Make Me Buy Your Mag

I was shopping for groceries the other day and did my usual shuffle past the magazine racks to oggle the men's magazine covers. I also took a gander at the gaming mags, picking up a shrink-wrapped copy of OXM to check out the content on their bonus disc.

It was then that I realized something. Gaming magazines are not trying hard enough to stay competitive in this world of blogs, game trailers, G4, podcasts and online news syndication.

Come, follow me across the jump and I will explain more...

The OXM is a decent magazine that I've purchased one issue of at the beginning of the year. It's a little skimpy on the pages but still shares a lot of good qualities with its sister publication, PC Gamer. Despite this, I've been getting the sense that the traditional magazines have been slow to adapt to the advances in new media an Web 2.0. This is a time when a single blogger can sift through the latest games news and post coverage on their own site mere minutes, if not seconds, after the news has broken. The end user, through the magic of hyperlinking and broadband, can read this article and immediately jump to additional support articles, rich media, such as a game play video posted on YouTube or watch a freshly posted developer interview on IGN or Gamespot.

My point is of course is that information spreads with incredible speed now. Furthermore, we as consumers of information have much more power to control what and how much we want to take in. Traditional magazines, stuck to their rigid one-month production cycles, are slowly getting phased out of relevance.

They do have an ace in the hole in the form of their pack-in bonus discs. Dating back about 10 years, these discs used to be a cool novelty for magazine to include in their issues. And what a valuable novelty they came to be. The commercial web was still growing up, so it was still hard to get hard information on new releases, let alone demos, videos and cute casual games. These bonus discs had all of these things in spades and were often wrapped in a very slick interface. Sadly, these discs have slipped drastically in quality and relevance over the years.

The disc that came with my first issue of OXM was decent. It certainly didn't contain anything that made me want to rush home and pop it into my Xbox. It did include premium downloadable content for Oblivion, which I didn't have in the first place, and a collection of demos to very mediocre games, including Superman Returns.

At the supermarket, holding up the latest issue of OXM, I was equally unimpressed with their bonus disc. Their feature demo was for Star Trek: Legacy, followed by trial versions of Xbox Live Arcade titles like Worms, Alien Hominid and a couple older releases. I blinked, looked over the content again and immediately shelved the magazine.

Who are they selling the magazine and the disc to? Am I being too harsh when I say you can't just slap any old content onto your disc... the same disc that doubles the price of your skimpy magazine. Granted, if the stats are to be believed, a good 50% of all X360 owners are not connected to Xbox Live. This increases the value of those old demos and Arcade trials for those poor souls who are a literally only getting half the fun out of their Boxes.

What about the rest of us who still enjoy their gaming news in hard copy form every so often? What about the rest of us Xboxers who actually have access to Live and want something we can't get on the Internet? How attractive is it for us to lay out $10 for a magazine that might have the odd exclusive on an upcoming game, pap on the remaining pages and a bonus disc full of old or uninteresting demos?

This slide in quality is one of the prime reasons why I'll buy a games magazine once every three to four months at best. Traditional publications need to take advantage of their strengths and push harder to keep and expand their readership.

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Crackdown Preview Video Clip on OXM

I can hear you asking me, nay, crying out in frustration: Oh Maclintok, another Crackdown post??

I know, I know, I know. Yet again, I post about this wonderful game, but with a mere 12 days remaining until the full game hits retail shelves, can you blame me for stoking the fires of anticipation? It does not help that there continues to be so much out in the WWW to satiate our Crackdown cravings. First the Achievements montage, then the Shai-Gen preview and now, a very meaty, very satisfying game preview and interview with the producer and designers at Real Time Worlds.

It's hard for me to scope out video podcasts, being at work and all, but I managed to take this in near the tail end of my busy day. So here, courtesy of OXM, is your delicious Crackdown preview video

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Your Gamerscore and You - Part Deux

I was probably supposed to follow up on my gamerscore post about, oh, 9 or 10 entries ago. Frankly, I've lost the gusto to continue on much more on that topic. I broke the 1000-point mark in my gamerscore weeks ago, so it's hardly newsworthy anymore... not that it would've been a banner headline if I blogged about it right away either. Well, let's see where this ramble takes us...

It's clear that the achievements concept has become a big hit and if the rumours are to bear any fruit, gamers will have even more reason to obsess over their gamerscores. Aside from bragging rights and personal pride, attachment to one's gamerscore does serve a more practical function, at least from the perspective of Microsoft and, more specifically, their departments responsible for monitoring codes of conduct. The latest issue of the Official Xbox Magazine features a revealing article about the life of an Xbox Live community watchdog, known only as "Chris". Part of the rather amusing story focused on an OXM editor's experiment to try and get himself banned from Live. He set up a dummy Live account and went about harassing teammates, griefing Uno opponents and generally acting like an obnoxious ass, all in the attempt to find out how far one has to push it before the powers that be take action.

It turns out he never got banned, even after a 4-day period of sending curse-laden voice messages and webcam-ming his crotch for all to see. It was later revealed on the weekly OXM podcast that although his account was not suspended, the editor indeed caught the attention of "Chris" and his fellow community watchdogs and had been put on a high-priority "to watch" list.

In the end, if you are someone who is intent on disrupting the experience on Live, you will find a way to do it by constantly changing up accounts. I think a large deterrent for doing that, of course, is the loss of gamerscore. Losing all those hard-won achievements just so you can continue to be an Ass, is simply not worth it for the overwhelming majority of gamers, even from the hardcore griefer set.

Gamerscore: addictive meta-points grind and invaluable EULA enforcement tool!

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