OK, I have just woken up and getting ready for work and my mind was wandering. I remember when tabletop gaming magazines covered many different IPs. You could open up a copy of White Dwarf, Dragon, Polyhedron, Challenge, or Space Gamer and find articles for games like AD&D, B/X D&D, James Bond 007, Warhammer, Traveller, Cyberpunk, Star Wars, Battletech, Runequest, and Cyberpunk. Then at some point in the late eighties and early nineties every gaming magazine became a house organ for their own publisher. It was a sea change in the industry and I humbly think it was for the worst because it killed off a lot of the diversity in gaming ideas.

I'm just wondering a couple of things. Which magazine was the first to start doing this? Why did magazines decide to become house organs?

Avalon Hill started publishing "The General" as a house organ in the 60s.  The context I get out of early The Dragon discussion about not being a house organ was pointing at those types of (still contemporaneous) magazines.

Why?  Because they sold more of their own product that way; and, if you look at the letters to the editor, many (at least of the letters selected for publishing by the editors) said they wanted only AD&D in Dragon and that other articles were considered a waste of their money.

I reckon The General was the first as well, but they weren't completely house organs (I published a few articles with them which weren't AH games).

Whatever diversity the "house organ" magazines killed in ideas (and I'm not convinced it did) found a huge resurgence when the internet came in and destroyed magazines in general.

Yeah, it sounds like House Organs and diversified magazines always were coexistent, with only a slight bit of which was in prominence at any given time period. One can only speculate as to the decisions of why to be a house organ vs. a non-HO (other than the obvious--if you are marketing yourself to your board of directors or whomever as free-self-advertising, you don't have to make a direct profit to not get cut). I know both White Dwarf and Dragon had a tempestuous relationships with non-self reporting, varying wildly over their lifetimes as to how much they covered their competitor's product.

One of them went the other way, the Journal for the Travellers Aid Society from GDW became Challenge, a multi-system mag until GDW died.

Fear of Copyright started to become a thing in the late eighties - 1988 was the UK Copyright Designs & Patents Act, also the year the USA signed the Bern Copyright Convention. Talking to TSR in house lawyers in the early-mid 90s, they seemed to think copyright worked the same as trade marks - use it or lose it. I think this had a chilling effect.

Challenge dropped articles for Rifts because of that, but I think every other publisher didn't care.

I think the copyright thing is significant, what with some game companies insisting you needed permission from them or at least putting up a disclaimer just to write a blog about their game. So the struggle of media companies with copyright in the digital age contributed to it all. Some are still struggling, for example selling collected works only on... CD.

If it was economically viable today, magazines would still exist that cover multiple game lines.

House organs OTOH can be a benefit, as they can be seen as an extension of a company's game lines. Being the official thing and such.

Advertising used to be a fairly large portion of old print magazine revenue. Companies and writers often didn't take bad reviews and such of their products very well.  Those same companies were usually a magazine's main advertisers.

The end of FidoNet killed those rags.

Remember when White Dwarf was good?

And then it became nothing more than a flier. Junk mail that you pay for.

Quote from: Mike the Mage;1047658Remember when White Dwarf was good?

And then it became nothing more than a flier. Junk mail that you pay for.

I've still got my old pre-100 issues...

I have to admit to being a little jealous.

Quote from: The_Shadow;1047660I've still got my old pre-100 issues...

Some of the early post 100 ones arent too bad wither. but past around I think 160-200 the articles on older games all but vanished and it became progrssively just a big advertisement flyer that you had to pay for.