Future Publishing quiz – falling circulations

This Saturday sees yet another instalment of the fucking awful “Test the Nation” programme fronted by Anne “I can’t lower my eyebrows” Robinson and Phillip “How the fuck has nobody discovered I’m gay yet?” Schofield. Just in case there’s a question on monopolising cunts, here’s a question on Future Publishing to practice on:

You’re spending potfuls of cash on buying out magazines, increasing the wages of the suits who hang around upstairs in Bath, and losing your magazine readership. What do you do?

a) Stop fucking around and plough some of that cash back into the magazines so the journos can put together excellent coverage for the readers;

b) Keep things steady, and hope the magazine teams can turn around their fortunes through their continuing hard work;

c) Acknowledge the fact that 75% of your revenue comes from the readers, so fuck them over by raising the cover price of several mags; and while you’re at it fuck the poor overworked journos by significantly reducing their budgets, forcing them to cut back on spending to cover game previews (why bother when they can just use gamespot.com instead?) and become even more overworked by having to write more for the same shit pay (leading to Headhunter: Redemption situations all over again); while sending your head cunt Greg Ingham to appear in MVC and say how great the management are.

The answer will be in the next update. As if you need it…

Future looking for new mugs

After a spell of losing staff faster than their credibility, Future are advertising for “four experienced gamers” to join their London office as trainees. Promising opportunities to work on the woeful Official Xbox Magazine and PSW, the RAM Raider was especially interested in Future’s requirements.

- An exhaustive knowledge of videogames and a passion for playing them (well, it was only a matter of time before Future realised their writers need to actually be gamers)

- A creative mind itching to express itself in print in an entertaining and original way (so they’re not looking for writers for Edge then)

- A bright, outgoing personality who can get along with anyone (in other words, can bend over and take it up the arse from the PR people so they can exchange high scores for advertising)

- A desire to learn and succeed (presumably to succeed at being a low paid skivvy that writes shit about games they’ve barely played)

Better still is what they’re not interested in:

- The size, shape or colour of your academic record (we’ll give them that – you’re either a decent writer or you’re shit, so well done Future)

- Why “old games are better than new ones, actually” (so anyone that actually has experience of old games – yet again, Future fail to grasp the importance of being involved in the industry from the golden era)

- Post-Freudian rationalisation of the Mario/Wario relationship dynamic in Super-Famicom releases ’91 to ’94 (so they’re definitely not looking for writers for Edge)

Judging by the number of comments attached to the post, it looks like loads of naïve forumites are seriously considering applying. The RAM Raider implores you not to, for the sake of your own sanity and well being. Working at the stinking London office doing shitty menial tasks that nobody else wants for a disgustingly low wage is not what you want to do in life.

You might love gaming, but Future only love their wallets.

Pointless press release of the week goes to…

…Official PlayStation 2 Magazine, who have… (drum roll)… got some previews and reviews in their latest issue. Well fucking done guys. With OPS2 counting amongst the lamest of the dismal PS2 mags doing the rounds, the RAM Raider can see why Future need to push out a press release to announce the amazing fact that they've done their jobs for once.

It’s even accompanied by an official statement by editor Stephen “I hate my track suit wearing readers” Pierce:

"The force is strong with this issue, making it the best OPS2 ever (customary shit press release gag over with early – well done). We have the amazing Star Wars blow-out, which couldn't be better timed to build up excitement for the movie (can’t resist letting slip the real reason for securing those ‘exclusives’, can you Steve) – as well as loads more (yes – Reviews! Previews! Hearty congratulations). We have the biggest selection of first-look exclusives ever assembled in one magazine (we’re assuming you have the facts to back that up, Steve?), and have covered the titles gamers really want to get their hands on (good tactic – a lesser editor would just pick a load of shite that nobody gives a fuck about). With the essential covermounted DVD, this illustrates why OPS2 is by far the best videogame magazine you can buy."

Well, the RAM Raider's convinced.

PC Zone To Become The New PC Gamer?

The RAM Raider has heard a rumour that the reason Jamie Sefton has been installed as acting editor of PC Zone magazine over at Future Publishing’s London office is that editor Dave Woods is working fulltime on a total redesign of the magazine, presumably in an effort to halt its declining sales.

PC Zone still has a fearsomely loyal fanbase from its heyday, which is sadly long gone. For a long time now, it’s not so much been a magazine with attitude as a games comic, but will this be rectified?

Dave Woods has always been a vocal critic of PC Gamer’s stupid and largely pointless Extra Life section, but is ironically planning a section called “Freeplay” that’ll basically emulate Gamer’s pages of glorified look-at-me filling. Only time will tell whether the Zone team can prevent Freeplay from turning into yet another desperate source of irrelevant commentary – has nobody learnt anything from the NGJ debacle?

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.

Sod New Games Journalism - What's Wrong With Old Games Journalism?

The RAM Raider is sure he's not the only one that’s absolutely sick of this whole bucket of fuck-all that’s calling itself New Games Journalism. The fuss is centred around an entry in the blog of ex-PC Gamer staff writer Kieron Gillen, who now makes a living freelancing for PC Gamer, PC Format and, erm, Eurogamer.net. There are two things in particular that irk about the whole situation – one is that the original piece was originally written over a year ago and was only recently dug up in a Guardian blog, the other is that there’s sod-all to it, other than being overly wordy.

The principle is that an NGJ article should centre around the writer and his experience. Taken at face value, this sounds quite sensible. Unfortunately, applied to an industry full of giant egos, this has resulted in a breed of articles that are more about the writer telling the world about himself.

Gillen himself is playing it pretty cool, claiming that the whole NGJ manifesto thing has been blown out of proportion. While he does tend to take himself a little too seriously (a quick look at his blog will confirm that one), Gillen’s not a bad guy when you meet him in the flesh, and it’s a shame to see his name brought to prominence with an issue that we can already see the community lashing out at.

A perfect example of so-called NGJ at its worst is PC Gamer’s Extra Life section. Usually consisting of a miserable mixture of pointless “this is me playing a game” bits and ten page articles on specific game levels (ten fucking pages – I don’t know whether to laugh or cry), the only entertainment that can possibly be derived from it is from attempting to find something interesting to read amongst it all. How fucking pointless can you get?

Applying NGJ to reviews is an even bigger nightmare, positively inviting the egos with typewriters to wank themselves silly while forgetting what the main purposes of these articles actually are. You basically need three things for a successful review: i) to describe the game (and you’d be surprised at the amount of reviews out there that don’t), ii) to describe what it’s like to play, and iii) to bolt those two ingredients together in an entertaining fashion.

Crash and Zzap are legendary thanks to their abilities to hit the exact balance in getting their views across while making the reader feel included, and this tradition was later mastered by Amiga Power. When they fired off a concept review, it not only worked, but the industry took notice. In a good way.

NGJ is little more than an excuse for the writer to talk about themselves first, and let everything and everyone else be damned. There are so many reviewers who talk constantly about their own sad lives, but this is completely the wrong track – you have to be talking about yourself as the reader, who is the potential player of the game. This applies equally to feature pieces and opinion articles – if you write about yourself, you’ll alienate your readers and end up as one of the bunch of self-deluded pricks who waffle on about fuck-all in shite like Edge.

Perhaps the worst thing about the whole sorry debacle is that the world’s gaming press is having a good laugh at the expense of us – the British gaming press – for being deluded enough to believe that NGJ was some revolutionary concept in the art of writing. The real guilty party is The Guardian’s blog for publishing their pretentious and pathetic list of NGJ crap in the first place.

As for Gillen, he’s probably getting the rawest deal in that he’s getting quite heavily slagged off by anyone with enough common sense to see that NGJ is complete nonsense, but let’s not forget that he, like practically every journalist, is a different person in his writing than he is in real life. The RAM Raider is sure Gillen’s unphased by the whole situation anyway – after all, it’s better to be a laughing stock than ignored. And we should know.

In the name of all that is good, let’s all just stick with old games journalism from now on. Clever. Witty. Incisive. Funny. Informative. And, crucially, not pretending to be something that it isn’t.

Future Publishing's "Secret" New Logo

MCV have scored a couple of brownie points by openly defying Future Publishing’s request to keep their crap new logo secret until they’re ready to launch it themselves on 1st June. Of course, MCV would never have had the guts to publish the logo had Spong.com not beaten them to it, but were at least gracious enough to point out that 69% of Future’s staff agreed that the logo was awful.

Still, if Future Publishing wants it keeping under wraps, that’s a good enough reason to post it here.

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.