Press Pass: Dan "Shoe" Hsu Takes on the Bitmob
The former Ziff Davis exec. talks about the fate of his former company and the recent launch of his new community-driven gaming site, Bitmob
7/2/2009 1:20 PM | 5 Comments | Page 3 of 4
On EGM founder Steve Harris' recently announced plans to purchase the EGM brand and relaunch it as a new magazine
"A lot of people were excited [about the announcement]. The biggest surprise to me was seeing comments from people saying 'I'm already planning to be a subscriber.' Maybe $20 doesn't mean a lot to these people, so it's low risk for them, but to me, I need to know what the magazine's about and who's working on it before I can get excited about something like that, you know what I mean? What makes
EGM "
EGM" are the personalities involved, the quality of writing, the features that you do. All of that really has to do with the staff that we had and the people that we had working behind the scenes.
Yes, EGM is coming back, and it's taking this retro-tastic logo with it!
"I think once I start hearing who's involved, who's providing the editorial direction, who's working on it day to day, I can start developing more of an opinion on it. I know so little about it that it's just hard to say, because
EGM just as a name itself is pretty meaningless on a qualitative level. If you're talking about a business, yeah, if Steve Harris wants to do a new gaming magazine and he wants to get back into gaming editorial, then absolutely, having the
EGM name is a huge thing to have in your pocket, that's a huge advantage. But forgetting about the business, just [asking me as] a reader whether I'm excited about the brand or not from a non-business perspective, yeah, I have no opinion yet."
On the health of the print gaming journalism in general
I've been approached about a print project that I can't really talk much about, to consult on it, help create it and run it, but the print business is very scary to me now. You're dependent mostly on advertising revenue and circulation revenue, and both are hurting really bad. People are buying fewer and fewer magazines at the newsstand. You're asking people to pay money for something that they believe, true or not, [contains] that same information that's online for free. So that's a hard sell, especially because it's late with the printing process and the distribution process and all... So I'd be really worried about getting into the print business now -- online seems to be the way to go.
On why the world needs yet another videogame site (in the form of Bitmob)
From a business point of view, we said, "We can't be doing the same thing our competitors are doing -- we can't be another IGN or 1UP or Kotaku." ... Also, content-wise, we want to do something that is exciting to us on a creative level. We've been through the
EGM and 1UP years where you had this huge readership that you were kind of obligated to fulfill certain things that they required. I didn't create
EGM from scratch, I took it over from a long line of other editors-in-chief, so there are certain expectations for the magazine from the audience that I had to fulfill. I can tweak it and I can improve upon it, change things here and there, but when I was running
EGM, it wasn't like a complete reinvention of the original
EGM. ...
