I wasn't even alive when Computer Gaming World launched in 1981. However, I was around this week when the print version of the magazine, renamed Games for Windows in 2006, was repurposed for inclusion in Ziff Davis' 1UP gaming portal. I talked with 1UP vice president for content Simon Cox about GFW's move online, the state of print gaming journalism in general, and the difficulties facing Ziff Davis. Some excerpts from our conversation:

　　On the reasons behind the move:

　　"I can tell you that GFW closing is a direct result of dollars and eyeballs moving from print to online way more quickly in the PC space than they are, from our reckoning, in the console space. Part of it is, [on the PC] you can surf the Web and play a game without leaving your seat. These guys are obviously more connected online, they tend to be more into the community aspects online...I think it's sort of a natural fit to have PC content where PC gamers are hanging out, which is more online."

　　"The circulation of the mag had been challenged over the last year, certainly. I'm not going to go into details, but I would say that the newsstand had dropped, and it was a tougher environment for the newsstand. That was part of the problem too--you have less advertising, less success on the newsstand and that really all adds up to one thing: People are obviously getting this information somewhere else. It's not that they don't want it, they're getting it somewhere else, and our feeling was they were getting it online."

　　"This is a sad day here, no doubt about that. A 27-year old magazine has gone away and it's sad, and people are definitely pissed off here about it, but we're also kind of going, 'You know what, we kind of saw it coming. It makes sense, and it's where the business needs to go.' It was really hard for me to watch these guys work their a**es off month after month [on a magazine] that fewer and fewer people were reading and fewer and fewer advertisers were advertising in. It was very tough to watch that."

　　On the future of Ziff Davis' Electronic Gaming Monthly print magazine:

　　"EGM remains viable. We have advertiser support, and the newsstand was not as bad as with GFW. Newsstand has slipped a little bit, but it's nowhere near the downturn we saw with GFW in the past year. Will EGM be around forever? No. When will it, kind of, cease to be? When there's not enough advertising or enough people reading it...particularly with information-based magazine publishing. If you're in the business of publishing a magazine that gives timely information to readers, the Internet is going to kill you at some point one day. It's just a question of when, and with GFW that day was today, and with EGM, that day will be some time in the future, but not for a good while."

　　On the possibility of PC coverage appearing in EGM:

　　"That's something we're kicking around. We need to talk to the audience, figure out if they want it, does it make sense. When you think about one of the factors that has made today what today is--the idea of PC eyeballs moving online and advertising revenue as well--obviously, it's sort of a limited market, I would suggest, for too much PC coverage in EGM. Does that mean we couldn't cover some PC games or list 'PC' as an alternate format in some of the features and previews that we do in EGM? No. We could, and we need to talk about that internally and talk about what makes sense for EGM."

　　On the difference between writing for magazines and the Web:

　　"When I look at the top 10 features on our site over the past six months, almost all of them were from Games for Windows...The idea that these features don't do well [online] is actually kind of wrong. Sites like Digg really help with that. If somebody finds something they find interesting, it'll do well on Digg, and people will spend the time to read it. I don't think long-form [journalism] is inappropriate for the Web. I think it just has to be done in the right way and with the right subject matter and presented in the right way, but we believe we can do that and these guys are great at it."

　　On closing a magazine amidst a bankruptcy filing:

　　"The timing is terrible. Make no mistake about it, internally here, we've been wringing our hands about the timing of this announcement because of the Chapter 11 filing. We're just saying, 'You know what, people are going to put these two things together, there's not much we can do about it;...and I can understand why they'd do that, but the truth is they don't have anything to do with each other. GFW's financial issues with advertising revenue and with the newsstand are completely separate from the [bankruptcy] filing. The filing is about restructuring the debt and basically turning over the company to the people who own that debt over time. The courts are going to be taking care of that...GFW is not a factor at all in that. This would have happened with or without a filing."

　　On past attempts to sell the Ziff Davis Game Group:

　　"My understanding of it is we were trying to sell the Game Group until about midway through last year, and then when Jason [Young] came on board as the new CEO, the message I got from him was, 'We don't want to run this business just as if we were trying to sell it; we have to run the business to grow it.' And we are running it that way. Talk of selling is not something that comes up here; it's just not a factor in the way that we think."

　　On Ziff Davis' plan for "going forward":

　　"I've been through some magazine closures--you know that this company has been through a lot--and we're going through that transition and it's been very, very hard, no doubt about that. But this closure wasn't one of those deals where everybody's lost their jobs. We're taking this team, Jeff [Green] and Shawn [Elliott] and Sean [Malloy] and Ryan [Scott], and we're putting them all online, which is very, very different than magazine closures we've had in the past. ... This is the first time we've done that in our history, and I think that speaks to the whole plan. And there is a plan, which is that we need to grow online, which is what we're doing."

　　"Going forward, you can only sustain so much of [an unprofitable magazine] until you say, 'Look, what's the outlook for the magazine,' and the outlook was bad and you have to make that decision, and it's the right decision. The vision going forward is we know to be a bigger player online, and we're not going to do that if we keep resources on a magazine that not enough people are reading and not enough advertisers are advertising in."

　　For more about PressSpotting, check out the introductory column.

　　Kyle Orland is a freelance journalist specializing in video games and based out of Laurel, MD. He's written for a variety of outlets, as detailed on his personal site. He's got a feeling, a feeling deep inside, oh yeah.

　　Questions? Comments? Story ideas? Bitter invective? Send it to Kyle.