Games for Windows: The Official Magazine… No Longer a Magazine

This past November, we posted a news item that posed the question, “Are Gaming Magazines Going to Die?”, but sadly, that answer has been known for a while. The fact has only been strengthened today, as news comes from the Games For Windows: The Official Magazine, which is now dropping the “Magazine” part of its name.

From now on, the magazine will remain as an online-only publication. It’s unknown whether it will be available in a PDF format or even follow a similar layout as the magazine, but that should soon be seen. The sad reality is that Games for Windows will not likely be the last magazine to cease producing paper magazines, for all-to-obvious reasons.

I admit I’ve never even cracked the cover of the magazine, but it’s sad to see any gaming magazine close shop, especially magazines are all we could rely on for years on end. Nintendo Power for the win! (The old ones, the new ones are appalling).

Editor-in-chief Jeff Green, whose columns I enjoyed for a number of years, has written a eulogy of sorts on his 1UP blog, wherein he laments the state of the industry yet simultaneously accepts that Internet publishing is the future. It’s simple economics, really: continue to chop down trees and ship them off every which way, or upload a couple of HTML files to a central server?

Source: CrunchGear