So, back in April I posted about having bought White Dwarf #400, in which I commented that it was a travesty that it had reached 400 issues while Dragon ended at #359. It appears that Games Workshop agreed, because they have decided to kill off White Dwarf. Well, sort of. What they've actually done is decided to turn White Dwarf into a weekly mag available only through themselves, while also launching a new "Warhammer: Visions" monthly magazine that will be a direct (albeit larger) replacement for the existing magazine.
Someone should probably have told them about the internet, and how it's busy killing off printed magazines.
They will no doubt deny it, but I'm reasonably sure that the new WD weekly magazine will mostly be adverts for their new releases, adverts for the new releases for the next week, and then some rules material that is nothing more than early access to whatever is going to be in a book one or more months down the line. I don't think the magazine can offer unique rules, because that's a quick way to make the game unmanageable (as WotC and Paizo found out with D&D 3.5e). This means that the weekly magazine is essentially without value - the adverts are better accessed online, while if you're interested in the new rules you're better off waiting for the 'real' book anyway - that way, you get the playtested version, rather than the one they've just slapped together.
Meanwhile, the new monthly magazine, "Warhammer: Visions" is a new magazine, and will suffer accordingly. While those few people who still buy actual magazines knew to look for "White Dwarf", the same isn't true of "Warhammer: Visions". And so, they'll lose a lot of their casual readers. They'll also be fighting for space alongside all the video games and sci-fi magazines, most of which will sell better. Basically, only a fool launches a new print magazine these days. (And, incidentally, that's why the printed Dragon will never, or at least should never, be back.)
The other problem they have to deal with is that both these magazines will be competing with their own online versions. This puts them in line for the exact problem D&D 4e had with the DDI and its printed books: in order to keep costs down, you need as large a print run as possible (many of the costs of a print run are fixed, whether you do 100 copies of 10,000), but you also can't afford to have lots of leftover copies, because that's wasted money.
The likely consequence of offering both a printed and online version is that they'll see a split in the customer base - some people will buy print (and refuse to buy online), while some will buy online. Virtually nobody will buy both. Pretty quickly, then, it will become apparent that the print version is a non-starter - enough people are buying online, and thus enough print sales are lost, that it's just not worth printing (and if they push up the cost to compensate, they lose yet more sales, and enter a detah spiral).
But when they take the inevitable step of cancelling print and going online-only, they'll find that the sales of that alone aren't enough to justify all the effort of making it - to be worthwhile, it needs the people who were buying the print version. Alas, they'll find that there are plenty of luddites who would buy print, but who will not buy an electronic magazine.
(Actually, that's not entirely unreasonable. An online mag has to compete with a whole lot of other online material, great swathes of it free, and some of it of very high quality indeed. A physical product, to a certain extent, can sidestep this. So, while the physical copy might offer enough value-add to be worth paying for, the electronic version has to compete with free offerings that are 'good enough', and probably can't. And that's also why the internet is going to kill quality newspapers, but that's another rant.)
So farewell Grombindal. Looks like you finally found a dragon (or troll, vampire, or whatever) you couldn't Slay.
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