…is when your brand new issue hits the mail (CGW in this case) with a nice two-page preview of Mythica, the game that got cancelled a week or so ago. Ouch!
Oh, and bad CGW for a two-page spread on Jon Van Carnegham all in red. Will you CGW guys hide the booze bottle from the art director? Who wants to read an article with a bright red background?
Liked the cover story on Freedom Force, though. That game looks like fun.
I’m still sad about Mythica being canceled. They were really trying new ideas and breaking away from time sink conventions, and trying to make players feel powerful.
No worries, I’m sure ZD still got paid for the ad^H^Hpreview.
/me hides
FYI: I e-mailed Gamestop about their game listing for Mythica, and they told me that nobody had notified them in an official manner that the game had been canceled.
Heh… Way to go on the communication, Microsoft! :?
Yeah, that kind of sucked. Now I get to deal with all the emails from guys writing in saying, “Hey dumbass! They cancelled the game last week!” Because, you know, we write and print these issues overnight. sigh
It does seem like you guys (all gaming mags) have to remind readers in EVERY issue that you are writing the articles well before they are read.
“By the time you are reading this…”
Guess you have to have precog to work in the magazine biz.
Hey Jeff! I loved you in Daytona.
haha I’m sure you never get tired of that one.
Actually I think it’s the NASCAR Jeff Green who probably gets sick of hearing, “Hey, how come you retired Greenspeak?”
hehe. I hope you’ve improved your UT skills. I remember when you popped on a server i played a few years back. :)
What was really crazy about that Mythica article was the first paragraph opening with, “As we were going to press…”. I thought they managed to get in notice of the cancellation and were running the article anyway because there wasn’t time for anything else. However, the late-breaking news they got in was about Mythic suing Microsoft over the name.
Reading the preview just made me just more interested in the game. This and WoW were the only two online games I was really interested in for this year.
Right now, what is the length of time before there absolutely can be no changes to the magazine and when it appears in people’s mailboxes, or on store shelves? Its a long time isnt it, like 4+ weeks? What is the biggest reason for that and do you see that changing anytime soon? How do weekly magazines do it? Is it just money/budget?
olaf
For us, it’s about three weeks. We finish an issue in the first week of a month, and it appears in reader’s hands somewhere toward the end of the month.
Hopefully, we’re not changing things at the very end, though, because that becomes a production nightmare. I suspect the magazines from bigger publishers (as in CGW, PC Gamer) have tighter deadlines and longer times before it appears because they may share art staffs or copy editing or production, and everyone can’t be doing everything at the last second, but I could be wrong.
We also go direct-to-plate using PDF files, so we don’t need to make film anymore, which means we can add in changes later. As in, changes can be made while they’re preparing the magazine to be printed.
Weeklies have different deals with printers. They use multiple printers located all over the country so that they can mail them simultaneously and have them arrive everywhere at the same time. And yeah, that costs a lot of money, and it would be a waste for a monthly, which by nature of its format is already conceding timeliness.
I suspect the magazines from bigger publishers (as in CGW, PC Gamer) have tighter deadlines and longer times before it appears because they may share art staffs or copy editing or production, and everyone can’t be doing everything at the last second, but I could be wrong.
Yeah, that’s about right, Steve, at least for us. In our case it’s the shared resources of copy editing and production–not art staffs.
To give some idea of our lead time, we are shipping pages to the printer (meaning they can no longer be changed) at the end of this week for the May issue, which will start heading to subscribers on March 16. So we’re looking at roughly three weeks.
Jeff
Well Jeff, you could just eliminate that pesky copy-editing step like CGM.
Zing!
And, my friends, that is why we game developers will always be superior to game magazine editors.
You see, while THEY work on stuff that won’t be out until May. WE are working on things that were SUPPOSED to be out last December. ;)
Did anyone see what van Caneghem had to say? It would be nice if he would be involved in a final Might & Magic RPG. It would have to be a lot better than MM:IX of course.
Dude, that is totally unfair. CGW completely made up the word “shiving” (yes, “to use a shiv”, but that’s not phonetic or in the dictionary) on page 62, left the period off the end of “Contract J.A.C.K.” on page 30, left a hyphen out of “jacks-of-all-trades” on p. 42, misspelled Wachowski on p. 68 (already covered in previous post), didn’t fully italicize the title “Victoria: An Empire Under The Sun” on p. 79, put an unnecessary hyphen in “high learning curves” on p.86 and failed to capitalize Frisbee on p.69. On page 91 I assume the subtitle “Another mess in the hedge grove” is supposed to be “…hedgerow”, as in hedgerow fighting and the hedgerow cutter (a thingie attached to tanks, you know, to cut hedgerows), unless “hedge grove” is some WWII-game-specific term I’ve never heard of. I don’t know, I’m not a copy editor, and I can’t really read this issue anyway because it makes my eyes burn like that time a can of oven cleaner exploded in my face.
And I still haven’t gotten this month’s freakin’ Computer Games yet, despite my valiantly defending Steve’s honor.
And you can patch your bugs. Ours live in infamy forever on the printed page…
And you can patch your bugs. Ours live in infamy forever on the printed page…[/quote]
Presupposing you can read the page in the first place.