Darran@Retro Gamer wrote:it doesn't normally make good business sense to give away something for nothing
While I agree with this, there's also good business sense in 'reward'. As I noted earlier, MacFormat now provides subscribers with individual logins to a section of the website that enables them to download—for free—digital copies of the mag. This means overseas subscribers get faster access to the content, and people also have an archive. It's a great incentive to subscribe, over and above basic discounting.
Of course, MacFormat's circulation is higher than Retro Gamer's, and so I guess the economics are different, although, interestingly, games™'s circulation is roughly the same.
Opa-Opa wrote:Also the iphone/apple thing just stinks of another apple/imagine colaberation designed to sell more of those phones, just as the reviews in retrogamer are all iphone and not "mobile phone games" the digital copy of the magazine is an "iphone version" and not a digital version I can use on any mobile device I chose..
You go where the money is, and create content that's hard to torrent. That's just basic fundamental good business sense these days. Users of Apple devices are significantly more likely to pay for apps, and the sheer number of Apple devices out there combined with the app ecosystem makes it extremely easy for a publisher such as Imagine to potentially gets its content into the hands of new users.
Moaning that Retro Gamer is somehow 'collaborating' with Apple makes no more sense than Live's Retro Gamer collaborating with Microsoft, what with its DVDs pretty much only containing Windows-based emulators. As for mobile games, Apple's platform has the most games and the best content, and so surely it makes sense to cover it more than other systems? I'm sure if Windows Phone Series 7 becomes massive, relevant games for it will get reviewed in the mag.