GameMaker Blog

Regardless of what it says above this is from the Jan-Feb 2010 issue

A serious question this.

Indie Game Magazine is a paid for 6-issues-a-year publication, available both online and in print, that features reviews of Indie games and articles aimed at the creators of such titles.

The cheapest normal subscription price is $19.95 a year (about $3.30 an issue) with an extra $5 on top if you want access to back issues and have access to “insider information” articles on the site. A print subscription costs $40 in the US and $50 in the UK and Canada.

Markup played with the idea of a printed edition long ago (images sadly were hosted elsewhere) and at least one other Game Maker magazine looked at the concept.

Indie Game Magazine are currently holding a “pay what you like” sale on the $24.95 subscription package.  I say “pay what you like” but when I tried to get it for free (you will find out why later) I discovered that wasn’t truly accurate as I was met with an error “product:j_id112: Validation Error: Specified attribute is not between the expected values of 1 and 10,000.”

I have seen issues of the magazine before and decided that it wasn’t worth paying $3.30 an issue for.  Essentially I judged the quality to be below that of GMTech which is available free.  It is also considerably shorter – excluding the cover, contents pages, advert pages etcetera there are 14 pages of material in the January-February 2010 issue.  It is not a bad magazine but I do not feel it merits a price tag when similar material is available on blogs – congratulations to the team behind it if they have been getting more than a handful of sales.

This brings me on to my main point.  At the bottom of the front cover the magazine has the following notice:

“Indie Game Magazine is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. All game logos, screenshots, artwork, trademarks, etc are property of their respective owner.“

A link to the license is here which states “You are free: to Share — to copy, distribute and transmit the work”.  So I just paid $1 to get something which it is perfectly legal to distribute freely.  I had previously found back issues of the magazine on the Internet freely available to download (although the sites they are uploaded to do also contain obviously illegal material).

I paid my $1 so you don’t have to.  Is there something I am missing here or would I be okay to upload/link to a copy?

Update: I have decided to make a download link available:  Download Indie Game Mag Issue 8 for Jan-Feb 2010 (13.1 MB). Not sure if this is what they intended but it is legally sound.  Please post your opinion of it here!