Press Pass: Will Recently Revealed World of Warcraft Rag Wow Readers?

We talk to two of the editors behind the new magazine to find out what makes it different and why they think it will succeed where other mags are failing.
8/27/2009 9:42 AM | 4 Comments | Page 1 of 3

The consensus seems to be that right now is not a good time to be in the print magazine business. Across the industry, newsstand sales fell 6.3 percent in the first half of 2009 and overall circulation has been flat. The narrower gaming niche is still reeling from the January shuttering of Electronic Gaming Monthly after a successful 20-year run. All over the media landscape, you don't have to look very hard to find people proclaiming matter-of-factly that magazines are dead.

So it seems an odd time to announce a new 148-page quarterly magazine, focused on a single game, with no advertising pages, no newsstand sales and expensive, high-quality paper stock. Yet that's exactly what Future Publishing is doing with World of Warcraft: The Magazine (WoW:TM), announced last week at Anaheim's BlizzCon fan festival. What's more, Future is doing it with a unique editorial and business plan that might just be crazy enough to work.

A product of the FuturePlus custom publishing division, WoW:TM is the result of roughly four years of negotiations between Future and World of Warcraft (WoW) publisher Blizzard Entertainment, according to Editor-in-Chief Dan Amrich. "This has been kicked around for a long time," he said. "Blizzard is, rightly so, very protective of their brand. They want to make sure that they trust whoever they're getting into business with. They wanted to make sure anything that has the Blizzard name on it, and especially the World of Warcraft name on it, is a top-shelf product, so that took some time [to work out]."

All that extra negotiating time may have been a benefit in this media market, according to Editorial Director Julian Rignall. "I think if we had done this magazine four years ago, it would have been a very very different beast than what it is now," he said. "Print has gone through that kind of recession and the shakeout of magazines that failed to evolve with the changing landscape. We've been thinking about different print models, and really, this is a very, very different print model -- and one I'm hoping can herald in a new era for us..."

That new business model -- which focuses on selling $39.95 annual subscriptions directly to WoW players, without any revenue from advertising or single-issue newsstand sales -- is key to making a new gaming magazine work in this environment, Rignall said. "Basically, what it allows us to do is print on demand for the first time ever," he explained. "We're not doing this crazy American newsstand thing where you print a million magazines and sell 300,000 and throw 700,000 away -- where, essentially, the readers are paying, in part, for the parts you're throwing away. This is why it has no ads in it; you don't need ads to support that massive loss you usually make from the newsstand. If we have 100,000 subscriptions, we print 100,000 copies and there's no waste, something that is very unusual for the print business. It's environmentally friendly in some sense, because we're not cutting down an extra few forests."

Amrich suggested that this direct-to-subscriber model is "a workaround for a problem people have not quite been able to solve in magazines. ... People keep saying print is dead, but I don't think print is dead so much as that [newsstand-based] business model is in serious trouble. ... A lot of people that say they don't like print; they're really saying they don't like the print business model. It's not that they don't like the print experience, it's just that they'd prefer to get their news someplace else. ... This is a chance to show what print can do very, very well. It is about deluxe presentation, it's about sitting down and diving in. It's for dedicated players and for people that want to spend more time in that world, as good magazines always do. It's a celebration of our hobby."

The print-on-demand structure, along with a looser quarterly publication schedule, also lets Future create a higher-quality physical product, something Rignall said was key to getting Blizzard to sign on to the magazine. "If you're familiar with Edge magazine in the UK ... we're recreating that size, feel and paper-stock and print quality to deliver something that is a really amazing platform for the core art and visuals the World of Warcraft game has to offer. ... [Blizzard] did not find acceptable the more regular kind of model and print quality and stock, because they're so conscious of the quality of their artwork. The model that we came up with -- much higher print quality, no ads, that kind of thing -- really comes across as more of a softback book or an art book, and this is very appealing to them."

While Rignall and Amrich wouldn't discuss initial subscription numbers (beyond saying that they already number in the "thousands"), they both said they were astounded by the reaction the magazine's announcement got at BlizzCon. The line to sign up for subscriptions at the show stretched into a more than 40-minute wait at some points, Rignall said. Of course, that reaction could have been partly driven by the exclusive Murloc plush figure that came with subscriptions made at the conference.