Retro Gamer Now On IPhone

[liveinabin]

This is a really great idea. I love RG but I'd much rather receive it digitally. I'd happily switch my print subscription over to this iPhone format if the price was the same.

[Dudley]

That sound you hear is opa-opa sobbing.

[Opa-Opa]

The end of the Paper magazines I tell ya..
It even says on the massive two page spread (in both RG and GTM) that it is the future of publications..

[Dudley]

Well obviously in the long term it is, just as paper killed the stone tablet. It's because it has massive, massive advantages over the other system with minor to no downsides.

You lose the fact that paper is it's own "device" and the sell-on/trade ability we're all accepting we're losing with games.

You gain searching, dynamic content, the ability to archive without owning half an acre of storage, people can zoom it to whatever text size they're comfortable reading, change the colours so colour blind people can read, it's cheaper - making mags like RG much more sustainable in the long run. You can in theory get the magazine the very second it goes to press, not 2 weeks later...

But none of this is going to happen fully until the reading devices are ubiquitous, and they probably will be one day. In 20 years they'll probably be able to sell them with the mag preloaded for the same cost as using paper. While Imagine are testing the water with Apple because it's easy to get someone to knock together a shonky app in an afternoon and put it on everything from PCs to pagers.

Still, you're talking probably beyond the life of RG. If anything will kill RG is them running out of interesting/popular machines and games to cover. Either they'll be forced to repeat increasing amounts of content, driving away the long termers, or be forced to write about ever more less interesting things, meaning no new readers. It is to a degree already happening, everything worth mentioning has had a machine guide now for instance.

[the_hawk]

I disagree on both counts.

I LOVE reading books & magazines, there's no way I get the same pleasure glaring at a computer screen/laptop/telephone screen and I know many like me.

Those ebooks are horrific, soulless inventions, give me the originals any day of the week.

Seriously; long train journeys, baths, extended trips to the crapper who wants to sit & get eyestrain squinting at a bloody iphone when they can relax reading a magazine or book with lovely illustrated screenshots as the author intended.

If RG was 100% digital & I had access to it I reckon I'd read a fraction of the mag as I'd just skip the features that had no initial interest to me & I reckon I'd miss out on a helluva lot.

Pretty much anyone with a half decent phone from the last few years can access up to the minute news from any source in the world at the touch of a button, yet people STILL buy newspapers in their MILLIONS just to read about news that happened the previous day, there must be some reason they prefer paper to the digital version.

Secondly, I used to have the same fears about Retro Gamer, but there are always new ways to look at the same thing, in the past year alone we've had Coin-op Capers & The Unconverted two excellent new features that make for fantastic reading. Even the much maligned Let's All Play feature provided a new way to look at some of the old classics.

World of Spectrum lists almost TWENTY ONE THOUSAND unique Spectrum titles, even if only one percent of them was worth looking at there's enough there for over two thousand features - and that's just one system.

I love the current format of RG - On paper with fresh new-old content, long may it stay that way.

[Bub&Bob]

World of Spectrum lists almost TWENTY ONE THOUSAND unique Spectrum titles, even if only one percent of them was worth looking

That seems 0.995% too high to me

[Dudley]

I disagree on both counts.

I LOVE reading stone tablets, there's no way I get the same pleasure glaring some floppy wood based thing with plant juice on and I know many like me.

Those paper books are horrific, soulless inventions, give me the originals any day of the week.

Could have been written by someone many years ago. Ultimately it'll be about as effective I'm afraid.

Pretty much anyone with a half decent phone from the last few years can access up to the minute news from any source in the world at the touch of a button, yet people STILL buy newspapers in their MILLIONS just to read about news that happened the previous day, there must be some reason they prefer paper to the digital version.

The ipad is a lot bigger than a phone, regardless newspaper sales are plummeting.

Not falling. Plummeting.

Very, very few newspapers have 7 digit sales now, sales of the Times fell 18% last year to 500,000, the guardian 16% to 300,000, the Telegraph 12% to its lowest sales ever at under 700,000. In fact only one newspaper reporting a rise in sales and that was the Star, which costs half as much as it did 18 months ago and then only rose 1%.

2 of London's 3 mainstream free daily papers have closed in the past year and the Evening Standard has gone free in a desperate last bid to survive having been sold off as a business for less than the previous cost of 3 copies of itself.

World of Spectrum lists almost TWENTY ONE THOUSAND unique Spectrum titles, even if only one percent of them was worth looking at there's enough there for over two thousand features - and that's just one system.

Maths is not your friend today. Even if you assume we really do only cover one Spectrum game an issue, that's only 200, not 2000 and we're already nearly halfway there. And that's assuming you're counting the affect that a good number of games are sequels or remakes as part of what gets us down to 1%. Yes it's only 1 system but we don't see only 1 game per issue and I would suggest most games were released on multiple systems.

[the_hawk]

Ooops I actually meant 10%. DOH!

Now I look like a bit of a tit.

I still maintain the paper format ain't going anywhere for a long time, thank gawd.

[Bub&Bob]

Ooops I actually meant 10%. DOH!

and I mean't 0.005%

[the_hawk]

So 9.995% are worth looking at? That's good to hear.

Interesting that Stone Tablets & ipads are mentioned in the same post earlier, lets see how they measure up against each other....



THrow in the fact that all six iPad models are 9.56″ by 7.47,” stone tablets can be made to various specs; as a 12:9 aspect ratio wouldn’t be out of the question, that “widescreen” checkbox should at least be yellow and we have a winner.

Paper still trounces the pair of them though!

[Bub&Bob]

So 9.995% are worth looking at? That's good to hear.

Ok, too early to start talking maths - I hate Spectrum, there ive said it!!
(I dont really)

[CraigGrannell]

Interesting that Stone Tablets & ipads are mentioned in the same post earlier, lets see how they measure up against each other....

*sigh*

Yet another hilarious and inaccurate iPad vs 'something else' chart, no doubt made my an angry geek that doesn't get Apple's device. (FWIW, iPhone OS can multi-task—that's why you can run instances of Mail and Safari inside other apps, or play iPod music while playing a game. Apple just hasn't yet enabled multi-tasking for content downloaded via the App Store—and since some of the most popular apps for competing devices are task killers, it's pretty easy to see why.)

[the_hawk]

*sigh*

Honestly, don't let it get to you, it's just a throwaway pic.

Some of us aren't keen on apple devices, some obsess over them. I personally can't see the use of the pad but hey if some people can, fill yer boots buy one & enjoy it.

Just don't stop making paper copies of RG any time soon, these last 2 years have been the best yet but I just can't see me bothering with a digital only one.

However, I would like to say that's it's nice to see a really well argued argument from everyone. Here's hoping it continues.

That didn't last long, I blame myself & for that I profusely apologise.

I guess it would be more useful for the thread to get back to back on topic by people who actually purchase & use the product in question rather than my Luddite fears clogging it up. Like I should have done a few posts ago I'll go back to posting random gibberish in off topic & leave y'all to it.

[CraigGrannell]

Sorry for grumbling, hawk, but I've been inundated with these things of late, and the only one that eventually made me crack a smile was the knowingly ironic 'iPad comparisons comparison'.

Regarding apps, though, some people here are missing the point. The iPhone RG app isn't—at least in the short or medium term—a paper replacement. Instead, it's a means of testing the waters of digital and potentially making more money. If Imagine could get, say, an extra 10% or so revenue for RG via digital, that at worst continues to secure the magazine's survival. At best, it could lead to investment (more pages, more content). If done properly, digital copies can also be great for archiving, searches and dealing with international subs. I know I'm dead happy with my MacFormat PDFs, because I now have the last 18 issues sitting on my hard drive, meaning I don't have to wade through paper issues to find something I want to quickly scan through.

[the_hawk]

Just Googled that one, very good.

http://pics.blameitonthevoices.com/0220 ... charts.jpg

With that I'm gone from the thread, no honestly this time. I am.