So... farewell then Pyramid Online

[ffutures]

Pyramid Online, Steve Jackson Games' weekly webzine, has apparently been losing money and is to be shut down, replaced by a once per month PDF which will looks to be fairly expensive compared to the old site; $7.95 a month, nearly $100 (now about £66) a year.

http://www.sjgames.com/ill/archives.html?m=November&y=2008&d=7

Existing subscribers get six months of the PDF, and for the time being will be able to download old articles from its archives, but that isn't going to continue indefinitely.

SJG say that the new magazine will contain at least as much content as four weeks of the old webzine, but I doubt that the mix will be the same. princeofcairo has already said that he will not be carrying his Suppressed Transmission column over to the new magazine - for me that was one of the main reasons to keep subscribing to the web zine. I think it's possible that the non-GURPS content of the magazine, already low, will disappear completely.

Hopefully I'm worrying unnecessarily, and the new version will still be worth the subscription. But with the dollar on the rise compared to sterling and the Euro they may find that they're losing a lot of their European audience six months down the line. Anyway, I wish them all possible success; I'm just not convinced it's a wise move.

As part of this restructuring the SJG newsgroups (currently only accessible if you were a Pyramid subscriber) will also close, replaced by bulletin boards. As far as I can tell these will continue to be free. Not quite as convenient for me as newsgroups, but on the whole not a bad thing I suppose.

Comments

[gonzo21.livejournal.com]

It's a worry the way the internet has increasingly driven the value of everything down towards zero. People just don't like the idea of paying for things they can get for free.

Which is fair enough, but, given the big players (LJ, Facebook, Myspace, etc) are increasingly coming to the realisation that advertising banners don't make a profit, I'm not sure where it leaves this whole concept of Web 2.0.

Ach, I miss the old gaming magazines. They were great fun.

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

Pyramid wasn't free but the web incarnation was pretty cheap - I think about $25 a year though I may be remembering it wrong, it's several months since I last renewed my sub. I would not have objected to a substantial price hike, if it had been phased in over a year or two, but I think $100 is taking it a bit too far.

[gonzo21.livejournal.com]

Yeah, that's a lot for 12 issues of an ezine.

Any idea how many subscribers they had?

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

No idea I'm afraid. Hundreds rather than thousands, I think.

[philreed.livejournal.com]

Over 1,000 subscribers, but under 2,000. Subscriptions were down from they were five or six years ago.

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

Thanks!

[robertprior.livejournal.com]

Well, SJG did a number of things to lessen the value of Pyramid.

They created free web forums, and then their staff proceeded to ignore the paid subscriber newsgroups, to the extent that if a subscriber had a question they were referred to the forums. So people who subscribed for (or partly for) the newsgroups lost that. (And as the forums had a clumsier interface and a much lower signal-to-noise ratio, it wasn't like you were getting the same product for free; you were getting a lower-value substitute.)

They changed the rules for playtesting so that, while you had to be a Pyramid subscriber, you didn't automatically get access. You had to apply, and you had to use email rather than the newsgroups (more cumbersome interface). So if you subscribed for playtesting your chances of actually getting to do it had dropped quite a bit. Again, less value.

Now, I have no idea how many people subscribed for these extras. I know I did, as the magazine itself rarely did much for me, and so when they went away I let my subscription lapse.

[parakkum.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I pretty much maintained my subscription to check in on the newsgroups from time to time, as I don't get a lot of use out of gaming articles most of the time, but the Pyramid newsgroups are usually a good (high signal:noise) place to go and ask "Where can I find information on this idea I have?"

[aitkendrum.livejournal.com]

I wonder where this leaves Journal of the Travellers Aid Society (JTAS)?

*scours web*

[robertprior.livejournal.com]

No idea. I've noticed that the size of the articles has been steadily decreasing, down to where a "Short Adventure" was little more than a collection of character sketches and notes on a couple of possible plot ideas (ie. less than the old "Amber Zone" in the print magazine). And the last review was one that I'd have failed if handed in by a grade ten student: too short, too incomplete.

[aitkendrum.livejournal.com]

Ah. Anything I write goes to the BITS newsletter as I'm the editor and we are usually short on material apart from a few stalwart volunteers.

I wonder if their better going down the Mongoose route and doing a free PDF ezine.