Video game magazine
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A video game magazine is a magazine that talks about video games on PC, other computers or video game consoles. These magazines sometimes have demo CDs or DVDs bundled in.
Some well-known video game magazines include Electronic Gaming Monthly, Edge, GamePro, Nintendo Power, Tips & Tricks, Game Informer and Famitsu.
Journalistic ethics
The video game press is somewhat controversial for having relatively bad journalistic ethics. There are several complaints addressed against them:
- Since the dawn of the Internet, new information about video games has been allowed to disseminate immediately from the company to the end user, disintermediating the role of the video game magazine. This is especially true in the video game industry since information release is carefully controlled, and almost always done via press releases or company website updates. Thus it is very difficult for the video game magazine to have any competitive advantage when it comes to information. To counter this, many magazines enter into formal or informal agreements with a publisher to grant access to exclusive content, in exchange for featuring that content in an issue. This oftentimes creates a conflict of interest between the critical staff of the magazine and the other staff, because upon first encountering the game many critics can know if it is going to be bad, yet per the agreement they must preview the game in a very positive light (upon release of the game the reviewers can then give it a bad review but some consider this too late). This system also tends to favor the large publishers over the smaller ones.
- The video game industry spends a large amount of money to entertain video game media. The center of this is the E3 video game convention (a primarily media oriented event), where numerous parties are held.