Xbox World

~ the obit ~

Xbox World put its first issue on sale on 17 April 2003, thirteen months after the console it covered had reached European shops. The publisher was Computec Media, the editor was Pat Garratt, and the managing editor was Tony Horgan, who had run CU Amiga in the previous decade. Within months it belonged to somebody else. Future plc bought it in late 2003 along with its sister title PlayStation World, and most of the staff did not follow the move from London to Future's offices in Bath.

Lee Hall edited the first Future issue. In September 2005 the thing relaunched as Xbox World 360 with Tim Weaver brought across from NGC, and in that shape it did the best numbers of its life: 31,030 copies an issue between July and December 2008, audited and certified. The package was heavy for a games monthly. Each issue arrived with a book of achievements and walkthroughs plus a four-hour double-sided disc, a DVD side and a high definition side, which was a reasonable thing to ship for a console sold on the second format.

Microsoft's console had almost no presence where I lived. The internet cafes I used in Turkey from 2002 onward were PC rooms, wall to wall, and the game they ran was Counter-Strike. An Xbox was a thing in a shop window at an import price, so a British monthly about owning one had no reader within a thousand kilometers of me.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the computec handover ~

Computec Media was a German publisher with a British arm, and it launched two console magazines into a market Future already owned. Selling both of them to Future a few months later was the whole arc of that experiment. Future acquired a masthead and a license to keep printing, while the editorial staff stayed in London and the magazine moved to Bath without them.

That handover set the pattern for the next nine years. Xbox World changed its name to follow the hardware, changed it back when the hardware stopped being new, and shared writers and pages with PSM3 down the corridor so openly that the trade press described the two as magazines that swapped content.

~ the 2011 reset ~

The September 2011 issue came out of a redesign, and by November 2011 the 360 had been dropped from the title and it was Xbox World again. Tim Weaver's last issue as editor was the Christmas 2011 one. He moved up to managing editor and Andy Hartup came over from PSM3 to take the chair, which meant one person was now shaping both of the magazines Future would shut a year later.

~ the day it died ~

Future told the trade press on 13 November 2012 that it was closing Xbox World and PSM3 together. Clair Porteous, the company's head of entertainment, put it in a statement to CVG: after careful consideration the decision had been made, and the final issues of both would go on sale on 12 December. The reason given was a strategy of accelerating digital growth across the brand business, and the number quoted in the same breath was 14 million unique users across Future's gaming sites.

Xbox World's own Facebook page gave readers the count: issue 126 would be the last. Future kept the Official Xbox Magazine, which it printed under license from Microsoft, and let the unofficial one go. The magazine never had a domain of its own either, just a section of computerandvideogames.com, and that address stopped answering years ago.

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