FunEffect.com

['Game Mag Weaseling' is a weekly column by Kevin Gifford which documents the history of video game magazines, from their birth in the early '80s to the current day.]

I mentioned back in August, when news of World of Warcraft: The Magazine first hit, that the only similar project ever attempted is EON, a quarterly title devoted exclusively to CCP Games' EVE Online. It's produced by MMM Publishing in London and sold exclusively on the Internet; you can buy a 4-issue subscription for $55.95 or buy any of the past 17 issues for $14.95 a pop.

I was previously aware of EON because there was a point last year when issue 1, which was sold out at CCP's online store, was going for serious premiums on eBay -- $100 and upwards, prices normally reserved for very old CGWs and Electronic Games issues in great condition. I wondered what on earth the big deal was, but I didn't investigate it further because I figured it was just crazy MMO dudes doing what crazy MMO dudes do: pay tons of money for collectibles, and maybe not shower every day. (The issue was eventually reprinted and is back on sale for list price.)

With WOW:TM on the horizon and Beckett Massive Online Gamer not getting any more readable no matter how hard I stare at it, I decided to take a look at EON to see if it offered any clue to what the WOW mag might be like. MMM was kind enough to spot me a couple of issues, and I have to say I'm very impressed.

What strikes you first is the design. Like what WOW:TM's braintrust emphasized in the original press blast, EON is about quality -- though it's only 84 pages an issue, the paper quality is obscenely fantastic, and the design's impeccable. Visually, the magazine is a bit like your typical Brit-mag (lots of box-outs and graphs, that sort of thing), but the design is artistic in approach, pretty to the eye and filled with details. It's a far cry from Beckett, and I think it provides a decent yardstick for WOW:TM to try and measure itself against. (One funny thing I noted: EON very rarely publishes photographs of actual people -- almost never, in fact, except for arty shots of CCP employees in the interview features. That's certainly different from Beckett MOG, which is packed with digicam grabs of frumpy, pasty-complexioned gamers.)

Being so devoted to a single game, EON has a couple of charming elements you won't see in any other mag. One is the advertising -- not for games or hardware, but things like EVE websites, services, and corporations (ie. guilds). You don't buy ads with real cash, but with ISK, the in-game currency -- 700 million for a full page, 1.4 billion if you want MMM to design it up for you. I suppose it's mainly a vanity thing for the corporations that throw ads in there, but it plays upon the advantages of print in covering a constantly-changing game. "Best of all," as EON itself puts it, "advertising makes your mark on EVE permanent."

The other, and I suppose this is what WOW:TM aims for as well, is depth. There's a little bit of fluff in every issue of EON (mostly in the fanfiction, which is at least very well illustrated), but the vast majority of pages contain serious hardcore game-oriented content -- alliance updates, ship reviews, CCP personnel interviews, and so on. Beginners aren't exactly thrown out by the ear, but they're expected to know the lingo, at the very least. For a complete non-player like me, I might as well try to read the Journal of the American Medical Association on the can. "Territory lies at EVE's heart," one article asks. "But the problems of empire building are becoming obvious. Is there a solution?" I don't know! Is there?

Kidding aside, even an outsider like myself can see that EON's carved out a nice niche for itself -- and, I guess, a profitable one, if they've stayed in business this long. If MMM can succeed with the EVE audience, then Future's got to have it in the bag covering the #1 MMO in the universe, right? In this sort of business, where reader dollars generate nearly 100% of your revenue, quality really does dictate success, I suppose -- that's what it'll all come down to.

[Kevin Gifford breeds ferrets and runs Magweasel, a really cool weblog about games and Japan and "the industry" and things. In his spare time he does writing and translation for lots and lots of publishers and game companies.]

At BlizzCon 2009 -- taking place this weekend in Anaheim -- Future is doing a big advertising push for World of Warcraft: The Magazine, its latest project and one of the bigger game-media launches of the year in any territory.

The magazine, which is slated to debut later this year (editor-in-chief Dan Amrich told me they're aiming for WOW's fifth anniversary in November), will have a fairly big presence at BlizzCon, where Future will front a booth, give out mini-mags in attendees' goodie bags, sell subscriptions complete with free murloc plush, all that sort of thing.

The basic stats on WOW: The Magazine --

- It'll be launching simultaneously with editions in America, the UK, Germany, France, and Spain and is subscription-only, with zero newsstand distribution. The price: $39.95 (or £29.95 or €34.95) for four seasonal issues. There's a bit of a discount if you commit to two years.

- It's run by Amrich -- who left Official Xbox Magazine US to take up the EIC job -- with Tim Edwards (who also continues to edit PC Gamer's UK edition) serving as the European editor. Art design is led by Ryan Vulk, who worked on Ziff Davis's Official PlayStation Magazine long ago (more recently he's been designing Wired), and Julian Rignall, a man who needs no introduction among British gamers of a certain era, is editorial director.

- It'll use the same wide-body dimensions as Future's Edge, with similar paper quality and so forth, and every issue is set to be 148 pages long, with no third-party advertising. Being official, there are promises of all kinds of exclusive content from Blizzard's designers and art guys. The editors I talked to assured me that WOW will be the main thrust of the mag throughout; there will be very little coverage of other PC games, or other MMOs, or even Blizzard's other franchises. Pure WOW.

- Since there's no newsstand presence, Future will mainly advertise the mag through worldofwarcraft.com and the Blizzard Launcher. (Worldofwarcraftthemagazine.com will go live on noon Eastern time/5pm GMT Friday.)

I have a feeling many people will ask why anyone would dare to make a print mag devoted to a nearly five-year-old game, in 2009, and charge ten bucks an issue. But although I've never really played WOW, I'm excited for this project -- in fact, if it succeeds (and I hope it does), I think "boutique" titles like these are going to mark the future of print-based game media, or the part of it that survives.

Here's why.

We all know the common complaints about print game mags by this point. They're too out-of-date. They're razor-thin. They look cheap. There's too little real content. They don't offer anything you can't get online for free.

These accusations constantly pop up in any online debate over media because, well, they're true more often than not. And with print advertising at an all-time low, distribution costs sky-high and rising, and US publishers cheapening the quality of their own magazines with loss-leader subscription rates, the outlook for traditional mags is bleak even before you factor in the economy.

Everyone in game media knows what's wrong with the print business. So why isn't anyone doing anything about it?

Over the years I've written frequently about where magazines need to go if they want to survive. I've talked about how they have to try something truly new and unique, how they have to use print media's advantages and avoid the disadvantages, and how this new thing has to be so awesome and so high-quality that it's worth paying a premium for. At this point in time, WOW: The Magazine -- as it's been laid out so far -- is the closest thing I've seen to my own vision. I wouldn't have launched a WOW mag, but that's quibbling.

Let's go over the main factors that'll judge the mag's future. First off, no newsstand distribution. I couldn't say how much this alone would cut the cost of producing the mag, but it's certainly a very substantial percentage when you're dealing with a country the size of the United States. This alone may ensure that Future can make a profit off WOW: The Magazine on circulation levels that would spell other magazines' doom.

Second, content. I think Future's rolling the dice here, focusing so intently on the WOW audience, but at the same time I concede that there are very few gamer subgroups that have more time and money wrapped up in their hobby. (Flight sim fans exhibit similar behavior, and there're two print mags devoted exclusively to them.) For this audience, Future is producing what promises to be a beautiful piece of work -- high-quality package, high-quality art design, (hopefully) a lot of articles that rely less on timeliness and more on mature depth and quality. A magazine you'd be proud to display in your living room, in other words, not stack on top of your toilet tank. I have very high expectations.

Third, price. Forty bucks ain't cheap. Blog commenters will dismiss the magazine for that alone. The success or failure of WOW: The Magazine, in my eyes, largely rides on how readily customers accept this price point.

But maybe the fact this is WOW we're talking about here gives Future more than even odds. When I was at QuakeCon last week, I had an interesting conversation with Rage creative director Tim Willets about the PC and console audiences. He said, with a laugh, that while he sees the two bases as large the same these days, "the people that play WOW are the only ones who don't play games on consoles." They really are their own market, and as lots of would-be MMO competitors have learned, they've been fiercely loyal over the past half-decade.

I can't help but be reminded of a similarly hardcore audience that, in the beginning, only had a couple of obscure media outlets supporting it. Suddenly, that audience's main benefactor debuted its own official magazine, a high-quality effort with tons of exclusive content, and it sold in the millions, spawning all kinds of imitators. What am I hinting at? You guessed it, maybe: I'm talking here about NES owners in 1988, and I'm talking about Nintendo Power.

Too much hype? Yeah, maybe. Future isn't sending millions of free copies of WOW: The Magazine's first issue out to Blizzard's mailing list the way Nintendo did, after all. But there's something similarly ingenious to Future's plan here -- something that could redefine print video-game media's, er, future if it works out for them. Now it just comes down to whether the audience really is there. I think it is -- and even if it isn't there in the millions, the mag can survive on far fewer readers than the GIs and OXMs of the world.