Future issue 130 page press release for £6

…and it’s called Xbox360 The Official Xbox Magazine.

It’s only natural that in the wake of a new console, a skipload of new magazines are going to pop up to cover its launch. It’s also natural that the world-domineering Future Publishing has secured the official Xbox360 licence.

Being on the shelves in mid-September, nearly three months before the console is out, thousands of eager readers must have snapped up the first issue to read some decent journalistic coverage of the Xbox360 and its games. After all, surely the staff of the official magazine has access to Bill’s new console?

Future’s favourite trick of hiding a dodgy issue inside a sealed box has been wheeled out, and opening it up after shelling out six quid will tell you why. A thin and miserable varnished Microsoft advertorial with a DVD full of tech movies running off a PC is rattling around inside.

A regurgitation of the spec sheets makes up some of the mag, masquerading as journalism. We lost count of how many times the proclamation “The graphics rock!” was bolted onto the end of a nonsense-sentence about the tech specs. And would it really have been too much to ask for someone to check the totally wrong page numbers in the A-Z game index?

Even the mighty Cutlack (UK:Resistance, we salute you) fails to save the coverage of the games, which is a dismal selection of rewritten press information and glossy screenshots that we’d bet our tattered careers on baring no resemblance to the final products.

Yes, citizens, again you’re being sold a lie. Despite the promise of “exclusive playtests” in the mag, and the promise “we play the best console launch lineup ever seen” on the cover, at the time of writing the magazine the staff hadn’t gone near a finished console, but were still ordered by their paymasters to get a rewritten press release out onto the shelves.

For six fucking quid.

Deadlines & How Long Reviewers Spend Playing Games – The Truth

The RAM Raider spotted a discussion on a fansite writers' forum recently about deadlines. The comment “I think 2 days is a bit short notice” particularly caught my attention. After all, we’re talking about an unpaid writer coming up with shit about a game, for free, that nobody will read.

These people have no idea. As a professional games journalist, two days is a bloody luxury. The RAM Raider has often been landed with reviews from magazines with a day to turn around up to 1000 words, plus screenshots, plus captions, plus boxouts. The record has to be 22 hours from one of the major PC mags – that’s to play a game, and write up the review plus bullshit extras.

Remember the Headhunter: Redemption debacle, where that poor guy from Official Xbox Magazine had his name dragged through the mud by the game’s developers who revealed on the magazine’s forums (which were naturally deleted by Future, but there’s more here) that he’d simply regurgitated facts about the game from an old press release, revealing that he hadn’t played it properly? Despite Future’s desperate attempts to deny the accusations, the RAM Raider has learned from one his colleagues on the mag that he actually had barely played the game at all, as he was completely snowed under with a load of games and not enough time to review them.

How much time is spent playing a game for a review isn’t always down to the deadline though. As a general rule, the less space a review takes up, the less time the reviewer will spend on it. If it’s half a page in a magazine, the reviewer can expect £40-50 at the most, and less than half of that for a quarter of a page. For that kind of money, it’s just not worth spending hours on a game, so more often than not, a review will be knocked out after a couple hours of play at best.

So, the next time you’re reading a review section introduction with the lofty promise of a magazine’s reviewers playing games right through to the finish, you can now confidently think to yourself, “bollocks”. Yes, dear reader, quite often the review of a game you’ll be thinking of spending £40 on in a magazine that cost you a fiver will have been cobbled together by some poor/lazy guy who’s played it for a couple of hours.

Future Publishing – Interfering & Monopolising

MCV (the gaming industry’s trade mag) is becoming less and less relevant to the industry. The editorial does little more than state the obvious at the best of times, while letting soulless suits masturbate their companies across their pages.

A series of editorials from Future Publishing mag journalists turned into an embarrassing set of mishaps, kicked off by Official UK PlayStation Magazine editor Stephen Pierce slagging off his entire readership. This was followed up nicely by PSM2 Magazine’s Andrew Kelly short-sightedly, and unnecessarily aggressively, writing off the retro market and anyone who has an interest in it (in other words, anyone who’s played games for more than five minutes, thus making them more qualified to comment on games than Andrew Kelly).

The odd interesting interaction between industry knowns (and unknowns) does occasionally pop up though. Recently, Eurogamer.net editor Kristan Reed had a moan in MCV’s less than hallowed pages about Future Publishing effectively monopolising the games magazine market. Racing to slip on his company-bitch suit, PC Zone editor Dave Woods was quick to respond in a letter published the following week entitled, “We’re still fiercely independent at Future.”

After accusing Kristan Reed of behaving unprofessionally, Woods announces, “There hasn’t been a single attempt to interfere in the editorial side of the magazine.”

Considering this was published shortly after Future Publishing had ordered the author of the magazine’s monthly column on games emulation, Stuart Campbell, to no longer be used because of a disagreement that took place in the past over payment, the RAM Raider can only assume that Woods must have been suffering from some sort of temporary amnesia. Either that, or he was acting on orders from above.