MMO print magazines - How fat are you?

I don't remember where I read that, but I've read somebody nitpicking about the correct grammer of the MMORPG acronym. The first letters stand for massively multiplayer, meaning not just a handful like in a multiplayer RTS game, but hundreds or thousands. But often people write it as massive multiplayer, which suggests that the game is played by several people, all of which are overweight. I had to think of that, because *both* print magazines about MMORPGs I know are called something with "massive", not "massively".

I already mentioned in August that I subscribed to Beckett's Massive Online Gamer magazine. Bad choice, but at the time it was the only MMORPG magazine around. I don't think it is utter crap, but I agree that it isn't very good. It seems that the magazine doesn't have any authors actually playing these games, but just patch their articles together from company press releases. On the plus side that keeps you informed about all the games that are to come out. But on the downside even the descriptions of existing games tell you very little about the details, and whether the game is good or bad. And grammatically speaking, a "massive online gamer" is definitely somebody who is fat, which I am not. :)

So the new competition, the Massive Magazine can at least claim grammatical superiority, because in this case it would be the magazine that is massive, not the gamer. At 100 pages for the first issue that isn't that far from the truth. And with articles by Raph Koster, Richard Bartle, Richard Garriott, Brad McQuaid, and Nick Yee, the Massive Magazine is certainly intellectually more massive than the Beckett one. This magazine can be bought in a cheaper digital version, which might be preferable for international customers who don't want to spend a fortune on shipping cost.

But of course lots of websites and online magazines like The Escapist offer pretty much the same information for free. So in the end the most interesting thing about these magazines is that somebody somewhere decided that there are enough MMO players around to make printing and selling such a magazine worthwhile.