Some games are more successful, and some are less. Some are successful enough that they spawn fanzines. Most of the time, this doesn’t work all too well. Either the quality of the writing and topics is questionable (even considering the sad state gaming journalism is in), or the communication between the writers and the game developers is not up to par. If I remember correctly, Blizzard’s general secrecy meant the demise of the “official” WoW magazine after roughly two issues [1]. If you can’t pull news out of the developers’ noses, it’s hard to fill a good magazine. Scantily-clad, buxom, purple night elf lolitas only get you that far with the average readership.
The antepenultimate issue of EON, and the last I remember reading.
EON was a bit different. Just like the game it covered, EVE Online, it was an outlier in the market. Its production value was quite high. The printing was top-notch. The writing was (for a game magazine) stellar (which meant it was actually readable). EON was probably the reason I played EVE for as long as I did. When they had a “one year for x% less!” offer a good year ago, I decided to go for it. I didn’t regret it, even though it was still expensive, and it came via mail in a plastic “neutral design” envelope that made it look like a porn magazine. (It also always arrived dog-eared because it didn’t fit into my small mailbox, and our postman seems to like cramming, but that’s a different problem. Not very nice if you like to take care of printed items.) Just as EVE keeps going and going, EON had a surprisingly long life for a printed game-specific magazine. For more than seven years, the quarterly “Official New Eden Magazine” brought news, rumors, and statistics to its readers, all in a slick design and sprinkled with interviews with or snippets about CCP developers and other team members. Now that time is over. Issue no. 30, recently released, has been announced to be the last one, first on the CCP dev blog (where I missed it because I’m horribly out of the loop at the moment when it comes to MMOs), and later via mail (where it reached me just a few hours ago):
It is with regret that we must announce that EON magazine is closing down after nearly 8 incredible years in production. The economic realities are such that it is no longer viable to continue to produce the magazine in spite of EVE enjoying record success in this its 10th year of operation. […]
Our only regret is that we are unable to fully celebrate EVE’s 10th anniversary with one more issue, but we can reveal that we are collaborating with CCP on a new project, to be revealed soon.
I wonder what that new project will be? Something with DUST? Come to think of it, I haven’t even followed the news on the DUST/EVE integration. I still can’t believe it will go well in the end, but I really should spend some time reading again…
In any case, the age of EON is over. I wonder whether we will see a comparable magazine again? It seems printed magazines are dying out. Then, of course, the paperless office never came to pass, so maybe at some point, we’ll see people enjoying printed matters again. It’s unlikely, granted, but as a lover of printed paper, one can hope…
[1] Thanks to Wilhelm’s archive, I now know that it survived for five issues.