It's Official: Printed Game Magazines Are Dying

If you don't like getting your gaming news, previews and reviews from hack websites, armchair warriors and everyman bloggers, you're in for a rude awakening: printed game magazines are dying.

New stats from firm ABC shows that printed video game publications such as Edge, OXM, PSM and more are dropping significantly just about every year on end.

According to GameIndustry.biz, ABC's stats show that Edge, a leading video game magazine publication, went from 28,051 sales in 2010 down to 24,443 in 2011. Ouch.

Future Publishing's other magazines such as Official PlayStation Magazine went from 46,012 sales in 2010 down to 38,262. The Official Nintendo Magazine also seen a pretty big dip, going down from 45,015 to 36,197 losing almost 10,000 in annual year-end sales. For many websites 10,000 visitors is nothing but for a printed magazine 10,000 sales can sometimes make or break you.

The Official Xbox Magazine was the only "Official" printed console magazine that didn't fare too bad on year-to-year sales, losing only a few thousand sales from 2010 to 2011. The previous year seen OXM move a total of 60,859 magazines while 2011 managed 58,610.

The numbers also show that PSM 3 dropped from 20,640 to 16,815 in 2011. Xbox World went from 23,061 to 20,738. Imagine actually dipped below the 10,000 mark for 360 Magazine which went from 11,183 in 2010 to 9,335 in 2011.

According to the report there was only one success story for the printed magazine publication and that was Moshi Monster's magazine, a printed publication based on the popular online kids casual game of the same name, which was actually up to 162,838 compared to the year before where it managed a still very impressive sales margin of 113,748.

It's not really surprising that majority of gamers are moving from printed magazines to online or digital content, which is free and sometimes easier to access, even though a lot of content and breaking news from said online sites are actually culled from printed magazines.