Aktueller Software Markt

~ the goodbye ~

ASM was already three years dead by the time I got a modem. It closed in february 1995 and I came online in 1998, so this is a magazine I have only ever read about, in a language I do not read well, from a country whose home computer press I was not in a position to buy. That distance is worth stating up front, because the interesting part of this grave is what Germany already had while I was still waiting for a phone line to do something useful.

The first issue appeared in march 1986 from Tronic-Verlag in Eschwege, and the cover announced it as the first computer software journal in Germany. The opening editorial promised games and application software in the same pages, which says something about how undivided the category still was. Nobody had settled yet whether a computer magazine belonged to people who played or to people who worked.

It drifted toward games the way nearly all of them did. By the early nineties ASM was a games magazine still carrying a name about software markets, and eventually the name gave in. Issue 12/1993 turned it into ASM Das Spaß-Magazin. Issue 11/1994 stretched that into ASM Das Computer-Spaß-Magazin. A title rewritten twice in fourteen months is a title being argued about in a room somewhere above the editor.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the breakout ~

Manfred Kleimann ran the magazine from the first issue to the end of 1991, which is most of its good years, and two more editors handled the rest. The publisher changed hands in 1990 when Tronic-Verlag was sold into the WEKA group in Kissing, and a small house magazine became a line item in a large one. Nothing visible broke at that moment. It rarely does.

What ASM had was the thing that made eighties computer magazines matter: it was the only place the information lived. A German kid with a home computer in 1988 could not look up whether a game was worth the money. Someone in Eschwege decided that for them once a month, in print and weeks late.

~ the decline ~

The machines the magazine grew up on stopped selling. By 1994 the German market had gone to the PC, and a publication built across the whole home computer field was covering an audience that had scattered into one platform. Renaming it twice was an attempt to sell the same product to people who no longer identified as the readership it was designed for.

There is a version of this where the magazine survives by becoming a PC magazine. WEKA did not choose that. They chose to end the title and start a clean one.

~ what it became ~

Issue 2/1995 was the last, and from march the budget went to PC Spiel instead. That magazine ran until december 1996, which means the replacement outlived its own launch by less than two years and died younger than the thing it replaced. Nine years of accumulated name recognition were spent on a title that lasted twenty-two months.

This is the part that generalizes past Germany. Publishers keep treating a magazine's name as the disposable component and its market position as the durable one, when the ordering is the other way around. ASM had readers who bought it out of habit. PC Spiel had a demographic study.

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