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Fact: Most gamemaker magazines fail

Continuing my search for gamemaker magazines I came across a site called omgili, which seems to steal, *cough*, I mean archive, the content of a number of forums.

The topic, of which the GMC original appears to have been deleted, starts when a member introduces his proposals for a magazine devoted to gamemaker, only to have his ideas ripped apart by forum members. One response I was particularly interested in way was the final one on the page where a member lists the URLs of 10 similar projects which were started and failed to get off the ground.

Of the 10 URLs only 5 were still available at the GMC. Many of these magazines had their ideas dashed early on, and some didn’t even get any responses at all.

In October 2005 Fox_USA only attracted unenthusiastic responses for a day before the topic died, poor grammar in his opening post can’t have helped create the image of professionalism which these gamemaker magazines need.

A month later Microcrow announced that his mum had thrown out his copies of the magazine he had been producing (no, I don’t believe him) and he was looking for copies of it so he could continue producing it.

In August ’05 GM6.info’s second eddition of Mark Up magazine was a flop, full of shameless self-promotion for their site, magazine and forums and missing its key title article. Interestingly the members of GM6 who went on to found GMKing have relaunched the magazine under the same name which was certainly a brave move. We’ll have to wait until early May to see if they get past the second issue again.

In September of the same year, 2005 was obviously the year of the failed gamemaker mag, renoman made what I consider to be one of the best introductions possible to his gamemaker magazine Game Maker Industry Review, however for some reason the rest of the Game Maker Community decided that all his efforts didn’t even warrant a single reply.

What do you think?

6 Comments

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  1. I had a game maker magazine which was featured on the game maker site. It was called Game Maker Gaming Mag. It lasted one issue because by the time I finished the second issue it was well past it’s used by date. The main issue is these magazines take a lot of time to produce, and so usually it’s hard to produce them every month on your own.

  2. Okay, well you can take what you like from the blog and I will also send you some seperate unpublished articles on game distribution from time to time.

  3. I certainly think it’s brave that you decided to relaunch the mag under the same name, especially seeing as it didn’t receive many compliments in its old format.

    Taking articles for the magazine is no problem, so long as attribution is present, I have added Creative Commons licence details on the about page. I was going to write separate article for MarkUp, to avoid them already being pre-published on gamemaker blog, however if you would prefer to pick and choose then that is no problem.

  4. A seperate article would always be better, ofcourse. My point was that I like commentaries and rants as articles, too.

  5. Wow! You discovered GM6.info’s deep, dark, secret! I’m impressed 😛

    Well, after our original MarkUp issue 2, the staff member in charge of it went into some sort of wierd depression and suddenly quit the forum, magazine, and site. We’ve been talking about relaunching for a while now, so I hope it all goes good 😛

    Also, I’ve been thinking.. we need some rants like that and the one about forums for the mag. Would you mind if we take one of those entries for issues 4 or 5, with a very nice link to the site?

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New GMers jumping in at the deep end

Clone forums suck