Games Quarterly Magazine Ads

[Paul Czege]

It has to be difficult these days for a game-related magazine with ad space to sell. There's increasing sales of brand new games being sold direct from publisher to customer, and many of them are games with no store retail presence whatsoever. It seems there might be advertising revenue to be had from publishers of the games that fall into this category. But how much do retailers care about these games? No one knows. Are any distributors keen enough on this market that they'd order direct from a small publisher in response to an ad? No one knows. So how much is such an advertisement worth?

Somehow there need to be some very public success stories before this is a viable source of advertising revenue for the magazine. Unless game publishers are competing for limited ad space within Games Quarterly, it seems to me the magazine publisher ought to gamble a bit, offer some discounts to select publishers, and try to create this revenue stream for themselves. If retailers and distributors aren't interested, no loss.

Paul