PSM3

» see psm3mag.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

The cover disc was the product. Future's writers would sit down in front of footage of a new game and talk over it for the length of a level, and the disc glued to the front of PSM3 each month was mostly that: reviewers arguing about a game while you watched it move. With a 56k dial-up line in Turkey in 2000, a disc full of video footage was unobtainable by any other route, which is the entire reason a magazine could charge for one.

It launched in October 2000 as PSM2, under Marcus Hawkins, as an unofficial PlayStation magazine. Unofficial mattered. Sony had its own licensed title and that title had to stay on terms with Sony; PSM2 did not, so it could be rude about a PlayStation game in a way the official magazine structurally could not. The name changed to PSM3 at issue 78, once the console it was named after had been superseded, and Daniel Dawkins took over as editor in 2006.

Once there was a TTNet broadband line in the house, around 2006, the magazine's core asset had stopped being scarce. Footage of a new game was a thirty-second download, and a commentary track about a game was something a stranger uploaded for free. The disc kept coming anyway, and in 2007 it gained a second side carrying high-definition trailers and game saves you could copy onto a console. That was a serious piece of work aimed at a scarcity that had already gone.

~ the case file ~

~ the leak ~

In 2006 the PSM3 team got hold of a PlayStation 3 outside Sony's control and filmed it running, then put the footage on YouTube through the magazine's blog. It became one of the most watched things on the site. Sony had it taken down quickly and it was immediately re-hosted by hundreds of other accounts, which was an early public lesson, for a print newsroom, in how little a takedown achieves.

The blog had been running independently since the middle of 2006 and was folded into the CVG network in early 2007, along with the other Future games titles. The magazine's own audience was by then partly a web audience, reading the same staff for nothing.

~ the last relaunch ~

In July 2011 PSM3 was redesigned to suit, in the magazine's own words, the needs of the modern adult gamer. The relaunch issue carried a Skyrim world exclusive. There were about seventeen months left.

~ both at once ~

Future announced on 13 November 2012 that PSM3 and Xbox World would both close. The final issues of both went on sale on 12 December 2012, twelve years after the first one. Xbox World had been the sister title on the other platform, reviewed by people working down the same corridor, and Future switched the pair of them off together.

psm3mag.com answers with a block page now and psm3.co.uk resolves to nothing at all. There was also an Australian edition, and the clearest surviving trace of either is on the Internet Archive, where readers have put up scanned issues and dumps of the cover discs.

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