The Fall of the Italian Magazines

"Ciao, buy this, that, and the other... You need just a click above!!"

There was a time, many years ago, where the italian videogame magazines was very amusing, home-bred, true! I remember that time with a sort of homesickness, and , maybe, with some remorse.

Today everything changed.


Advertising exists from the beginning, this is not a news. Unfortunately there wasn't the high-speed internet connections in that time, and it's there the main rule of a magazine, foundamental for the society.
This could be applied also to different areas from the videogames one, but the main sadness I feel is caused by the way that magazines followed : Marketing.

A respectable informatic magazine have 3 essential things:
- The paper magazine
- A CD/DVD full of prorams , games and demo .
- An advanced Homepage.

1. Times ago, till 2000 a.d. , the paper version of the magazine was bought relatively for the reviews, interviews, and depending on the number and the quality of the interesting contents...
2. Times ago, the CDs were full of trakers for digital music passionates, thousands of images, some videos, many demos and , the more advances magazines, some direct interviews of the developers. Thes special areas were cured inside HTML pages, very pleasant to read...
3. Times ago, an homepage where the internet surfers found the possibility to regroup themselves (i.e. Forum, amatorial mods links, chat) and of course there were a lot of interesting functions that the paper versione cannot assolve.
   

But now, how the world changed now in 2007 ?

1. The Paper version isn't readed such as before: there is Internet. A review today, is bought only if the ENCLOSED VIDEOGAME is good, otherwise there is no hope for a paper magazine. This forced a progressive destruction of the magazine areas, and a general razionalization of the pages. Anyway the paper content is secondary to the GAME of the review... and the price defend this theory (about 7 euro for every magazine).
2. CD have now an ".exe" interface that introduce you to the content. I've never appreciated the abort of interfaces that the magazines gives : they are really bad coded (probably because they change every 2 months and they generally are in flash format). The contents are DEMO, trailers, some utilities, and see ya! The game, instead, is very accurated in the presentation and you can also recreate the shop box of the game rotating the 2-side printed paper... but if you don't like the game, there isn't a cheap version with magazine plus demo.
3. The Magazines Homepages are apparently very good... but: advertising everywhere. You read 2 lines and you load 3. If you open a news you are interrupted by advertising middle pages. If you think to clik a line and Tac!, a pop-up cames from behind and get the click, so you lose your 2-minutes-to-load page of the magazine for a uninteresting page... and so on. It's like to be inside a mined field.
   

To conclude , the world change but it's not sure that this is a good representation of the progress.
There could be also a REGRESSION !!

Amen,
now I don't buy any magazines, but enclosed videogames.

Ah, if you need and italian link that montly suggest the magazine and the relative game, take a look down here:
VIDEOGAMES ALLEGATI ALLE RIVISTE
At least this link is useful... and ironic to me.

Lord Hol Napult