Friday, 9 January 2009
EGM, 1UP: R.I.P.
My iPod is in mourning this week as most of the people behind many of my favourite podcasts (including what had been my current number one favourite, "1up Yours"), were laid off yesterday as Hearst Corporation bought the 1up Network from the long-struggling Ziff-Davis.
Along with the podcasts, also axed was the illustrious video game magazine Electronic Gaming Monthly—although I cannot mourn it in the same way that I mourn the podcasts' passing. This is not because I am without nostalgia—in fact I'm probably one of the few gamers still around who can say that I bought Electronic Gaming Monthly Issue #1 (with the Mega-Man 2 cover) from the newstand. But print media, especially an enthusiast magazine focused on a multi-media realm such as video gaming, has long had a bleak outlook. Like most gamers nowadays, I have long gotten my gaming information through the internet. In fact the only times I've bought EGM in recent years were when I was in an airport, and that isn't often enough to feel too bad about the magazine going away.
If print is the past, though, the things 1up was doing in terms of online media were clearly the future. I subscribed to four of their regular podcasts (Broken Pixels and Review Crew were a bit too irregular for me to include them with the rest): The 1up Show, 1up Yours, 1up FM, and Sports Anomaly. Of these, the video podcast the 1up Show was produced at a standard that exceeds most television programs, and it deservedly got top billing on the iTunes store. In terms of new media, that is a coveted achievement.
Even so, one can see from a business perspective, that the 1up Show took a lot of people to make, and that is very expensive. In the face of that, and the few advertisements they were able to include, I am willing to admit the possibility that they might not have been able to continue with the 1up Show. (Although I should think that they could have done a better job in including advertisers—enthusiast-oriented programs like this are great for advertisers, where the topical ads are more interesting and less annoying to viewers, so it seems to me that there was a lot of untapped opportunity there.) But the audio podcasts were cheap to produce and cheaper to host—and they also had almost no advertising. I definitely feel that their potential was untapped by Ziff Davis—but for Hearst to axe them means that they have let go of the best part of the property that they bought. These shows made their contributers celebrities among gamers—who then read the articles on the website chiefly because they were written by these personalities. With no personalities and no shows left, Hearst is missing out on a lot of potential value.
One of the other "enthusiast" (in a way) podcasts I listen to, is the Wall Street-oriented "The Real Story" from theStreet.com. It never ceases to amaze me how consistently they are able to get advertisers—often ones like BP that are not even directly related to the show topic. Revision3 and TWiT may have to work harder to find sponsors, but they have been able to do so. This is why, despite not being on the business side, I cannot believe that such widely circulated and respected gaming podcasts—who have an obvious bank of potential sponsors in the game publishers and console manufacturers—could not be more succesful from a business standpoint.
But I digress. Although I take some solace in the fact that (podcasts being so easy to produce), most of my other favourite enthusiast podcasts ("The Java Posse", "Geeks On", and "The HDTV Podcast") are run by enthusiasts as hobbies, with no thought of monetary return. From this, and from the encouraging Twitter posts by the fired 1up-ers (the first episode of "Rebel FM" is already up!), I am confident that more podcasts will still be coming.
But, with the personalities that make these shows what they are being scattered to the four winds, I do worry about how long this will be able to continue, as they progressively find jobs elsewhere. Some may be able to continue, as John Davison continued to appear on 1up Yours even after leaving the company to found whatTheyPlay.com, but others, like past greats Shawn Elliott or Mark MacDonald, will not. The prospect of so many leaving at once makes me worry for the future, and while I look forward to listening to what they put out, the end of 1up as we know it is a very sad thing.
Mielke's blog of EGM's final day is a must-read if you've ever followed this magazine or its podcasts before.
