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I do miss the glory days of White Dwarf, I used to get both WD and Dragon Magazine, one of which is long gone and the other appears to be in it's death throws.

But, if there was a decently produced glossy mag for wargaming, roleplaying and such, with SF/Fantasy book reviews, movie reviews etc, as WD once had, would you still buy it? Or has the unlimited access of the internet made magazines in general obsolete?

I was just sitting in the garden and pondering that I'd like a magazine to read out there, not a notebook or electronic book, but a physical magazine with interesting articles and reviews in it. I appreciate that at 37, I'm an old fart and that younger folks might not even bother with physical publications so much now.

Do you think there's a market for a magazine about wargaming, roleplaying with a side of book, film and computer game review, pertinent to the hobbies and genres?

 MeanGreenStompa wrote:
I do miss the glory days of White Dwarf, I used to get both WD and Dragon Magazine, one of which is long gone and the other appears to be in it's death throws.

But, if there was a decently produced glossy mag for wargaming, roleplaying and such, with SF/Fantasy book reviews, movie reviews etc, as WD once had, would you still buy it? Or has the unlimited access of the internet made magazines in general obsolete?

I was just sitting in the garden and pondering that I'd like a magazine to read out there, not a notebook or electronic book, but a physical magazine with interesting articles and reviews in it. I appreciate that at 37, I'm an old fart and that younger folks might not even bother with physical publications so much now.

Do you think there's a market for a magazine about wargaming, roleplaying with a side of book, film and computer game review, pertinent to the hobbies and genres?

In a word, yes. I greatly miss the old style of WD and spend a lot of time flicking through back issues from early 90s and so forth. I am a very tactile person; I like having a copy in my hands, the sensation of the print media, the new-magazine smell - it all adds to the experience for me. Yes, I could get that content online but I don't want to, it's one of the reasons I still have a WD sub, even though it is a poor shadow of its former self and takes about 10 minutes to read cover to cover.

Maybe. There's War Games Illustrated, but I don't know how good they are.

Yes. 100% yes.

I still buy home and garden magazines because I enjoy looking at pictures, enjoy 'how to' articles and enjoyreading up on neat projects. Can I do all that online? Sure... But online I have to know what I am looking for and go find it. A magazine (even digitally) puts things I don't know I am interested front and center.

I would totally want a digital publication with techniques, reviews, battle reports, conversions, stories, and so on. The only difference between this and a 'blog' is often I have to go hunt down and find a blog to follow.

If someone gathered up a great group of digital publications, had guest articles from the community, sold advertisements inside the publication and then put them online through digi-book stores for .99 cents, I would subscribe. Hell, if it was a good print magazine I would consider subscribing and have it snail mailed to my house for 4-5$

Basically a magazine is paying someone to google the internet for a bunch of interesting articles and present it to you in a consolidated format.

I would be interested if it gave attention to the wargaming hobby as a whole and isnt just a "GW games, and a couple pages of other stuff". As a matter of fact, since GW has their own magazine, Id like to see one that doesnt even mention GW games/products at all.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

nkelsch wrote:


I would totally want a digital publication with techniques, reviews, battle reports, conversions, stories, and so on. The only difference between this and a 'blog' is often I have to go hunt down and find a blog to follow.

If someone gathered up a great group of digital publications, had guest articles from the community, sold advertisements inside the publication and then put them online through digi-book stores for .99 cents, I would subscribe.

That would simply be a gaming website, and theres plenty of those. Id like to see all the things you mentioned but in print. Sometimes its nice to not be staring at a computer screen.

Yes, but I believe that the zine industry is dead. Sad really, I went to college and graduated as a Mass Comm guy. Now I work in a hospital and not Time.

Unfortunately, WGI has gone the way of White Dwarf - it is now the "house organ" of BattleFront Games. Wall to wall Flames of War. It is great if you are a FoW fan (fanboi?) but not so great as a general wargaming mag anymore. I miss the good old days - Dragon, White Dwarf, Wargames Illustrated, The Courier, Wargames Monthly. Of course we can spend a virtually unlimited amount of time surfing gaming content online these days, so that is the tradeoff.

 kronk wrote:
Maybe. There's War Games Illustrated, but I don't know how good they are.

Definitely, it just had to be a good one!

Yes, but only digital and it has to be very reasonably priced to compete with the wealth of free information that is the internet.

I disagree, to say that WI is FoW/BF-centric skews it a bit. True there is prominence given to FoW and I think the level has risen but the vast majority of the mag isn't BF products. If WI stays as it is then the BF connection gives the mag a good backbone of popularist material with allot of room given over to new/different/smaller game. If anything it is rather like WD was between #85 and #99.

As to the question a mix RPG/Wargame mag is appealing to me - Old WD and Valkyrie Magazine were my fixes 20 years ago. There was another one but its name escapes me, I wanna say it was International....something or other?

I wonder though, if GW would even allow it's stuff pictured or reviewed in an independent magazine or if it would go after them?

 MeanGreenStompa wrote:
I wonder though, if GW would even allow it's stuff pictured or reviewed in an independent magazine or if it would go after them?

I would say they probably wouldn't want their products featured in a 3rd party magazine.

But I would say for the most part, any products featured in a magazine outside of a straight up product review would probably need some company consent as well as citing of sources of models if they are heavily featured in a particular photo. A model on a table from a room shot of a tourney is fair use, a close up of two models dueling at a cinematic point of a battle may need at least source cited.

I feel like you need to Cross your Ts and dot your Is much more with a print publication because a website you can just remove the content, no harm, no foul. A Paid for magazine, they could claim to want some or all of the profit as well as things shut down.

When in doubt, get permission and cite sources, Especially when using images of other people's stuff.

Well we have Miniature Wargames which is a rather good independent magazine. It's just gone through a revamp and looks rather nice. It is however overwhelmingly historical. Not that there is anything wrong with that, I’m primarily a historical player myself but I get the feeling you are talking about more fantasy gaming? An independent magazine geared towards Sci-Fi/Fantasy gaming certainly could work.

Combining RPG's and Wargaming into one mag would be a risk because even though there is a crossover between the demographics they are still separate hobbies.

CMON publishes "Ravage", which has a VERY broad selection of coverage. While it is mostly a gloss trade/ad rag, with a low page count, it at least has the benefit of covering the entire spectrum of the hobby. I have problems with CMON, but not with their magazine.

 MeanGreenStompa wrote:
I wonder though, if GW would even allow it's stuff pictured or reviewed in an independent magazine or if it would go after them?

When we started Irregular a few years back, we did enquire with GW what, in their view, we could do. The short answer was event reports - but I don't think they could actually enforce that.

I'd want to get a lawyer to advise first, but I'm fairly sure that if you generate your own imagery (including pictures of products for reviews, etc) rather than using their imagery you should be golden.

He'll, outside of .GW most companies are happy to cooperate for the cheap advertising that supplying a review copy of a product provides, up to thelikes f Wizards of the Coast...

Back in the 90's it was quite common for GW figures to appear in fantasy gaming articles in WI and MW, not seen any in ages though. Could be to do with the massive explosion in alternative fantasy/sci-fi miniature makers or perhaps GW cracked down. Most likely a combination of both.

Jack_Death wrote:
Unfortunately, WGI has gone the way of White Dwarf - it is now the "house organ" of BattleFront Games. Wall to wall Flames of War. It is great if you are a FoW fan (fanboi?) but not so great as a general wargaming mag anymore. I miss the good old days - Dragon, White Dwarf, Wargames Illustrated, The Courier, Wargames Monthly. Of course we can spend a virtually unlimited amount of time surfing gaming content online these days, so that is the tradeoff.

That's definitely unfair to WGI. Yes it's owned by Battlefront, and there's a page or 2 of FoW new releases and most WW2 articles are based on FoW, but the vast amount of content and page count is dedicated to other games and eras. I skip over the FoW stuff and still find plenty in the magazine worth reading.

There is, however, almost no SF content (it's a historics magazine) or reviews of non-gaming things

I don't think you can prevent people reviewing your products. It's one of those things that comes under 'fair use'.

I would happily pay for a well written, sensible battle report; professionally written fiction and New/experimental rules. But the production costs would probably be quite high

I think the decent priced magazine with quality content could do very well

Video kill the radio star

Talk of WI being the battlefront equivalent to WD is hyperbolic. Obviously there is going to be FOW content in each issue but there are still plenty of other periods and manufacturers covered as well. WW2 coverage is admittedly very FOW centric and even though other rule sets are covered it only tends to be ones like Bolt Action, that don’t compete directly against FOW.

I did hear a rumor that BF don't allow other 15mm WW2 makers to advertise or feature in any photos, though I've never checked to be sure. I once heard that the guy behind Plastic Soldier Company was told that WI would only carry adverts for his 1/72 or 28mm ranges. Though I don’t know if this is still the case.

WI has always had plenty of Skytex 15mm full page ads in the past, i'm pretty sure there are others but Skytrex sticks in my memory.

I haven't heard of any all round Wargame magazines, but if there is a good one covering things like the Spartan Games games, Dreadball, Infinity and that I'll definitely subscribe. So is there one?

Sure, the internet, but I love flipping through magazines.

 Howard A Treesong wrote:
I don't think you can prevent people reviewing your products. It's one of those things that comes under 'fair use'.

Not just reviews of new products but I can't see how copyright law prevents you from taking pictures of models in order to illustrate a paint scheme or a battle report.

Otherwise I am in big trouble with GW already...

 notprop wrote:
WI has always had plenty of Skytex 15mm full page ads in the past, i'm pretty sure there are others but Skytrex sticks in my memory.

That might have just been a rumour then. I'll check some of my WI issues when I get home. I only buy it every now and again.

 LuciusAR wrote:
I did hear a rumor that BF don't allow other 15mm WW2 makers to advertise or feature in any photos, though I've never checked to be sure. I once heard that the guy behind Plastic Soldier Company was told that WI would only carry adverts for his 1/72 or 28mm ranges. Though I don’t know if this is still the case.

Nah 15mm WW2 adverts are allowed*, but there hasn't been any editorial coverage of other 15mm WW2 stuff. I remember a bit of controversy a while back when someone asked about it on a forum and was told that they did feature other 15mm WW2 stuff and quoted a page number which turned out to be an advert.


*I'm pretty positive I've seen PSC ads in most issues.

i be surprised if GW can stop you using pics of your own models in Battle rep, Tactic report and the like, in a indi mag

I have heard a rumour recently that a major player is considering publishing a magazine solely for sci-fi/fantasy wargaming. I can only think of one company in the UK that maybe in a position to do so and that may be Mantic I suppose.

I also miss a hobby magazine especially for Warhammer. Still reading through the old issues and they are a really good read with all their tutorials etc. in it, the cool battle reports and the very "old-schoolish" visuals.