Bravo Screenfun

~ the obituary ~

Bauer brought out a one-off Bravo Screenfun special cover-dated April 1997, which reached German newsstands in May, and then waited. The second issue did not arrive until November, and only from that point was the magazine actually monthly. It belonged to the Bravo family next to Bravo Girl and Bravo Sport, which meant it inherited the house rule of addressing every reader as du, and it aimed squarely at the age where a games magazine doubles as a way of finding out what everyone else is playing.

I never read it, and the reason is duller than distance: it was in German. The magazine wrote to German teenagers about release dates set by German ratings and German retail, and none of that travels. What traveled was the format, roughly a hundred pages wrapped around a disc, which every market worked out for itself.

The disc did most of the work. Each issue carried a CD and later a DVD-ROM loaded with demos and cheats, and occasionally episodes of a TV series like King of Queens, an odd inclusion in a games magazine and a precise signal of who Bauer thought was buying it. Issues normally appeared on the third-to-last Wednesday of the month.

By the fourth quarter of 1998 the IVW auditors counted 206,686 copies sold per month. A year later the number was 266,531. In June 2000 Bauer put out a release announcing a record for the previous month: more than 380,000 copies of a single issue.

~ the case file ~

~ the record month ~

May 2000 was the ceiling, and the shape of that number is worth a moment. A monthly magazine for German teenagers, about PC and console games, moving 380,000 units in thirty days. The cover disc was the reason: in a country where broadband was still years from ordinary, a DVD-ROM of demos was the cheapest way to try fifteen games you were never going to buy.

The audited quarterly figures stayed in that territory for a while. 194,970 at the end of 2000, 227,348 at the end of 2001, 176,764 at the end of 2002, still 168,555 at the end of 2004. Four years of drift rather than decline, and nothing in them looks like a death sentence.

~ down to a tenth ~

Then it fell off a cliff. The end-of-year figure went 132,638 in 2005, 63,013 in 2006, 44,706 in 2007, 16,229 in 2008. The German Wikipedia puts it plainly: total sold circulation dropped to a tenth of its value inside five years. Broadband arrived and demos moved to download, which removed the single best reason to buy the magazine.

Bauer kept intervening. Issue 05/2006 was a relaunch with a friendlier look and five new sections replacing the old hardware-and-software split. In May 2007 the title moved from Munich to Hamburg, the Munich editorial staff under founding editor-in-chief Anatol Locker was dissolved, and from then on the magazine reviewed only games rated under 16 by the USK while the hardware pages were cut entirely. In May 2008 Bauer wound up Inter Games KG and relieved the Screenfun editorial team of its duties; an external editorial office supplied the contents afterward.

So by its final year the magazine was being produced by contractors for a narrowed age bracket, minus the hardware coverage that had been half its original remit. From issue 05/2008 it also carried cinema and television news under a new editor-in-chief, Holger Reher, who had come from the DVD-Magazin. Reviewing fewer games and more films is what a games magazine does when it is hunting for a reader other than the one it has.

~ the plan for 2010 ~

In April 2009 the trade press reported that Bravo Screenfun's revenue had fallen 60.9 percent against the same period a year earlier. One month later, on 18 May, Bauer announced the closure. Golem and DWDL both carried it the same day. Issue 06/2009 was the last, and the audited sale for the first quarter of that year was 11,616 copies.

Bauer did not present it as a straight shutdown. The gap was to be covered online by a gaming section on bravo.de, and from 2010 Screenfun was to continue as a free supplement inside Bravo itself. That is the announced plan as the sources recorded it in May 2009. What the brand had already stopped being by then was a magazine anybody worked on full time.

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