The magazine I picked for this blog post is PC Gamer, which has been near and dear to me when I was in high school years ago. As hinted by the title, PC Gamer is for and about PCs, Gamers, and games that said gamers might be inclined to play. When you get past the ads, the magazine is usually filled with gaming news (such as new game announcements, game delays, or noteworthy updates), previews of upcoming games, and reviews of new titles or PC hardware. The length of the articles can vary greatly, and most of the longer ones tend to focus on big-title previews and reviews or special features like the March 2011 issue’s list of the “Top 100 Best Games of All Time,” which incidentally left me raging like a Viking clad in a bear skin and little else. (Hooray for berserker references!)
As I hinted to earlier, there are quite a few advertisements in this magazine. At least they are relevant, and range from whole computers or components, monitors, laptops, and games. Even though my interest was piqued, I was rather stunned by the sheer number of pages taken up by the ads in comparison to the articles. I even went so far to compare to a few of my copies from a few years ago, and I was startled to see that the whole issue was about half as thick as my older copies, and yet it looked like the number of pages dedicated to ads was the same. I almost feel like I bought a magazine of advertisements that also happens to have a few interesting articles.
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| One of the few articles that seems devoid of ads! |
I have yet to figure out any real rhyme or reason that some articles end up on the website, and others end up in the printed publication. In fact, I’ve even noticed some pseudo-overlap. For example, a game called Dungeons was released just this month. Within a week of the preview article posted on the website, the review was completed and posted, yet there’s an article in the magazine that is simultaneously both a preview and review, while being neither. The article in print is probably not even something that really needed to be included at all, except maybe to the target audience that doesn’t have the internet. Given that the target audience is PC gamers, well, maybe I’m not the only one who can see the problem there. Maybe the printed article is there to just phone-in and still get a paycheck, since the person who wrote the online preview and review is different from the one who wrote the published article. It’s also worth noting that the same team that works on the printed magazine also works on the website, so it’s not like they have the excuse of two separate teams.
Now on to the particularly fun part: Comparing the two mediums a little less passively! As I mentioned just moments ago, there’s just one big team involved. That means the majority of the “essence” of PC Gamer carries over into both. Both media have plenty of pretty pictures and screenshots to gawk at, almost every one of them captioned with some kind of snarky or silly remark.
The printed version does have a couple of advantages over the online version, the best of which in my opinion is the fact that it’s a physical copy. I can carry it around with me, I can bring it to school, take it into the kitchen to read while waiting for food to finish cooking. I can’t read the website if the internet is down, power is out, or my computer decided to give up the ghost (which it hasn’t yet, knock on wood, or else you wouldn’t be reading this). What I would also consider an advantage over the website is that I know I will read all of the articles in the printed version, if only because I feel motivated to get the most for the money I spent and because, again, I can take it with me and I have more general exposure to it.
What the website definitely wins out on, however, is how light it is on my wallet. For the price of whatever I shell out to Comcast to keep my internet running, and however much of a drain of electricity my computer equipment is, I can check the website daily and see updates on gaming news, previews, reviews, download weekly podcasts, troll browse the community forums, or even purchase and download games at the PC Gamer Webstore. That said, I don’t visit the site very often, since something about the blog-style format rubs me the wrong way.
Even still, timely and free updates of a website whose layout I hate is better than shelling out a few bucks for an almost redundant vehicle for ads that has a few interesting articles inside. Now if only those articles were unique to the printed copy, including the Top 100 Games list, I wouldn’t feel as if my wallet had been emptied in vain. As if my “energized” disagreement with their selections wasn’t enough, now the salt of my missing cash is rubbed in the wound!
To wrap up the last couple of paragraphs, I have to say that I would stick to the website. It’s free, the articles seem to be more fleshed out, I don’t have to wade through ads in pursuit of something interesting to read, and it even seems that they seem to focus on the website first, with the magazine as an afterthought.
And here’s a twist: I don’t even go to the PC Gamer website that often, and I usually do so only to check out the hardware section. I typically stick to IGN to find anything that catches my attention, and then broaden my search from there. As an added bonus, IGN also covers different consoles, movies, music, and essentially anything the target demographic of 18-35 year old men might enjoy. Oddly enough, there are more ads on the IGN sites than on PCGamer.com. And, related to recurring themes in our class, IGN was bought out by News Corp in 2005.
In doing this assignment, I learned that though I prefer to read something I can physically hold, I’m not sure that it sits well with me and my wallet. I also learned I have no idea what the hell the people at PC Gamer are thinking. Sell me some pretty glossy pages for what’s offered online for free at their own website? Really? Really? At least I’ll always have the fond memories.
