Total PC Gaming

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

~ the obit ~

Imagine Publishing announced it in October 2007 and the first issue reached shops on 8 November, a monthly covering PC games and the MMOs that were still supposed to be the future. Russell Barnes took over as editor from issue 2 and stayed until the end.

Launching a PC games magazine in late 2007 meant walking into a market Future had owned since 1993 with PC Gamer, and where it published PC Zone as well. The audience was already halfway onto the web, Steam was four years old, and the people who bought a monthly for the cover disc had mostly stopped needing one. Total PC Gaming lasted 31 issues, which in that climate was not a bad run.

On 20 March 2010 a letter went out to subscribers saying issue 31 would be the final magazine, with refunds or an alternate title offered. MCV confirmed the closure on 22 March. The staff kept their jobs inside Imagine, and Barnes moved across to Linux User.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ what the publisher said ~

Damian Butt put out a statement the following day. Imagine had reviewed the magazine and decided to close it with immediate effect, and the reason given was the widespread delisting of PC games magazines by retailers. He also said the title had been profitable, and that the team deserved to work on something with more future in it.

That is an unusual thing for a publisher to say out loud. The stated problem was not the readership and not the accounts, it was shelf space, and a magazine that is not on a rack can only sell to the people who already subscribe. Future closed PC Zone later the same year.

~ the turkish side of this ~

This was a £3.99 British rack product, which put it out of reach by default, and by 2008 every graphics card argument I wanted was already waiting free in donanimhaber threads, the same evening the parts were announced. TTNet had been carrying those threads to my desk since 2006. Imagine's closure notice describes a problem with shops, and where I lived this magazine had never been in a shop at all.

~ where the address points now ~

Butt said totalpcgaming.com would keep running as part of the NowGamer network, and for a while it did. Imagine was bought by Future in a share deal worth £14.2m that completed on 21 October 2016, which put Retro Gamer and gamesTM under the same roof as the titles they had spent a decade competing with.

Type totalpcgaming.com today and you land on pcgamer.com. The address of the challenger now resolves to the incumbent it was launched against.

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