there would be no need to answer this question. We do not get review copies of games months before release. As soon as we get the game, it takes roughly a week to play through the game, and a whole lot of time to write the critique. In the local publishing industry, that kind of timeframe is unheard of. Again, it makes sense to just plug in the foreign review.

If you think about it, the staff could have easily just replaced the byline with a local name, and people would have not noticed. That option however, was ethically unacceptable.

2. Rates for contributors here and abroad differ GREATLY.

Whereas an article abroad could get you around $500, rates here are just 1/20 of that. Sad, but that is how the local publishing industry was set-up. If you think about it, there’s nothing lucrative about it at all. You have to worry about the review and your day job.

3. There’s nothing here that’s not on the Internet.

Do you bring your PC or laptop to the stinker? I thought so. It still feels good to have something on paper. Also, each copy of the mag came with a back to back kickass poster every month. That in itself was worth the price of admission.

4. Who the hell are these reviewers?

If there was one thing that got the ire of a small minority of readers, it was the scores that were given in the magazine. In some local forum that I can’t seem to find anymore, people were speculating that Ragnarok Online had made some financial considerations so they could get a 9.0 review score. This issue was all the more amplified when Guild Wars got a review of 8.8.

I guess the thing to learn from all of this is that no matter who reviews the games, there will always be haters. All I can say is each article is a reviewer’s opinion, and people can easily disagree with it.

  • “I never bought the magazine because the whole mag sucks”.
  • “(Put name here) is a crappy reviewer. He should get his reviews and stick them up his arse”
  • “Who made these people experts anyway?”
  • “I never bought that magazine, and I probably never will”

The sad thing is there are no names behind all these comments, while there are names behind the people who do all the articles. Everyone in media has encountered crab mentality in one form or another. This was the form GamesMaster’s came in.

Another challenge the magazine had to face was the availability of ads. Were traditional advertisers open to the idea of non-traditional marketing at the time? It was definitely an uphill battle, but not one that we were ready to concede.

Next: How we presented GamesMaster to Advertisers

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