A new Game Maker magazine, named “The Independent Gamer”, debuted its first issue yesterday.
Issue 1 includes an article on game theory, an interview with Game Maker user Notcturne on the Game Jam, snippets of news, and obligatory GM game reviews. There are 20 pages of content in total, including the front and back covers.
You can grab a copy of the magazine for the rather ambitious fee of $4.50USD for a printed edition. Additionally, you can also freely purchase a digital copy, but with a registered account at MagCloud.
A mirror of the digital version on Dropbox has also been provided for those who wish not to subscribe to the MagCloud service.
The magazine has been developed by the “surviving members” of IndieGo magazine, who subsequently failed to make three issues of their previous endeavor.
In a post on the Game Maker Community, The Independent Gamer states that IndieGo, which was established only two months a go during mid-September of 2011, has now folded.
IndieGo was perhaps best known for causing controversy after announcing a false partnership with YoYo Games earlier this year, which eventually lead to YoYo Games CEO Sandy Duncan posting a Twitter update, where he denied knowing anything about it.
Hi all, this article came to my attention when I was searching to see how the independent gamer was getting on.
I would like to clear a few things up regarding IndieGo, as it has already been mentioned we did indeed have a partnership that was legitimate with YYG. They provided us with prizes to offer in competitions within our first issue and they also provided ideas about what we should include. In return we gave them advertising within the magazine. We never claimed that this partnership was anything else or greater, any other comments made about this are simply opinion.
The next thing I would like to do is to clear up my own name here, I was the original manager of IndieGo from July 2011-October 2011. I created the basis for the magazine and got us into a position where we had created two magazines and had people in place to make the third issue far superior. Very quickly IndieGo grew into a company with around 12 employees and I managed to keep on top of everything. Unfortunantly I was then getting into exam season with my final year of studies and I could not provide the hours to keep up the maintance of the business. So any rumours or claims that I “Had nothing better to do” are untrue. With hind sight I should have left the company in a better state but its decline following my departure was simply because of a lack of organisation within the new regime.
I felt the above need making clear as most of these claims make me sound like some sort of lazy/lying manager when I all ways had the companies best interests at heart. In the Summer the original team I created in July last year will be working
on a smaller magazine project whilst we all have time out for the holidays, and I hope that people will not judge us purely on our what has happened in the past.
Thanks,
Oliver Atkins
Hey thanks for the comments. It has to be said we aren’t a Game Maker magazine. We feature Game maker content but we’re mostly about the whole indie community rather than just one part.
Pretty good all round as first issues goes, though not sure this can really be called a “Game Maker magazine”! Decent design and some interesting content.
Website can be found at http://www.theindependentgamer.co.uk/
Hey there, thanks for giving us a mention. I’m afraid I can’t comment on the whole YYG partnership thing as this was organised by people no longer with us. Hope everyone likes the magazine. The price on the hard copy isn’t up to us its set by magcloud, we only see something like 50cents from each sale. We will however try and keep the digital copy free for life.
Hello,
I am sorry you feel this way, NakedPaulToast. It was to my knowledge that that IndieGo did indeed lie about their partnership with YoYo, or at the very least, exaggerate it to something it wasn’t, which did indeed cause controversy (that to my view was a key in the failure of the project; it was poison).
Thanks
Actually, the failure of the original magazine was primarily due to the fact that the entire original team (excluding me and perhaps one or two others) left shortly after the manager stated he “had better things to do”. Also, the whole “partnership” thing was initiated by IndieGo’s assistant manager, meaning that the manager knew nothing of it.
GameMakerBlog should be reporting news, not creating news.
Since Phil has become less involved and “loaf” more involved GameMakerBlog is just going down the crapper.
“IndieGo was perhaps best known for causing controversy after announcing a false partnership with YoYo Games earlier this year, which eventually lead to YoYo Games CEO Sandy Duncan posting a Twitter update, where he denied knowing anything about it.”
Scottay cleared the controversy up, specifically re-enforcing that IndieGo had been working with YYGs, and that Sandy wasn’t aware of it, nor as CEO should he be.
http://gmc.yoyogames.com/index.php?showtopic=519523&st=20&p=3832858&#entry3832858
“Just to confirm, we have indeed been speaking with and involved with Indie Go. We wish to get behind and support all GameMaker Community ventures. Nocturne is correct in that Sandy is not always aware as he has bigger things to deal with, so don’t take a throwaway twitter comment as gospel.
Kirsty ” (AKA Scottay from YYGs)
Shameful dishonest reporting.
New GM Magazine “The Independent Gamer” to Replace IndieGo http://t.co/zLbhkT0A