Official Xbox Magazine

» see oxmonline.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

The word official in a magazine title is a contract, not an adjective. Microsoft's Xbox publisher license agreements from 2000 name the Official Xbox Magazine by title, as a channel the platform holder could push game demos through. That paperwork existed before the magazine did, and it is the first thing worth knowing about a publication that also had to run reviews with numbers on them.

It started in november 2001 alongside the first Xbox, after a preview issue handed out at E3 that summer. Future ran an American edition and a British one in parallel and the two drifted until they were different magazines wearing the same logo. The US version was the large one at 425,000 copies a month. Britain sat under seventy thousand.

Turkish newsstands never carried it and i was not on a console in those years anyway. The Xbox showed up in Turkey as an import rather than a shelf product, and the people around me who cared about games in 2002 were in internet cafes playing counter-strike on PCs. This one is read from outside the countries it was printed for.

~ the dossier ~

~ what the word official bought ~

Access, mostly. An official magazine gets the code early and gets the announcement on its cover, and in exchange the console itself is never really on trial. The interesting thing is what OXM did inside that boundary. It scored out of ten, called a ten a Classic rather than a perfect, and then printed a score of 11.0 on the scale under the name Mecha Godzilla's Choice with the description "The unicorn. Will never happen. Never."

Twenty games got a ten across the whole run, BioShock and Skyrim among them. A scale with a permanently unreachable top is a small joke, but it is also a magazine telling its readers where the ceiling is, which is more honesty than the licensing arrangement strictly required.

~ the disc did a second job ~

Every issue came with a disc of demos and trailers, which by 2005 was the normal deal for a games magazine. The unusual part is that OXM's discs also carried the backward compatibility software for the Xbox 360, so people without broadband or an Xbox Live connection could get their old games running off a magazine cover. A monthly publication was doing system update delivery for a console manufacturer.

The discs carried other things that were not demos. Issue 53 had a free beta of Final Fantasy XI on it. Issue 67 carried two quests for Oblivion. The run ended in january 2012 at disc number 131, with the magazine explaining that readers had said they no longer wanted the DVD and the magazine had listened.

~ the last issue ~

The American half went first. Future cut a third of its US staff in 2014 and folded the American site into the British one, and in february 2015 OXM and every other Future games site was redirected into GamesRadar, the same clearance that took Computer and Video Games with it. The print magazine kept going in Britain for another five years with Stephen Ashby editing it.

Future announced the closure on 30 march 2020, alongside five other titles, saying it was being forced into difficult decisions and had a duty of care to staff. The pandemic took the print advertising market apart in about three weeks and a licensed console monthly was never going to be the thing a publisher protected. The final issue was dated may 2020, eighteen and a half years after the first one. oxmonline.com still answers today, and what answers is GamesRadar.

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