Game News in a Duel of Print and Online
by CATE DOTY[EXCERPT]
The main online site of Future US, Gamesradar.com, had 4.9 million unique visitors.
Jonathan Simpson-Bint, the publisher of Future US, said that his company also focuses on special issues for releases of new game systems like Wii, which come with high-quality visuals and a high newsstand price.
Given the competition from the Internet, “we’ve had to be more ingenious about the way we’ve approached it,” Mr. Simpson-Bint said.
Future US’s game magazines earned $46 million in 2006, a $4.8 million drop from 2005, according to company reports. The circulation for PC Gamer, a leading magazine from Future US, shrank to 210,369 this year from 300,271 in 2003, according to the Audit Bureau of Circulations...
Mr. Simpson-Bint of Future US said that the Internet was not the only drag on the revenues of game magazines. Another factor, he said, was the mercurial nature of the games market itself, where a slowdown automatically means a drop in advertising.
“It’s a really tightly linked ecosystem,” he said. “The fortunes of the magazines are very profoundly linked to the fortunes of the hardware platforms.”