GMWeekly have today released their 15th issue (download) which means they have now produced as many issues as MarkUp and more issues than any other Game Maker magazine.
Earlier this week I spoke to the creator of the magazine, Darren Poole, and asked him about the idea behind GMWeekly and got his thoughts on the magazine’s future.
Why did you decide to launch GMWeekly?
Well, I sort of felt that there was a gap in the ‘market’ if you like. I thought about what other GameMaker magazines lacked – consistency (in releasing issues). I thought I’d overcome this problem by releasing a relatively short GameMaker magazine and making sure that I never get a gigantic team working on it. Also, I was failry bored when I started it up and I wanted something that would keep me busy throughout each week.
You decided to focus more on news than the other features included in the already established magazines – is this something you thought was missing from the community?
Well yes, although of course there are a couple of GameMaker news blogs that I’m aware of. I thought it would make a change to the norm by making the magazine not so similar to exisiting ones. Another reason is because I find news easy to report on, in comparison to writing technical articles and tutorials about GameMaker.
Did you really think that you would still be producing at 15 issues, considering the vast majority of Game Maker magazines produce only very few issues?
Well I planned to keep it going for as long as I feasibly could. I thought that if I could get a decent backing from the GMC I would be able to keep going to until the end of the year at least. I wasn’t sure if people would like the publication and I was somewhat surprised at the fact that quite a few praised if after Issue #1 – it was a pretty poor issue and I should have put more effort into it. I didn’t really think about the record of other GameMaker magazines. Just because they may have failed, that didn’t mean I was going to.
Where do you see GMWeekly in 3 months time?
Hopefully the publication should be still around. Maybe people will become bored of it, but we’ll just have to see. I’m becoming increasingly busy now, with GCSE tests looming and A-levels on the horizon. Though I still think that my determination will carry the magazine forward. Crikey – in three months, I would be releasing Issue #27 or there abouts!
See also: GMB reaction to GMWeekly’s first issue, GameMaker Magazine releases.
I’ve been catching up on the back issues; your magazine just gets stronger and stronger with each edition.
And I really appreciated the nice write-up of Quarterly # 4 in your October 17th issue.
Nice MarkUp review! Thanks! 🙂
Not to squash the achievement, but, technically GMWeekly is a newspaper, or newsletter; not a magazine. I think if you went by number of content pages, or number of words; you’d find it was considerably behind the monthly magazines methinks.
Still, 15 prints in, I believe, 16 weeks is a great achievement, and is worth being proud of!
Robin