MMO Magazine #3

At Zonk's blog and Terra Nova Blogs, I saw mention of an upcoming magazine dedicated to MMOGs, coming this September.

I didn't care the first nor second time such attempts happened either.

I respect print media. There's something to be said for kicking back with a good magazine. Even more so than web browsers, magazines are almost purely platform independent, absolutely portable, and are as casual as any one-way medium can be.

But they are never up to date. They can't be, by nature of how they are delivered. This is fine too, because their benefits are still benefits in some cases.

Not for MMORPGs though. What little coverage they are given by my existing gaming-related subscriptions is fine for me because I'm already a fan. I read about this stuff multiple times a day. Print cannot keep up. They can provide some depth of coverage for people not playing these games of course, maybe driving awareness of them to others who aren't playing them. At the same time though, so many people are playing online games that I don't at all believe they're not in MMORPGs because they don't know about them.

The problem with MMOGs isn't any lack of awareness of them. The problems are the game experiences themselves. No magazine is going to change what keeps gamers out of these titles. Only the games themselves can do that, and that'll only happen when the developers perceive the need to make such changes.

So I see any MMOG magazine somewhat doomed from the start. They're covering a genre most already know about with details that probably wouldn't matter to them. And even if those details did, they're already being covered hourly on the web.

Sure, the web is not as transportable as a magazine. But that is more than made up for by the timeliness of the information delivered.