PC Player

» see pcplayer.de as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

PC Player was closed to me at the language layer. It was written in German for German readers and sold at German newsstands, while I was in Turkey reading whatever arrived in a language I could get at. That is the entire distance here, and it is worth stating plainly because the alternative is pretending I was ever a candidate for a subscription.

Heinrich Lenhardt and Boris Schneider-Johne started it in december 1992, coming out of the console side of German games journalism with an argument about audience. The readership for PC games was older and had more money than the console audience, so it did not need to be shouted at. The magazine would write in full sentences and assume the reader could take a negative verdict without a tantrum. The market agreed fast. By march 1994 it was moving 140,000 copies a month, and by 1996 it was the best-selling PC magazine in Europe.

The decline started in 1999 and it was structural rather than editorial. A monthly review of a game you can read about online the week it ships is a slower product than the thing it competes with, and the cover disc, which had been the actual reason a lot of people bought computer magazines, was being undercut by a download that no longer took all night.

The end still did not come from the readers. Future Verlag decided to withdraw from Germany altogether, and PC Player went with the rest of the German operation. Issue 6 of 2001 was the last one, the hundred and third. It carried an announcement for issue 7, which had already been planned and would never be printed. At the end the magazine was still selling around 88,700 copies a month with roughly 23,800 subscribers on the books, which is a circulation most publications would call a good year.

~ the record ~

~ what it was for ~

It is easy to forget how much information a games magazine was actually carrying in 1994. You could not watch the game before buying it, and there was no comment thread from people who already owned it. Nothing came with a refund window either. A magazine's verdict was the only thing standing between you and a box that cost real money and could not be returned.

That is why the tone mattered so much and why readers got so attached to specific writers. You were not reading criticism as entertainment, you were reading it as purchasing advice from the one person in the transaction with nothing to sell you. PC Player's reputation was built on being willing to say no, in a market where the advertising pages came from the same companies whose games were being reviewed.

~ the disc on the cover ~

The other half of the value was physical. A cover disc carried demos and patches, and on a 33.6k modem a patch could be an evening's work or an impossibility depending on the file size. Buying the magazine was, for a lot of people, buying the disc, with the writing as the thing that came attached.

Broadband dissolved that in a few years. Once the patch was a click, the disc became landfill, and half of what a computer magazine sold you was gone before anybody at the publisher had a plan for it. The magazines that survived did so by becoming something other than a delivery mechanism, and most of them did not manage it.

~ the day it stopped ~

The specific shape of this ending is what makes it worth a grave. PC Player did not fold after a slow public decline where everyone could see it coming and the last issue got a farewell letter. It was profitable enough to still be printing eighty-eight thousand copies, and it was killed by a decision made about a country rather than about a magazine.

Readers found out from the trade press. The staff found out not much earlier. An announcement for a next issue in a magazine that has no next issue is the most honest artifact this kind of death leaves behind, because it is the last page written by people who did not yet know.

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