What the heck? World of Warcraft: The Magazine

World of Warcraft, the billion-dollar online world with 11.5 million subscribers, really is a world unto itself. So it’s no surprise that a game media publisher is planning to do a print magazine dedicated to the game.
World of Warcraft: The Magazine will be a subscription only magazine debuting in multiple languages — English, French, German and Spanish — in the U.S. and Europe. It will be published by Future, a British media chain, in cooperation with the game’s maker, Blizzard Entertainment.
The magazine will have no ads and run about 148 pages. It will be high-end glossy, with lots of room for game art and a pull-out poster. It seems crazy to launch a new print magazine, without an accompanying web site, in the age of the Internet.
But Future’s executives, including magazine editor Dan Amrich, believe that the gravitational pull of World of Warcraft is so strong among its users that they will gladly pay the $39 per year subscription fee for the collectible magazine. That really says something about how much fans can be attached to their fantasy worlds. The more I think about it, the more it seems likely that this is going to succeed. The appeal could be similar to that of Figure Prints, a startup that is overloaded with orders for its 3-D figurines of personalized World of Warcraft characters. The bet here is that fans of a world such as World of Warcraft are so involved in their own storytelling inside the game that they will want something permanent to commemorate it.
The magazine is being announced among the faithful at Blizzard’s annual convention, BlizzCon, in Anaheim, Calif., this weekend. Blizzard will promote subscriptions for the quarterly magazine on its web site for the game. Amrich says that the issues will be packed with all sorts of articles from the perspectives of both game creators and fans.
The game was launched five years ago. It faces one big hiccup now. In China, Blizzard has had a horrible transition from its Chinese online game operator, The9, to Netease. The game has been down since June as a result, and now Chinese authorities are in talks with Blizzard about removing objectionable material in the game. So the fate of World of Warcraft in China is up in the air. But Future isn’t planning on launching the magazine there anyway.
Amrich, former senior editor at Official Xbox Magazine, will be joined by art director Ryan Vulk, who joinsFuture from Wired magazine. The editorial director is Julian Rignall. A bunch of freelance journalists will contribute to the magazine.
John Gower, international director of FuturePlus, said that the game magazine business has been hurting for some time, thanks to competition from the Internet. He said that this project could buck the trend and has been in the planning stages for years.
Paul Sams, chief operating officer of Blizzard Entertainment, said that his team will work closely with the Future team to make the magazine stand out.