Future Publishing blames weak sales of magazines on games market - warns more cuts are ahead.

As someone that mourns the loss of NGamer, I found this interesting:

Quote :

Sales in the three months up to June 2013 were below expectations and the firm will miss targets, it said today.

"The senior management and Board are not satisfied with the pace of improvement and have agreed to accelerate our cost saving programme to generate a £2-2.5m margin improvement in the coming year," the interim statement says today.

Group revenues were up a single percent from October 2012 to June 2013.

As usual the firm says its digital business is strong, but the overall flat performance was down to "owing chiefly to continuing weakness in the Games market".

The firm's digital revenues are 24 per cent up year-on-year for the nine month period, and advertising revenues are approaching 60 per cent from digital markets. Digital edition revenues on the iPad and other tablets are 50 per cent up on a year ago.

Mark Wood, Future plc Chief Executive, commented: "We are disappointed to miss our target for the full year and as a result we are bringing forward plans to reduce legacy print costs and improve operating margins in the period ahead.

"We see encouraging trends across the business for the final quarter and the year ahead, including in the Games sector in the run up to major new console launches later this year, and anticipate delivering significant revenue and profit growth in the coming year."

http://www.mcvuk.com/news/read/future-blames-weak-sales-on-games-market-and-warns-more-cuts-are-ahead/0118797

Maybe because you have no good games magazines out any more, eh?  EH!?!?!?!?

Nah, it's not because of that, or the games market.  With the 3DS going great guns, and TLoU continuing to see good figures, only the MS magazine can claim that; and this is just before two new consoles launch anyway.  The problem, as ever, lies with the modern consumer's ease of Internet access. Why buy a magazine when you can get the same news online, they think. Not fair, given that magazines always contain more than just news, but there you go.

I was thinking the other day that CVG seems to be dying on its arse- it's got a decent turnover of news and regulars (Ask CVG Anything, Comments Of The Week) but reviews are few and far between (The Last Of Us is still on that menu at the bottom of the page) and features haven't been much better. Compare that to other web outlets like IGN or Eurogamer which has a much greater output- even if you allow for content being filtered away from CVG (industry stuff being on Edge, the more actively humourous stuff on GR) it's not really holding up.

What big games have there been out recently to review?

Even if there's not been 'big' games, there's been enough midsize ones to fill the time with- it's just a worry for the site's future that they've not been able to write something.

I feel if you're a games site, you've got to review pretty much every mid to large title that gets released in order to keep up in the saturated market that is games websites. As for lower sales figures for mags, it's as Balla said - print is dying, NGamer's demise only affirmed that for me.

Print journalism is definitely on the way out, but I will mourn the death of the magazine. Having everything in one monthly chunk, and knowing that its the same one everyone else is reading, feels much more powerful than a website that only exists as bits and bytes.

Plus you don't have to deal with the acerbic plague that is article comments.

Sad news, really, it does seem like Future haven't been able to get the figures from their push for online websites (EDGE and CVG have been transformed recently, as you've probably noticed, the former for the worse) to compensate for the inevitable decline of print.

I do feel bad not picking up print myself, but there hasn't really been anything to sway me. I thought Nintendo Gamer was the best the team could have done given the cut budgets (which Kittsy mentions a lot in his portfolio) and a shift towards using more content from contributors rather than the majority being from a team in the office, so I genuinely fear what may happen to the other magazines. Haven't picked up ONM in a while, but I imagine that still retains the feeling of it being written by a close-knit team?

I used to read EDGE, but I found I can get just as interesting reads on the internet from developer-written websites and industry-focused websites.

I really miss print when it was at its prime, though. Even now I feel the lack of an NGamer today has made the Wii U's launch period drastically less exciting for me and certainly less involving.

I can see why it would go this way pretty easily as I had to drop my Nintendo Gamer sub as I just couldn't afford it. In hard times a magazine is the first thing I could live without.