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GMWeekly and Magazine Stats

Darren Poole has released his sixth issue of GMWeekly (mediafire dl) – one day late. This means that GMWeekly has now released as many issues as GameMaker Scope. If Weekly continues to release on-time it will have reached its 20th issue by the end of the year making it the GameMaker magazine which has released the most issues ever.

Obviously it should be noted that the magazines all have different release schedules, so we would not expect them each to release a certain number of issues per month. Russell’s Quaterly, for example, is actually ahead of schedule whilst GMWeekly are sticking to their promise of one issue per week.

From what I can see there appears to be a pattern in the release dates of magazines in their first few months. GMTech, MarkUp and Scope all took at least a months break after their first issue was released, then managed to produce several months of back-to-back releases (MarkUp released issues in 11 consecutive months!), before slipping to less regular releases.

Exceeding the expectations of some GMWeekly has managed to stick to its schedule of releasing every Friday before today.  Prior to the release today it has received around 85 downloads from its primary host per issue. The short issue length and limited degree of coverage (of GameMaker news which can be found elsewhere) may contribute to these relatively low download figures – however the magazine hasn’t even been around for 2 months yet, so given more time I expect recognition of the magazine to increase.

What are your thoughts on the regularity of magazine releases? Does it even matter?

What do you think?

5 Comments

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  1. I really would like a little more regularity out of some of the GM magazines. Not only is it a sign of more professionalism, it is also something that helps popularity because users can always count on it at a certain time. When they release with less of a schedule, people tend not to think about the magazine.
    -Elmernite

  2. It is not always easy to release an issue [i]always[/i] on time Elmernite. I am sure that a lot of the other magazines would agree with me?

    Anyway, that table is slightly out of wack, I never released an issue in November of 2007, or any part of 2007 for that matter.
    Here is a link to the fixed version I’ve made:
    http://img207.imageshack.us/img207/7630/gmbstatsyn2.png

    But the only reason I believe that GM Weekly is getting an issue out ever week is because all it is is getting some known news from somewhere, rewriting it into the magazine, and there, you have your 4 or 5 pages worth.

    Personally, I would like to see some more content in the magazine, because, downloading it and being able to read it in less then 5 minutes can be quite annoying [56kbps Dial-Up].

    But it’s an alright magazine overall, though it would be more of a newsletter then Magazine.

    I was actually wondering where Russell’s Quarterly is, It’s been a little while since we last heard from his magazine.

    -Matt

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