April 9, 2013 | By Staff
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More: Console/PC, Social/Online, Smartphone/Tablet, Indie, Serious, GD Mag, Programming, Art, Audio, Design, Production, Business/Marketing
After over 19 years of disseminating the best strategies around the art, science and business of video games, our hearts are heavy to announce that, as of July 2013, Game Developer magazine will stop printing its physical edition, and transition to become a section in Gamasutra.
The final issue sent to print subscribers will be the June/July 2013 issue, and the Game Career Guide special issue, disseminated to events including PAX Prime and GDC, will be the final physical issue available.
The magazine will also be ceasing distribution of digital issues, but will start to gradually transition its complete legacy content onto sister website Gamasutra's 'Game Developer on Gamasutra' section for free, where we also hope to continue publishing new Game Developer-centric content from some of our regular contributors.
If you are currently a paid subscriber (either digital or physical) of the magazine, we will contact you over the next few days with options for either refunding or fulfilling the remainder of your subscription with an alternative product.
We've made the decision to shift away from print as part of a wider strategy change in our parent company UBM Tech, which is simultaneously shifting other print publications either to digital only or to website-specific content, orienting them to help support our growing community-centric events such as Game Developers Conference.
However, we will conduct Game Developer's major research (such as the Salary Survey) as part of Gamasutra's remit going forwards, as well as continuing to print historical and newly sourced game postmortems on Gamasutra.
Finally, a special thank you to all of the EICs of the publication over its almost two decades - including, but absolutely not limited to Larry O'Brien, Mark DeLoura, Alex Dunne, Jennifer Olsen, Simon Carless, Jamil Moledina, Alex Handy, Brandon Sheffield, and Patrick Miller, and our hundreds of contributors over the years - especially stalwart columnists such as (but again, not limited to) , Mick West, Chris Hecker, Steve Theodore, Jesse Harlin, Jon Blow, Noah Falstein, Matthew Wasteland, and so many more. And thanks for reading - we'll miss you.
If you have any immediate questions or issues, or would like to pass along your memories of Game Developer magazine to print in our last physical issue, please comment below or contact us via editors@gdmag.com - we really want to hear from you about what the magazine has meant to you.
[UPDATE: Clarified headline: while the 'Game Developer on Gamasutra' section will continue with old and hopefully new content being posted on the website, there will be no 'digital magazine' produced after July.]
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Seriously I'm going to miss my favorite magazine in my hands.
Thanks GDMag.
Also, thanks for your help as an adviser over the years!
Brandon, thanks for the many years of work you have put in to the magazine and community. I hope you keep it up! You've got my vote for the Ambassador Award!
Best of luck to anyone who might be losing their job, and thanks for the years of awesome content.
Also... Now it will take willpower in order for me to read these articles. One of the things I love about GDMag is that it has no comments section to draw me to. Gamasutra trolls are now going to invade my GDMag reading. I know I could just not read the comments, but that takes willpower. I have none
I hope all the staffers land on their feet, either continuing on with Gamasutra or finding other positions that don't dampen the journalistic standards they have maintained at GDMag.
Sad to see it end.
Goodbye "Old."
"New" beware. You "Borrowed" and "Blue" are all on notice.
Good luck, GDMag staffers! And to readers: Remember your favorite editors and follow them going forward!
Kudos to the staff for putting together such great content over the years. From Brandon's insightful editor comments to the humor section at the end, I spent a good amount of time in this magazine each month.
On the plus side - I'm really looking forward to seeing even more content on Gamasutra!
Thanks to everyone that made it happen!
Sorry, no doubt some will flame but this is from a programmers perspective.. I used to buy it at the newsagent every month and am pretty sure I have edition numbers in the single digits somewhere so there might even be a lot of people who never experienced the old GDMag anyway and not even know what I am on about.
Basically GDmag used to be a programmers magazine, it then become an artist/designers magazine and I stopped buying it. This was over 15 years ago though so take that as you want.
Still sorry to see it ending, it really is a sad sign of the times to me.
And a mag, even digital, is not a web site. A mag is en entity composed by its articles, every month, entity you're waiting and can read in its entirety, making the reading experience different than a blog one. This is why, for me, Gamasutra and GDMag were two differents things, complementary, and I don't understand the end of its digital form, if it continue on a web form (hope it's not to follow the fashion of short articles like twitts!). I would maybe have to find a new mag now..any idea ?
I just hope that all the talented people who work(ed) for GDM find a new home with Gamasutra. Best of luck to everyone!
Best of luck to all involved, but I have the feeling that this "Change in strategy" in UBM Tech will be no good news for a lot of people.
About a week ago my wife wanted me to clear some space on the counter and she pointed to a stack of GDM from about 5 years ago. So I thought, okay... I'll get rid of some of these older issues that aren't relevant anymore.
Oh, wait, this issue had a cool post-mortem. Um, another post-mortem I liked... Oh, yeah - heat-mapping the deaths of the players to see problematic zones in the levels - that was clever... Darn.
So, I had to find somewhere else to put them, because in one respect or another, this retro data format remains relevant, at least to me...
Well, thanks for putting out a great mag for all these years.