I bought the first issue of Massive magazine this week. Covering the massively multiplayer online gaming genre, it offered a digital subscription option, and I decided to give it a try for the first couple of (quarterly) issues.
Within a couple of minutes, I received an email with a link to the magazine, which appears as zoomable png files with a navigation bar at the top of the page. The first thing I noticed was the advertising: they must have been offering some pretty good packages, because there is a lot of it at launch, for Blizzard, SOE, Vanguard and most of the rest of the big players in the MMO marketplace. In all, there were twenty-three pages of ads out of the one hundred pages of magazine. Another twelve pages were covers, graphical padding, contents pages and the like, leaving about sixty-five pages for actual content.
Sixty-five pages isn't bad, but it depends what you're looking for. Twelve pages were given over to "What's Next": news on what the next expansions for each of the bigger games in the marketplace. Then fifteen pages were dedicated to "Coming Soon": a list of upcoming releases over the next 18-24 months, with more minor current and upcoming games in the sidebars. I found some of this interesting, but it's very sponsor-friendly stuff. It was interesting what went where: Dark and Light was relegated to a single paragraph in a sidebar when, nine months ago, it was the keenly anticipated release on MMORPG.com. In total, this meant that twenty-seven pages of the magazine were dedicated to a list of games and expansion packs. I suspect that this will have been by way of an intro, and that this will shrink into a six- or seven-page news item in later issues.
There were six "first-line" articles, ranging from a fairly soft and fluffy piece on hacking MMOs, through an interesting article on guilds, to a substantive look at UI mods for WoW, EQ2 and CoX. Generally, they were discussion pieces - farming, the history of the genre and so on - although there was one piece looking at a disastrous server rollback on EQ2 that was nicely different, and amusing to me as a developer. This was also the only piece that could have been seen as in any way negative about potential advertisers, and even then the EQ2 live team came out of the mess looking a lot more professional than probably would have seemed the case had one been there, watching, at the time.
There are the usual padding and page-filling pieces: hardware that you might like to use; a moderately-amusing explanation of MMO jargon; five questions to a dev; some made-up and unfunny letters to an agony aunt.
Finally, there are a bunch of editorial pieces by big names: Brad McQuaid, Raph Koster, Richard Bartle, Richard Garriot and Nick Yee. The latter is a researcher, and Bartle helped invent the genre, but the others have been involved in most of the A-list games since Ultima Online came out and began to popularise commercial MMOs. None of the pieces is terribly breathtaking, however. Nick's is good stuff, but you can read it all (and more) at the Daedalus Project. Raph's is stuff you can read on his blog every day. Richard Bartle's piece is less like his blog, and more like his postings on Terra Nova, where, having reached archwizard status and the end of his beloved Hero's Journey, he rarely posts articles any more but just comments on those of others. Brad is far more controversial when posting on the Vanguard or FoH boards. And Garriot writes about how useful instanced spaces can be: probably Brad is one of only a couple of dozen people in the world who disagree with him there. A head-to-head between such names on important areas would have been far more interesting than what turn out to be fairly meh pieces, all in all.
This is the problem with the magazine. More than just about any other genre of entertainment, those interested in buying this magazine will be reading blogs, forums, news sites and the rest. A quarterly magazine will not be providing news to a community where any announcement is read, dissected, cross-posted, flamed, trolled, parodied and even discarded within hours. Unlike normal games mags, it cannot provide gameplay hints when the readers are, by definition, connected to the internet and liable to be readers of Warcry, Allakhazam and the rest. And it is difficult for it to carve a niche for itself in the comment sphere when those who really care probably already read half a dozen developers blogs already.
I enjoyed reading Massive. It took up a couple of pleasant hours. But I had to pay for it. On the level of serious comment, The Escapist is first class and free, while Terra Nova provides a forum for discussion. And such sites don't need to fear offending advertising: considering the current Second Life discussions on TN, they don't even fear offending their contributors.
I hope that Massive finds its niche and prospers. I'm going to let my sub run for the meantime, just to see what they do next. But I'm glad I'm not the editor: carving out a unique and necessary space will be a challenge.