Future announces UK PSN mag, FirstPlay

“a three month subscription at £8.99″ … Hmmmmm

LOL

Pay to be advertised at.

@JPickford
Isn’t that what any magazine is?

Be interesting to see what the exclusive DLC ends up being – Qore does things like “early” access to big demos doesn’t it? Also interested to see how independent things like reviews end up.

Weekly? Future are desperate. Of course, we’ll need to subscribe to get all the playable demos, won’t we?

I heard Tim Clark is heading this up, and he’s the last best editor Future have/had in print journalism, so there is at least some hope that this will be worthwhile. But… HD reviews, HD previews… the internet does that already.

My question is – if this isn’t simply an attempt to get us to pay for downloadable demos – what actually is it attempting to do that the internet isn’t doing for free already?

It’s a little difficult to imagine why people pay for stuff like this when there’s any number of interweb sites providing the same sort of thing for nothing.

Edit: Yay!

Fucking good luck to them. I’d love to be able to charge you lot for this. Say, 10p a day? You’d all pay that? Yeah?

You could say the same about any paper publication; Why would i want to buy a monthly issue of a mag when i’ve got minute by minute news on the internet for ‘free’?

In the end it’ll really come down to what type of goodies they give more then anything. Though i’d imagine it’ll be hard for them to find decent stuff for every episode being weekly.

Will you take an IOU?

You’d only have to input your card details once, Blerk! We’d handle everything from there on in.

From the Bahamas, yes?

Me, tomorrow.

I don’t know what sort of market this has really. I buy print based magazines so that I can have something to read on the bus or on the loo, when I fire up my PS3, it’s to play games or watch films not to sit watch an infomercial, something I get more than enough of on the internet… for free.

I do hope it doesn’t result in a gimping of demo releases though, Beta’s I can understand but demo’s I’d be a little sore at.

@6
You know Pat, I would! Personally, if I like a place I socialise in, I dont mind paying a little towards it. I play BF2142 alot and donate money a month toward the server costs.

Sure, there are lots of free servers out there, but for me, I get great value and even in these hard times, I dont mind shelling out a few quid.

But paying for a Future Magazine? Only when it becomes cheaper than toilet roll to do so

£8.99 for 3 months sounds like a bit of a bargain to me

so this would only be accessible through the ps3?

no dice

@13 That’s good to know

God knows if we’d ever do it, though. I think Mr Murdoch’s assertion that the free internet’s going to be over “soon” is a tad premature.

People just expect businesses to grow money from trees nowadays. Don’t complain when those magazines you “enjoy reading on the toilet” stop being published because people weren’t willing to support the businesses making them.

At only £8.99 for three *months* of weekly content, people have absolutely no valid reasons to whinge about the price.

LMAO… so apparently this was the World Exclusive Announcement we were to expect today.

http://www.gamesradar.com/ps3/playstation-3/news/exclusive-firstplay-new-digital-magazine-on-playstation-store/a-20100212163724293002/g-20060314115917309058

Not even a game ffs.

@ Michael – that is so true. If I like it, I have no problem supporting it – otherwise, you will wake up one day saying ‘they closed? oh man, I used to love reading that…’

But I personally wouldnt pay for any magazine from future. But say if this place started to charge and had more features like that one on RTS games (which, could have been a bit better in my grim view :-p ) I wouldnt mind paying for it.

I think the waters need to be tested but I think for the current generation of internet users, they are SO used to free content and having everything at the click of a button for free.

“I think for the current generation of internet users, they are SO used to free content and having everything at the click of a button for free.”

Pretty much. People are spoilt.

“GIMME GIMME GIMME! NOW! NOW! NOW!”

So by subscribing every quarter you get about 1/4 off the weekly price. OPM is £5.99 a month and most people only got that for the dvd & demos anyway, so you save £9 by not having a paper mag. So this is a cheaper way of getting the same thing if that’s what you want.

If it works like Qore in the US and just has a few exclusive demos, then that’s ok, but it’ll be a wrong un if all demos are only available this way.

Sony would get a lot of data out of it. They can examine the number of people that download a demo; % of people that try the demo, then buy the game; how many times they play the demo. But all of that they can get anyway from PSN. Future will get an idea of what features people are watching, which they can’t get from traditional mags.

But I think as has been pointed out, the difficulty is that reviews and previews are available on the net for free. I know Murdoch is making all his sites subscribe only, but so long as someone is doing it for free, somewhere, then the so-called “Pay-wall” business model won’t work. It’s trying to apply old values to new technology. They only worked before because the technology didn’t change for centuries. Now the net has increased the rate of change.

Anything decent in terms of footage will end up on YouTube any way, within the day. Future needs to come with new and involving ways of presenting game news and content that make the most of the multimedia facilities of the PS3. Looking at the site, where it seems to be magazine reviews read-out over HD video, it has failed to do so.

For every publication attempting to charge for their content, there’s another ten websites that offer it for free. That, unfortunately, is the reality.

99p per episode?
I’d hazard a guess this must be weekly to justify an £8.99 outlay for a 3 month sub.

Only possibility I can see.

Also, I don’t think we should blame consumers for making wholly rational purchasing decisions. If I see the same content being given away freely then I’m going to go with that, as will, I imagine, most people.

It is not the responsibility of the consumer to make sure a business stays profitable. Businesses are not charities.

Does anybody even remember this being annonced at Leipzig by David Reeves a few years back.
It was meant to be out a while ago as OPM HD.

If they were provide exclusive beta access, themes, free dlc, avatars, interviews etc…

Then it will be worth it.

But for now… it’s a ‘Wait and see’.

Also, is this a separate download each week or will the front end just be updated?

@26

Yeah, I signed up for email notifications relating it that [OPMH] and ironically… still have received nothing!

OPM had an ad in their own mag about a year ago about it.

@Onlineatron’s 27 post
That’s the most sensible thing to do with this service.
No point making judgements until we know what will be included in these.

Early access to demos and DLC, not to mention free wallpapers and themes would make it worthwhile, until we have more we don’t know what this will be like.

It’s most likely this is Sony’s subs service they’ve been going on about for ages.

Isn’t this just like the Inside_Xbox channel on Xbox LIVE but for PSN? Makes sense to me – the PS3 needed a proper magazine show on its tubes.

I hope it is like inside XBOX, I think MS handled that really weel and it is aimed at a sensible market, while not being to derogatory to hardcore and casual gamers. its a nice mix, which I always check for when that green light comes on.

@18 Kind of expected it wasn’t gonna be something huge despite from the overexaggerating news title they put on it

No, this isn’t anything to do with Sony’s own subscription services… it’s most likely part of Future’s renegotiation of the official PlayStation license which has far less value to them since demos became downloads.