MMOG Magazine #3- Followup

June 20, 2006 on 4:39 pm | In General Gaming, Reporting, Industry

Over at Grimwell, SirBruce posted the launch of the MMOG Magazine #3 website. Having talked about this back in March, I had some further thoughts on whether there was actually any need for an MMOG Magazine for a publisher to fill.

I think I may have something.

A magazine is, by nature, trying to talk to an existing base of interested people as well as expand that base. But covering a single genre is already starting too narrow. Further, based on their front page, they're narrowing even further by:

• Talking about titles that are iterations of the same experience. To a purist, they'll argue all over how fundamentally different CoH and EQ are. To the passerby, they look different. Experientially very similar.
• Talking about the games everyone else is talking about. That's the killer there in my opinion. We need in print what others already cover in print and that which is also covered every on the order of terabytes every picosecond across the planet?

Want a magazine that fulfills a need in MMOGs?

Talk about everything else!

My God. I'm a patient hobbiest, but I delete bookmarks to sites that use 75% of their front page to talk about WoW. That's fine those places exist for the people who love WoW, but not from sites that want to get their readers to believe they're "covering MMOs". They're not. Rename yourself to WoW_fansite_23432 and be the heck done with it.

On the web there's lots of conversations about everything. In print though? Not so much. Instead of trying to draw dollars to your article about GW away from CGW, CGM, PC Gamer and Electronic Gaming Monthly, further cannibalizing an already receding discussion circle, why not talk about the other stuff?

If you're on a store shelf waiting for the impulse buy, you may attract a casual fan of the genre. Why tell them stuff they probably got dumped into their email box before they left for the store anyway?

Talk about Second Life, ATITD, Eve, Dofus, Club Penguin, the stuff that falls below the scope of IGN and Ziff Davis but still has a dedicated following and offers truly unique insights into the total breadth that is this genre.

Will you sell as many magazines as PC Gamer? No. But you knew that already by making a magazine about a single genre. And you may convert some people into becoming members of the genre through it.

But I don't see this sort of thinking in the now three separate attempts to make print magazines out of MMOGs. The big money sees a lot of potential with MMOGs, but they don't seem to get it. MMOGs started electronic. Everything from the game itself to every concept about them are intrinsically realtime by nature. The "need" you need to fill is very different from just getting info out about new games. Either you're one of those magazines publishers that already do that, or you're online