This is what the PCGamer editor had to say about the forthcoming HL2 magazine previews:-
Bit dissapointing they only played levels we've already seen, and that Gabe didn't give much away, but atleast it is better than nothing.
For what it's worth I'll tell you what I think about this.
I wasn't prepared to reply to the other thread because it was a heinous slanging match driven by a few PC Zone propagandists, and frankly, ensuring the redesign issue is brilliant is far more of a priority than responding to their blinkered accusations.
The facts are as follows:
There was a trip in March to Valve's HQ in which we were privileged enough to play HL2 for the first time. PC Gamer and PC Zone were both on this trip.
The cover was the price of the trip. This was the first time anyone got to play HL2 and so we had to be there. But to be allowed through the door, all magazines had to commit to a HL2 cover.
In Gamer's case, it had to be the cover out in April too because we'd committed the next cover to the first look at Knights Of The Old Republic 2. So April was the only cover we had free.
However, there was also an NDA (non-disclosure agreement) in place which prevents all media publishing the material they'd gathered from the trip until April 29. This meant that the material gathered on the trip would miss our issue out April 15. What could we do? We had to do the cover in April to go on the trip. Yet we couldn't report what we had seen until our issue after April 29, which meant waiting until our issue out May 13.
Clearly we couldn't run a cover in April and then have nothing about the game inside. Our other choice was to say sorry, we can't give you a cover, so we won't go on the trip. That was no choice at all, because it would prevent us from ever giving PC Gamer readers our impressions of playing HL2, and we clearly couldn't do that.
So we spent a long time thinking about this and working out what we could do. Now part of what informed my thinking at this stage, was the fact that the last time we looked at HL2, I came under heavy criticism for devoting 16pages to a single game in one issue. It may have been the biggest game on PC for years, but nevertheless, a fair chunk of forumites felt 16 pages was too much. Our research suggested a similar amount of HL2 material had accumulated in the mean time, so it seemed that splitting the material in two would enable us to solve the cover/NDA problem and avoid having to devote so much of one issue to a single game.
We also knew that Valve are very active in the community and actually reveal little snippets of information about the game all the time. These events are very seperate from the annual media scrums which surround a trip to Valve HQ but nevertheless, these small insights are important because, taken together, they reveal a lot about the game. It's also the case that most of this material had been missed by the mainstream games mags, and therefore, by a significant chunk of their readership.
To my mind that means we have a duty to report it. Now our readership is not a homogenous mass. Some people will no doubt have hoovered up every last word from Valve. Equally by the time we come out with a review, they may have already read 6 other reviews on the Net or even played the game, if the publisher's kept it back from us before it hit the shops. The same can be said of most of the material printed in any magazine. If you know where to look you can find it somewhere else. We're not the only media outlet in the world. But we are the only one who does things like PC Gamer does. And I think that's why the majority of our readership buys the mag. I know this, because we're regularly congratulated about material printed in the magazine that has also appeared elsewhere. Yet our readers seem to like the way we treat that material best. We've also been criticised in the past for not covering games in sufficient depth, when I know they've been done to death elsewhere. The only logical conclusion to draw from this, is that the PC Gamer readership falls into 4 camps on every given issue:
1. Some care so much about a particular issue/game that they'll read every word written about it, even if its similar to material they've seen elsehere.
2. Some care so much about a particular issue/game that they scour every possible media outlet so that they know every word about the subject as soon as its uttered. However, they are utterly dismissive when they see material they feel they have already absorbed from another source.
3. Some care about the issue, but generally rely on only one media source for their information. Everything published by that source is new information to those readers.
4. Some are utterly disinterested in the issue, therefore don't want to read anything about it.
So I think it's fairly obvious that we have a duty to report any information we can get to the readers in category 3. They make up the bulk of our readership. Readers in 4 couldn't give a damn anyway, and readers in 1 lap it up come what may. But for everything we print to keep readers in 3 happy, we're going to offend some people in category 2 who think we're wasting their time. That's why we have a 148 page magazine, so hopefully they'll be able to enjoy information about topics they're not obsessed with. Now I'm not claiming this is a scientific analysis and I'm sure you can pick holes in it, but I think the sentiment is broadly true.
So most of the HL2 material in question was new to PC Gamer and, by extension, to a large proportion of our readership. For that reason alone, the feature is entirely legitimate. But we didn't stop there. We knew that the very hardcore would know a lot of this information. However, reading between the lines of what Valve has said enables us to speculate with a fair assumption of accuracy about things they haven't yet revealed. This is a grey area, and how much value you attach to that kind of analysis is up to you, but I'm confident we're right about quite a few things that 'official' sources are keeping under wraps.
But we didn't stop there either. We got clearance to interview Valve about Steam. Steam has the potential to radically alter the gaming landscape, in my opinion, and is an important part of the story. Dismiss it if you want, but we thought this was a significant addition. But we still weren't satisfied and interviewed two of the foremost HL modders involved with Valve. Considering the impact Counter-Strike has had on gaming, I don't think you can overlook this part of the HL2 story, and I for one, enjoyed what they had to say.
Taken altogether, I feel we did a good job of creating a well-written, insightful feature with plenty of material that was new to PC Gamer. There's no question that made the report exclusive to us, though I personally hate the term exclusive. It's been used so freely by the media over the years, including PC Gamer, that its value is effectively nil. Nevertheless, the suits insist on it. As for 'amazing new plans', well considering you find out inside that Valve are already thinking about HL3, then I think that's ok too. I don't think any magazine has ever knowingly undersold its cover and you can't honestly post here and claim not to be media savvy enough to understand that. I read stories all the time, in media of all types, and question whether the organ did enough to justify their claims. We tried hard to make sure that our claims were justified. If you don't think so, then fair enough. We'll try harder next time and I hope there is a next time in your individual case. But there do seem to be plenty of readers on these threads who appreciate that a magazine is more than a cover. It's a 148 page (minus adverts) production that covers a lot of ground and caters for a lot of tastes. We sweat blood making sure the insides are as good as we can make them but, one thing is for sure, you can't please all the people all the time.
Just to clear up a few other things. Some people have made a great play about the words in my editorial. Well, for one thing, I'm pretty sure my words have never convinced anyone to buy a single issue of PC Gamer. Particularly the alleged subscriber on the other thread, who bought the issue long before ever reading my words. Secondly, we didn't claim or imply on the cover or in the feature that what you were reading was a hands on playtest. So why would I bury that claim in 2 lines in the middle of my editorial and expect to sell a lot of mags? I wrote that we'd played it because we had. I was excited, because I'm utterly stoked about the game, so I guess I just wanted to say something to release that excitement. I was also frustrated at not being able to tell you about what we'd played, so I think that played a part too. I also wanted to flag up the fact that not everything was in this article. That there would be a part 2. At the moment this post is running at over 1400 words. I've only got 400 in Planet Gamer, so as I didn't want to bore everyone to death about NDAs on the first page of the mag, I took a short-cut and just blamed space issues. I hope you can understand that.
What's still to come? Well I know exactly what PC Gamer and PC Zone will publish next on HL2 because we played the same levels for an hour and a half and were both present in the same hour long interview with Gabe Newell. The interview was good stuff and it's always great to hear what Gabe has to say, but he was naturally very careful not to give anything new about the game away. The screenshots will be different in both magazines but I don't believe they show any new levels. The levels we played are levels you've already seen in screenshots but they were great fun. So what you can look forward to in both mags is the player's description of what it's like to play the game.
Mark
Bit dissapointing they only played levels we've already seen, and that Gabe didn't give much away, but atleast it is better than nothing.
