EGM is dead
1UP has been sold to Hearst and many were fired
These are just the latest casualties, and they certainly wouldn’t be the last.
The only question is who is next?
The economic recession is not really the direct cause of this. It only accelerated the downfall of the disrupted industries like gaming magazines and other traditional media.
They have already been in the decline long before this recession.
You can already feel this happening when gaming media became more obsessed in becoming a giant Ad catalog rather than providing content that readers want. When was the last time you’ve read a gaming magazine that isn’t 50% filler ads?
Instead of the treating the readers as the customers, most gaming media have decided that the game publishers are their primary customers instead.
Even though the gaming market has vastly expanded, the gaming media failed to follow suit. Their unwillingness to follow the wave of disruption caused consumer disinterest on the new audience, while the recent fiasco on the journalistic integrity of the gaming media itself caused distrust on their core readers. Not to mention that information on games magazines have been consistently out of date for quite some time now.
With the new audience ignoring gaming magazines,
and the old audience treating the magazines as an afterthought,
these gaming media companies left themselves with basically no audience alienating both their old and new readers.
At least for some of these gaming media, its better to be cool and out of business than become successful and mainstream… OH WAIT!