PlayStation World

~ the eulogy ~

PlayStation World put out its first issue with a February 2000 cover date, published in Britain by Computec Media, the UK arm of a German games publisher. It came out every four weeks, which works out at thirteen issues a year rather than twelve, and it was independent in the trade sense of the word, carrying no license from Sony and no obligation to be nice about a PlayStation game.

Future Publishing bought the UK side of Computec in February 2003 and PSW came with it. At that point the magazine was averaging 53,349 copies a month. Ian Dean edited it. Future already published the Official PlayStation Magazine and an unofficial title of its own, the one that would be carrying the name PSM3 by the end, so from 2003 onward the company was running three PlayStation magazines against each other on the same shelf.

That arrangement held for six years and then stopped holding. By 2007 the figure was 17,132, down roughly two thirds, sitting beside a claimed readership of 210,000, which is a softer number than a sales one and is quoted by the people selling the ad pages.

~ the dossier ~

~ the thirteenth of august ~

Future confirmed the closure on 13 August 2009, the same day it told the trade it would not be submitting its games magazines for ABC audit. MCV reported both in the same piece, leading with the audit decision and confirming the closure underneath it.

James Binns, Future's games portfolio publishing director, said the decision "was taken in response to decreasing demand", and framed what was left as a focus on the Official PlayStation Magazine plus a single independent title in PSM3. One member of the PSW team had already been moved to another role; four more were in talks about other jobs across Bath and London.

~ what independent was worth ~

The magazine put the word on its own cover, billing itself as the UK's best-selling independent PlayStation magazine, and the word carried real weight in Future's announcement too. PSW had no official license, which cost it early access to review code and bought it the freedom to say a PlayStation game was bad in a month when one was. Future's resolution of the problem was to keep the official magazine and exactly one unofficial one, and PSW was not the one.

~ the distance on this ~

I was online through the whole of PSW's run and the PlayStation was everywhere around me, but a four-weekly British magazine at a British cover price was not something a Turkish newsstand carried. Consoles arrived here through importers and the discs mostly arrived copied, which is an economy that does not generate a magazine industry, because there is no publisher buying ad pages to sell you a game you are going to buy legitimately.

What I read instead was the web, free and in English, which is the same thing that was draining PSW's circulation from the other end. The reader Future lost between 2003 and 2009 did not stop caring about PlayStation games. They stopped paying a cover price to read about them.

~ the name came back without them ~

In February 2011 a new PlayStation World appeared, also abbreviated PSW, with its own domain and forum and a YouTube channel. Wikipedia describes it as new and separate and cites nothing at all for the section, and no Future announcement connects the two. A magazine brand that nobody renewed is cheap to pick up, which is most of what happened here.

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