PLAY Magazine

» see gamesradar.com/playmagazine as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

the official uk playstation magazine was a UK newsstand product i could only ever look at from outside. turkish gaming press in the late 1990s was a different ecosystem. PC Magazin türkiye and oyungezer covered console news in passing. the imported UK gaming monthlies sat in the english-language section of bigger bookshops in ankara at a heavy markup. i flipped through them. i did not buy a subscription, and i was a PC gamer who was on counter-strike at the internet cafe by 2002 not on the ps1 demo disc.

PLAY's lineage runs straight through future publishing's print era. the magazine launched in november 1995 as the official uk playstation magazine, on the newsstand the same month the original gray ps1 went on sale in the UK. future ran it under the OPM-UK name for 25 years across the ps1, ps2, ps3, ps4 and the first two years of the ps5. demo discs glued to the cover were a circulation lever in the 1996 to 2003 window. the magazine had review-score authority that sony cared about. it survived edge merging back into future. it survived the imagine publishing acquisition in 2016. it survived the digital-only transition pressure that closed PC Zone in 2010 and PC Gamer's print edition arc.

in may 2021 future rebranded the magazine. the OPM name was retired. PLAY took over with the same editorial team and a less official tone. the rebrand framed it as a deliberate split from sony, the magazine would still cover playstation but would not be a marketing surface. it ran for 46 issues over three years under the PLAY name. on september 26 2024 the team announced issue 46 would be the last. the final print run reached newsstands on october 15 2024 with a december cover date and a metal gear solid delta hands-on preview on the cover. the editorial farewell ran inside.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ what it was at peak ~

in 2000 the print game press in english had three centers of gravity. EGM and gamepro in north america, edge in the UK for the broad market, and the official console magazines (OPM-UK for sony, official nintendo magazine UK and computer and video games for the others) for the platform-loyal reader. OPM was the sony part of that map. it had access to first-party studios that no independent magazine could match. the demo disc was the killer feature, a piece of physical media that sat next to your console for a month and let you play three or four upcoming games before release. the disc cost future a lot to produce and was a moat against competition while it lasted.

the magazine ran at over 150 pages an issue at peak with reviews, previews, hardware guides, mods, retro features. the review scoring was a numerical scale with a recommended-by-OPM stamp for top titles. the letters page mattered. the cheat code section mattered through the ps2 era. the readers were loyal across the brand changes because the editorial team was the same people, year over year, for most of the run.

~ the slow part of the death ~

the demo disc died with the ps3 generation when online demos through PlayStation Network became the obvious replacement. that took one of the magazine's structural advantages off the table. the review window also closed. games journalism moved to the web through 2004 to 2010. by the late 2000s ign and gamespot were where reviews showed up first and where readers checked scores. print monthlies that printed reviews six weeks after release were reading a different timeline than their audience.

future trimmed the print line through the 2010s. PSM3, PSW and the other sony-adjacent titles were folded back into OPM-UK. the rebrand to PLAY in 2021 was a holding action. the audience that still bought print magazines was older and shrinking. ad pages followed. by 2024 the math did not work for a monthly print run, even with future's gamesradar online business holding the editorial team's day jobs together.

~ the 2024 cluster ~

PLAY was the second major english language video game print monthly to close in 2024. game informer shut down on august 2 2024 when gamestop laid off the editorial team after 33 years and 354 issues. PLAY followed on october 15 with 46 issues under the PLAY name and a 29 year run across the OPM brand. these were the two longest-running print-game monthlies in north america and the UK. their deaths bracketed the final breakup of the 1990s game-print model.

the PLAY editorial team was retained at gamesradar after the print closure. the website still publishes the same kind of coverage. the print artifact that ran from a 1995 newsstand with the original ps1 demo disc to a 2024 newsstand with a metal gear solid hands-on preview is the part that ended. future has not committed to another print monthly to replace it.

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