Beckett Massive Online Gamer
It seems like the new cool thing to do is start up a magazine about massively multiplayer online games. This time, it’s Beckett with plans to launch an MMO magazine called “Beckett Massive Online Gamer.” I’m not going to comment on this one specifically, because I covered it with the announcement of Massive Magazine in this post. It’s both interesting to see magazines focusing on the genre and to see Beckett create this as their entry into the gaming magazine market.
Given Beckett’s history of producing price guides for collector industries, I assume that this will also contain a monthly virual exchange rate that they hope will become a monthly standard. Smart on their part to jump out ahead of everyone and try to come up with a centralized place to keep up with it. This isn’t the baseball card industry though. I am eager to see how well it is accepted. I suspect it won’t be around after year one.
I just don’t see how a print magazine (especially one about online “life”) can hope to compete against online media.
I think mags like PC Gamer (and others) have succeeded (at times) and manage to hang on because they were “there” somewhat before online media became big.
MMO players are all about being online, so naturally they will (imo) tend to gravitate toward online resources for their news and information. I guess it depends on what “extras” they’ll be giving away with the mag (CD/DVD or whatever), but as Cyanbane said, I don’t see this (or Massive Magazine) lasting long.