360 Gamer

» see 360-gamer.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

It went on sale on 27 October 2005, cover-dated December, 132 pages for £2.99, from a small independent publisher in Poole that also put out a manga magazine and a professional wrestling one. The Xbox 360 had not quite launched in Europe yet. Four other British magazines ended up covering the console, two from Future and two from Imagine, and exactly one of the five was official.

This one was not, and said so at every opportunity. It came out every three weeks rather than monthly, which is an awkward cadence that exists only to put you on the shelf more often than a monthly without the cost of a fortnightly, and it kept that rhythm for nine years. The joint editor's own summary near the end was 100 percent independent coverage of the Xbox 360 for almost eight years.

Print stopped on 16 September 2014, announced by the trade press rather than by the magazine. By then it had been through two name changes and was no longer about the Xbox 360, or about any single console. The final issue was number 145.

~ the case file ~

~ no disc in a bag ~

British games magazines in 2005 were sold in sealed plastic with a DVD and a tips booklet inside, and the cover price reflected the packaging more than the writing. 360 Gamer refused the whole arrangement. No bag, no disc, £2.99 against an average of nearly five, and the argument printed in its own press material was that the trailers everybody was burning to those discs could simply live on a website instead. It called the thing an Online Disc.

That argument was correct, and it was also a bet on the reader's connection. I had broadband at home from about 2006, so the download half would have worked fine for me. The other half never could: the magazine was a physical object sold in WHSmith and Asda to people walking past a shelf every three weeks, and that distribution system stopped at the British coast.

~ what the ABC table showed ~

The audited figures exist for this one, which is unusual at this size, and they tell the story without help. Second half of 2007: 13,928. A year later that had become 18,073, up nearly thirty percent, and the second half of 2009 came in at 18,527, which is as high as the magazine ever got.

Then the slide. First half of 2010 came in at 14,288, down almost a quarter on the half. December 2011 reported 13,124, another fourteen percent off. For scale, the Official Xbox 360 Magazine in that same 2008 table was selling 63,908 and Future's Xbox World 360 was on 31,030, so even at its own peak the independent was running at a bit over a quarter of the official title's circulation.

The cover price went the other way, as it always does. £2.99 held for 113 issues and then moved to £3.49 in July 2012 and to £3.99 in March 2013. Eight months, two increases, on a magazine that had built its identity on being the cheap one.

~ two renames and an app ~

Microsoft announced the Xbox One in May 2013 and the magazine changed its name with issue 130, on sale 17 July 2013, becoming ONE Gamer while promising not to abandon the older console. Ten months after that it was announced again as plain GAMER, multi-format, no console in the title at all. The magazine's own website never caught up with that second change and was still calling itself ONE Gamer in late June 2014.

Print ended that September and the brand moved to a free tablet app, GAMER Interactive, which ran to twenty five issues and stopped around March 2015. Pocketmags still sells the back catalog and still prints the sentence "This title no longer publishes new issues." The publisher outlived all of it by a decade and then filed to strike itself off in March 2025, dissolved on 27 May, accounts filed on time to the end, no administration and no insolvency. The domain is the only part with an afterlife: 360-gamer.com now redirects to a generic gaming content farm, which is the thing the magazine spent nine years refusing to be.

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