It was a sad day ’round these parts last January when Ziff Davis shut down EGM, the long-running video game magazine. Last May, when it was announced that the magazine’s original founder, Steve Harris, had bought back the rights, there was muted cheering. “Yay, they’re bringing it back; did we really miss it?” But now that Harris has given an interview to Publishing Executive, I can say that I’m a little more excited about the new magazine’s prospects.
The main point of the interview—it’s a short one, so be sure to read it all—is that the new EGM will co-exist with its online counterpart in ways never before seen. It’ll also be more “digital-friendly”: you’ll be able to send pages of the printed magazine to your iPhone to read, for example. The new mag will also focus on bringing more professional A/V content, like videos, to accompany stories inside the magazine.
I guess the overall idea behind the re-launch is that, when it was cancelled, EGM had some 500,000 readers; to say that there wasn’t an audience for the magazine is ludicrous. Magazines don’t have to break news anymore, but if you want a longer, “behind-the-scenes” look at a developer, why not have that in magazine form? Maybe charge more than $1 an issue to subscribers to help pay the bills—look how much it costs to subscribe to Edge.