February 4, 2009

THE END OF EGM
by Bobby Shen

Electronic Gaming Monthly closes for good.

The dust has settled. EGM is gone. The magazine closed in early January when the 1UP network was taken over by UGO. Now that we’ve had some time to reflect on this tragedy as a community it doesn’t get any easier to accept. They were the best at what they did. The end. The current economic situation has affected many of us, myself included. The trickle down effect is extensive. A good example of it here in New York City can be found within the mortgage crisis. The MTA (transit) gets a great deal of money from mortgage tax. When the mortgages dry up, the money is gone. Then the discussions of raising the tolls on bridges, buses and the subway begin. That trickles directly into our pockets, quite literally.

There is more to it though. There is always an inevitable buildup. You can see it on the horizon if you look carefully. It takes a combination of economics and technology and timing and a whole manner of different things that build and build. Just look at the music industry, which is spiraling toward oblivion. In fact, the Guitar Hero franchise is probably the best thing to hit the music industry in years. I was reminded that Iron Maiden was awesome prior to 1989 (after which, not so much). The Number of the Beast has rejoined my music collection because of Guitar Hero III. However, the cold reality is that countless bands have been turned away over the past several years due to the overall decline of the industry.

DVR has made the Nielsen Ratings irrelevant. Who cares when a television show is really on? I’ll just record that sucker and integrate it into my schedule. That is when advertising begins to tank. The print media is no exception. Years ago if you opened up the New York Times there were pages and pages of advertisements. Now, ad sales for that paper have dropped over fifteen percent for the fourth quarter alone. EGM experienced the very same decline in ad revenue. Unfortunately, life boils down to money. It is, what it is, but you knew that already. Why wait for the printed preview of a video game, when you can simply go on line and view countless preview articles immediately.

The answer of course, is that many people do not wait anymore in this day and age of digital instant gratification. I’m sure there was more to it than ad sales that saw EGM close down for good. I’m not privy to all the details that contributed to the end of an era. EGM is gone and they will be sorely missed. It is indeed the end of an era. With little fanfare or righteous send off, I might add, which they truly deserved. And for those of us who did read EGM, it was because of the unbiased, scrupulous, unwavering coverage that the writing team provided. If they said a game was good, bad, broken or the greatest thing since Voodoo graphics accelerators changed the PC, you could trust them. Trust is the single most important thing a journalist can offer.

Electronic Gaming Monthly represented one of the very first legitimate spaces for game journalism in print. They did it with integrity within a genre that is still virtually new and constantly under fire from its audience and literary contemporaries. Writing for games in an environment that is also a venue for publishers to buy ad space is always a fine line to walk. That is just the way it is. Game journalists work very hard to destroy any notion of biased reporting. A controversial example of this can be found in an editorial in EGM issue 199, where the EIC Dan Hsu spoke candidly about game publishers and what happens when scores don’t meet expectations.

There are a lot of talented people who lost their jobs now that EGM has closed for good. I have no doubt that they will conquer adversity and find work soon, because as I said earlier, they were the best at what they did.

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