Highbury magazines face uncertain future

These game magazines were a mainstay for me during the mega drive days. In the days before internet, they kept me better informed than any one of my friends. I actually miss having a big crate of them stashed away, as the nostalgia was immense paging through them and seeing , for instance, the review that made me buy Rocket Knight Adventures.

I actually wouldn't mind tracking down one of the old editors of my favorite magazine at the time (sega power). I always admired him =P .. although I suppose that's what you get for being young and impressionable.

XBM - for all the latest on extreme bowel movements.

I would have thought that all games magazines were slowly going out of fashion. You can find out more onlinef for free, rather than buy a magazine with out-of-date info. Shame about GamesTM though- I wouldn't mind seeing that switch to an online format.

Magazines?? Are they made of paper and cost money?

Come on man, who wants to pay for news that are a month old whe you can have almost live news for free??

I'm not a UK resident, but I love GamesTS - awesome magazine that, every issue, has a lot of great material. It would be a damn shame if the mag ends up going away.

Highbury are relatively new players to the Games mag market, they used to be mainly a contract publisher i think and bought into the games mag market buying out Paragon publishing I think.

Future is where it is at the top of the uk games Mag pile for a reason. The were the first mag in the UK to covermout demos on removable media when the started with cassette tapes for the frikin spectrum. Future define old school and the guys that write the mags love games as much of any of us.

It's like EA sure we hate the fact they are so dominant now but at the end of the day they still put out the odd fantastic game. The fact that Future now publish offcial mags for all three main console manufacturers is something that causes a touch of concern but hey at the end of the day they are a business.

Note Future tried to buy the Highbury games mags but the Office of Fair Trading wanted to investigate since it was getting close to a monopoly on the games mag sector. They still bought 38 other titles from them however.

No, Future is at the top of the mag pile because everyone else got out when they saw it was headed down the toilet. Future are only still in it to milk what they can out of the remaining chumps who'll buy their £6 demo discs with shitty "magazines" attached full of reviews whose score was determined by how much advertising the publisher bought. EA are a bunch of lovable fluffy bunnyrabbits brimming with artistic integrity, compared to Future.

It's easy to comment on how the mag industry is in decline, but Future's magazines are selling more copies year on year. In fact Future have doubled in size within the last year.
The decline of Highbury’s profits is a sign of readers moving to Future's official titles, and away from the lower quality un-official magazines.
MalcomJones is either uninformed, or a bitter employee of a failing publisher.

Tom, you're delusional. Future's mags sell less and less every year, they just keep buying more mags to keep the total up. The ABCs tell the true story - every individual mag is in decline.

Yeah the technology mags are in slow decline. But the games mags are selling more and more each year, against expectations in the city. The demo discs on the official titles certainly help.
And if I am delusional, then everyone else must be here at Future.

Haha, MalcomJones got pwned by Future Publsihing dude!

It's true, I used to get PC mags for their demo discs back in the day, but now with 10meg broadband (shiny) I have little need to. Even on the rare occasion I buy a gaming magazine like OXM I generally read through it quickly.. "Knew that already, that's been on the web for a month, oh not more Frag Doll pics.." and keep the demo disc instead. Same reason I'll be buying January's OXM for the FFXI beta; thank goodness for lock-in.

Seriously, what ABC figures is everyone else reading? Because the real ones show all Future's games mags (except Gamesmaster and Edge, which never changes by more than a few hundred) going down the tubes at a rate of knots.

And just to back that last post up:

http://www.gamesindustry.biz/content_page.php?aid=10937

"Sales of UK games magazines declined in the six-month period from January 1st to June 30th 2005 according to the latest figures from the Audit Bureau of Circulations, with magazine chiefs at market-leader Future Publishing blaming the transition period between new console releases for the shortfall.

Future's year-on-year circulation was down to 513,733 copies per month, with both the Official PlayStation 2 Magazine and Official Xbox Magazine taking six-month hits - the former falling from 172,593 copies per month to 133,242, and the latter declining from 88,136 to 85,072."

"Future's Publishing Director Mia Walter called it all "an unsurprisingly mixed bag". "The overall decline of 6.8 per cent year-on-year comes at a quiet time in the current generation of hardware with no big triple-A releases like Halo 2 or GTA: San Andreas.""

So Tom, you're either a liar or a fool. Which is it?

Oooh, out of date report!
The GamesIndustry article covered January to June 2005, the quietest period of the year.
At last weeks company meeting, circulation figures were higher than the same period last year. (And higher than those reported at GamesIndustry.)
:P

Riiiigggghhhtt. So we should take an anonymous supposed employee of the company's unsubstantiated word over the audited, published current figures? I hope you'll forgive me if I stick with, like, the FACTS.

I expect all this great news and soaring sales are why the company's been issuing profit warnings and its stock has plunged by nearly half - from almost 90p a share to 48p a share - in the last three months, yes?