Contributing relations

Not another GameMakerTech versus MarkUp post – oh yes.

Being the controversial guy that I am I can’t leave it alone, at least not this time when I look at the differing attitudes that the magazines have with their contributors.

Two magazines, tens of thousands of GameMaker users you would have thought those that had managed to survive this long would be flooded by contributions and would have to turn content away because of quality and space restrictions.

It doesn’t appear to work like this. Two magazines, total number of contributors, as listed in each magazine’s 7th issue, GMTech: 12, MarkUp: 11.

Whilst the impassioned pleas for contributions to MarkUp grow as incentives are introduced for writers, GameMakerTech have people applying for positions in their forum. This gives a good insight into the differences between the two mags with, in my opinion, GMTech being viewed as the ‘cooler’ and ‘in with the kids’ magazine. Perhaps this is because of their appeal to the none-coding section of GameMaker world, after all the majority of their recent issues have been reviews (this is not meant to be an offensive comment).

MarkUp on the other hand is definitely the more technical magazine, and I suspect is viewed as ‘dull’ by a large portion of the GMC. What’s wrong with the two magazines have different content and audiences? Nothing. But what’s wrong with a low number of active contributors – everything. More work for the other contributors, which I suspect may lead to some of them jumping ship sooner rather than later as the novelty of writing for a magazine soon wears off when they realise that they will be expected to produce content for each and every issue.

Just to clarify, before anything gets out of hand as it probably will anyway – this post is not making a dig at either of the magazine’s content or positioning in the marketplace. It is just me expressing my opinions on the differences between them, and my fear of what will eventually happen.