Couldn’t help but giggle at this post on Kotaku, showing the latest covers for the (I’m guessing) US versions of Gamepro and Edge.

This sad situation arises because:

1) Gaming magazines have all but abandoned original covers for high-res publisher art. Why spend $1000 on a photo shoot when you can slap on whatever images the publisher has on their media FTP? During my tenure on Atomic, we strived to do neat fronts every month. It’s a shame the mag’s recent desertion to gaming-only covers has forsaken this edict… now it just blends into the newsstand like everything else.

2) Publishers promise exclusives… that aren’t exclusives. You only find this out after the mag goes onsale. This happened more than a few times while I was in the magazine biz. Fortunately Atomic was burned only once or twice. After that, we learnt our lesson. It was hilarious watching the bigger mainstream mags getting caught again and again. Going by the above display, it looks like nothing’s changed.

Using precanned art for covers is nothing new and it does work (that is it sells), otherwise we’d have stopped doing it years ago. Does it matter that it makes a mag look like a marketing brochure instead of a serious industry journal? Or that if another mag runs the same art both products look ridiculous (not to mention creatively phoned-in)?

Apparently not.

~ by Logan on June 28, 2010.

Posted in Gaming, Industry news

Tags: covers, edge, gamepro, hot pursuit, kotaku, magazines, need for speed, publishers