gamesTM

» see gamestm.co.uk as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

The first issue came out in December 2002, published by Highbury Entertainment, styled with a small raised TM so that the name read as a joke about trademarks. It was a multiformat monthly, which in 2002 already meant something slightly old-fashioned: consoles and PC and handhelds and arcade in one magazine, at a time when the money in British games publishing was in licensed single-platform titles with a disc on the front.

Imagine Publishing took it over in 2006 and ran it for a decade out of Richmond House in Bournemouth, which is where a great deal of British magazine publishing quietly lived. ABC audited the circulation at 20,376 for 2007, 22,284 for 2008, 21,677 for 2009 and 20,013 for 2010, so the number held around twenty thousand while heading the way every print circulation was heading. Future plc bought Imagine's whole portfolio in 2016 and inherited it.

In October 2018 Future said the title had stopped paying for itself and gave it a closing date. Issue 206 reached the shelves on 1 November 2018 with Rage 2 on the cover and an editorial stating plainly that this was the final edition after sixteen years. Typing gamestm.co.uk now takes you to GamesRadar, the website belonging to the same publisher that closed it.

~ the case file ~

~ licensed abroad ~

Under Imagine the magazine was licensed into German and Dutch editions, and that licensing is where my own distance from it sits. A British multiformat monthly travels abroad by licensing deal, and these deals went to Germany and the Netherlands. The Turkish games press of those same years was its own ecosystem with its own titles, and a monthly out of Bournemouth had no route into it.

By 2018 the magazine was still coming out monthly in English and in German, so some of the last people reading it in print were reading it in translation.

~ what it was for ~

Being multiformat was the whole pitch. The licensed magazines had to be nice about the platform holder paying for the license, and the single-format magazines had to pretend their format mattered most. gamesTM could review a PlayStation game and a PC game in the same issue without an institutional reason to prefer either, and it carried a standing retro section long before nostalgia became a publishing category of its own.

~ issue 206 ~

GamesMaster, which Future also closed that week, had been going since 1993 and had a television show behind it. gamesTM had sixteen years and no television show, and it went on exactly the same day. Edge came through it, so the last long-running British multiformat monthly belonged to the publisher that had just canceled two of them.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »