According to a
story on Gamasutra,
Computer Games magazine--the third and smallest of the US PC games magazine--is being shut down by parent TheGlobe.com as a result of
MySpace's lawsuit claiming that TheGlobe.com spammed 100,000 MySpace users. (Not for the zine, but for TheGlobe's other businesses--that is, Computer Games is entirely innocent here.)
The lawsuit was revealed in
TheGlobe's 3Q SEC 10-Q filing, and it's not clear to me why Gamasutra is relating the closing of Computer Games to that lawsuit. The lawsuit claims damaged of $60m, btw, which is vastly greater than TheGlobe.com's current assets of $8m and change as of 3Q 2006. (They don't seem to have completed a quarterly filing since then.)
For those of you with short memories, TheGlobe.com, founded in a dorm room by Stephen Paternot, went public in 1998 with a close to $1b market cap despite the fact that it had damn-all revenues--one of the first companies to cash in on the dot boom, and one that helped spur all the idiot investments that followed. For no obvious reason, they bought Computer Games, as well as one-time hot game news site Happypuppy.com, along with online game retailer Chips'n'Bits--all assets that actually did have revenues, and made TheGlobe.com for a time a small competitor to the likes of Ziff and IGN in the game news space, although their ostensible (and always money-losing) main business was online community bullshit.
In recent years, TheGlobe.com tried to cash in on another hot investment topic by plunging into VoIP, a business that brought them a mil and a half in revenues in 2006 (small potatoes in comparison to Vonage and Skype), and some lawsuits from Vonage.
It's hard to figure these things out, but last year, Computer Games claimed a rate base of 220,000. For damn, I could run a zine like that with a circ of over 200,000 profitably--and so could any number of small magazine publishers, too. TheGlobe.com's filings claim a loss on "computer games" of $140k in 3Q 2006, but don't break out Computer Games magazine from their other game assets (startup Massive magazine plus Chips & Bits, HappyPuppy.com being long sold off), but a) it was in their interest to shift costs onto that side of the equation to make their fruitless VoIP venture look better, b) any start-up magazine loses money (that is, Massive), and c) TheGlobe.com is clearly a bunch of morons anyway.
In some ways, Computer Games is no prize; it's the #3 magazine in a category (PC games), and conventional wisdom holds that only the #1 and to a lesser degree #2 zines in a niche rake in big bux. And yet, 220,000 readers... That's nothing to sneeze at. Asimov's would kill for that circulation.
I'd be very sorry to see them go; that leaves us with PC Gamer, who seems to believe the gamers are the Maxim demographic, and "Games for Windows Magazine" (nuff said). Computer Games was the most intelligent of the PC game magazines remaining.
I do retain hope that a white knight will show up; this is a viable property, I believe, if it can be pried lose from TheGlobe.com. Of course, I'm looking for capital myself, so there's not a lot I can do. But still--this sucks.
===
Geez, and I schmoozed with an upbeat Steve Bauman at GDC. What shitty news to come home to. And oh yeah... nice review of
Play with Fire in the (last?) most recent issue.
posted by Greg at 9:29 PM
28 comments
A friend of mine is a contributing editor there, and had begun to write more and more for them... this is definitely a remarkably low blow for a magazine that honestly did try to do something more with the format than re-hash press releases.
CG has been really decent about giving coverage to indie games. I'm sorry to see them on the way out.
-Erik
"it's not clear to me why Gamasutra is relating the closing of Computer Games to that lawsuit."
That was the reason given to staff. I assume one of Gamasutra's sources was a staffer.
Actually, it leaves us only one.
The Escapist (Magazine).
PC Gamer and GWM are not even worthy contenders to bother with.
That 220,000 subscription number is heavily inflated though. I spent some time at theglobe.com a while back and it was well known even then among staff that it was a false number.
Sorry, but CGM was the best of the CG magazines, especially at its height as Computer Games Strategy Plus. For example, while PC Games and CGW were raving, RAVING about Black & White, Bill Abner and myself knew better, giving it a mediocre 3 (of 5) star review.
Strategy Plus/CGS+/CGM never paid attention to the hype. Steve Bauman, Bill Abner, Cindy Yans... they were all the best. Here's to resurrection of CGM sometime soon, I hope.
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