Interview, Continued

Aaron McKenna: The integration of online and media features, such as video in advertisements, would seem to open up some interesting possibilities for your content. Have you any new features in mind for future issues and titles?

Dave Taylor: We have some short term plans, which are focused on getting the next emagazine launched, which is a PC games magazine coming out November 30th.

Then we have some mid-term plans in terms of expanding multimedia in the titles. Everyone loves the video, and the great thing is that you find yourself looking at titles you might not have even considered before. I reckon that there are probably 2 games I'll now buy for the 360 that I wouldn't have considered buying before I saw the ads in our own mag! (And yes, sadly, some of us do have to go and buy our own games, because the editorial lads won't share.) They were in genres I wouldn't normally consider, but having seen the video and then read the ad, I'm going to give them a go.

So video is here to stay. Then we'd like to expand the multimedia; we've done some cool stuff before, like the interactive Spot the Ball competition we did in issue 1 of PES Fanzine for Konami. We'd like to do more of that kind of thing, plus as many ways as possible of trying to make the games reviews more interactive. Our lead game piece in PCGZine is going to have much more interactivity than in 360Zine.

Long term, we've got some wacky plans for looking at ways that would allow readers to decide what sorts of games are delivered in their magazine that they download, but that's a long way off.

Aaron McKenna: Tell me a little more about this "interactive article", if you will.

Dave Taylor: [Laughs] No. Okay, we have an idea about how we could do some really interesting things with compiling a magazine using the technology available today, but the thing is that we're looking at rolling out ideas over time. By the time we want to implement it, I suspect we will be able to something so cool that today's ideas will seem lame! What we've done with 360Zine and PCGZine is already so far ahead of the other stuff out there that we don't want to rush to market even more advanced stuff until people feel comfortable with what we have.

Aaron McKenna: Do you think there is a disconnect in your emagazines to coverdiscs and downloads of demos and other such content, and do you have any plans in this regard?

Dave Taylor: It would be pretty easy for us to link off to a download site for PC demos and drop on a "Demo on Xbox Live" flash for PCGZine and 360Zine respectively. It's something we've discussed and it's relatively easy to do. With the PC demos, I'm almost not sure whether it's worth it, because our readers are so net savvy that they know where they are going to get the demos from already. With the Xbox 360, it just saves you the trouble of going to look if we tell you whether it's there or not.

Aaron McKenna: Issue 1 of 360Zine comes in at just over 20 MB. Have you set a size cap for your magazines, and how does data size impact on production?

Dave Taylor: Originally we capped our mags at 30 MB. That's roughly two and half minutes for people on 2 Meg lines, which seemed reasonable for gamers. Obviously though, we want to get it down as quickly as possible, so the smaller the better. In the end, after nearly a day just working on the compression, we brought it in at around 20 MB. We haven't had a single complaint about file size.

As time goes by, of course, the default bandwidth goes up - lots of people are already on 8 Meg in this arena - but we had to cap it somewhere. That'll change as we feel the time is right.

Aaron McKenna: What kind of circulation figures are you seeing for 360Zine, and how do you intend to audit circulation going forward?

Aaron McKenna: [Laughs] Do you really expect me to answer the first part? We're a little ahead of where we wanted to be, so that's good. It's very good.

Auditing was something we were very conscious of from the start, so we have a special bit of script to ensure that the download is only counted once. We implemented the electronic ABC guidelines for how to denote a reader, so we know our numbers are double checked and 100% legit.

Aaron McKenna: Tell me a little more about PCGZine; it sounds a lot like something in the mold of a traditional PC games magazine.

Dave Taylor: I think it's like a traditional PC Games mag in the way 360Zine is like a standard games mag. We're grounded in a print magazine background, so quality of page design and quality of editorial (meaning the quality of the words) is paramount. Interesting, entertaining, accurate copy is what we are most interested in - the rest flows from there. There will be a few design tweaks between the two mags, but they will definitely feel like part of the same brand.

Aaron McKenna: What kind of a publishing schedule will you be keeping with 360Zine and PCGZine?

Dave Taylor: The next issue of 360Zine is due in January, as is issue 2 of PCGZine; from there on in we're publishing monthly. Because launching is such a big affair, especially from a standing start, we wanted to give ourselves the breathing space to get PCGZine right between issue 1 and 2 of 360Zine, but actually it's worked out well.

Aaron McKenna: Tell me a little about your team of contributors - you seem to have used some well-known names.

Dave Taylor: One of the main advantages we have is our main management team. Dan has been working in the industry for so many years that he could look across the whole spectrum of writers and get lots of people involved, rather than just one or two. We weren't just some people from out of the blue ringing these people up and saying, "we've got this great idea for doing an emag!"

Aaron McKenna: Give us a preview of what we'll see in Issue 1 of PCGZine.

Dave Taylor: Sure. Our main article is a preview of The Burning Crusade, because it's a huge event for PC gamers. It's so huge, in fact, that we have not just one person working on the article, but two, so that we cram in as much as we reasonably can. And on that note, we're also working hard to bring some new video features to the feature, so you can see the video with the original audio. There will also be a voiceover - kind of like DVD commentaries - but we need to see if we can get the compression good enough to allow for this. Then, of course, we'll have previews and reviews of all the other big titles, plus an exclusive interview with the developer of Championship Manager 8.

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