If you thought that the days of computer gamers thumbing through magazines was over, you are wrong. It turns out that the print industry is more alive than most people think – and there’s a growing market for it. It turns out that gamers sometimes want to set aside their controllers, mice and keyboards and experience the simple pleasure of thumbing through plasticated pages that smell a little funny.
In light of this, a new magazine is coming out designed by gamers, for gamers. It’s called From Gamers Magazine and is the result of a kickstarter project which managed to produce around $5,000 to print the magazine’s first two issues.
The idea is to produce a community-backed gaming magazine that will provide honest, original content for gamers sick and tired of developers and publishers buying off regular review publications.
2020 and 2021 have both been dreadful years for gamers. High-profile developers released a series of duds that failed to inspire or actively insulted gamers’ intelligence. And “official” reviewers who are supposed to keep quality high put out ridiculous reviews that claimed that terrible games were actually “critically acclaimed.”
Gamers also had to put up with a new wave of internet marketing techniques that acted more like clickbait instead of high-quality links. The whole tone of the games media has shifted and now those in-depth stories that used to make video game magazines great have all but disappeared.
From Gamers Magazine
From Gamers Magazine, is, therefore, attempting to address these grievances. The community wants to fall back in love with video games all over again and needs journalists to lead the charge. But it knows that companies owned by mainstream organizations aren’t going to provide the honest and original content that they want. And so they are now having to look elsewhere.
From Gamers is arriving at just the right time. Hardcore games feel like the industry is perpetually letting them down and they need a champion who can help them retake some of the power and influence that they used to have. The hope is that the publication will allow them to separate the wheat from the chaff – showing them what is just clickbait and differentiating it from what is actually decent.
From Gamers is going to make QR code segments a thing too, so readers can get more information on specific topics and deals via their phones. So beyond just turning real pages, gamers are going to get an interactive experience as well.
Naturally, we don’t know a great deal about this publication yet – and we won’t until a physical version of the first copy arrives. But we are being promised high-fidelity images on each page and plenty of good gaming journalism. Unfortunately, given the limited budget of the publication at the moment, it might be some time before it starts benefiting from quality editing. However, if the writers can effectively communicate what they are trying to achieve, they could be onto a real winner, securing a solid circulation.
