Sega magazines
From Sega Power to Mean Machines, why did the UK have so many Sega magazines in the 90s?
Let’s solve a mystery…
It’s the early 90s. Pepsi is clear. Parker Lewis Can’t Lose. And Sega’s Genesis / Mega Drive dominates the market on both sides of the Atlantic.
If you popped into a UK newsagency during these halcyon years you would have seen a bunch of Sega magazines to choose from.
Mean Machines Sega, Sega Pro, Sega Power, Megatech, and Mega are the titles that immediately come to mind. I’m sure there are others.
If you lived in the US, your newsstand options would have looked very different. And a lot more limited. Multiformat titles like EGM, GamePro and GameFan dominated the market, and if you were after for something Sega specific you were basically out of luck.
I wanted to find out why. So I went straight to the source, and asked a bunch of industry veterans.
The cyber razor cut
If anyone knows about the UK media landscape in the early 90s it’s Julian ‘Jaz’ Rignall. He came up via Zzap!64 and CVG magazine, launched Mean Machines in 1990, then split that into rival Sega and Nintendo publications before taking off for US shores.
Anyway, as he explains it, the UK was already flooded with quality multi-format titles as the decade began. Established magazines like CVG, ACE, and Mean Machines made “entering into that sector very risky.”
Conversely, “Sega specific magazines had a lot less competition.” And Sega was experiencing a golden era, with booming console sales in the UK and other PAL territories. The kids that had graduated from old 8bit micros to playing Sonic on their Master System, Game Gear or Mega Drive were looking for a magazine that focused on their new system and the many games coming down the pipeline.
That presented a commercial opportunity. And UK publishers were happy to oblige.
Speaking about the launch of MegaTech, editor Paul Glancey noted that it wasn’t a particularly tough sales pitch when he flagged it with his boss, Jaz. Yes, the same Jaz.
“The initial pitch (for MegaTech) was me sitting in the back of a cab with Julian saying, ‘Hey, why don’t we make a Mega Drive mag’? This was in mid-1991, Virgin Mastertronic was handling all the Sega hardware and software in the UK and making a pretty good job of it. With no official release for the PC Engine, and the Super NES still on the horizon in the UK, the Mega Drive was THE hot console at the time.”
It was also a potential cash cow. As Paul notes, “The expectation was that there would be loads of official games coming for the Mega Drive that would need lovely full-colour, full-page ads in MegaTech.”
Electronic gaming monthly
While that all makes sense from a UK perspective, it doesn't explain why the US didn’t follow suit. After all, the US also had a number of multi-format magazines that were extremely popular, and the Sega Genesis was quickly establishing itself as a market leader.
But those Sega specific magazines failed to eventuate. What gives?
Well, a good place to start would be land mass and demographics. The UK covers a surface area of about 243,000 km². The US is about 9.8 million km²
Why am I telling you this? Because the geography of the two countries, and the way populations were distributed had a major impact on their respective publishing models.
The UK’s relatively small size and dense population means it’s a lot cheaper to print a magazine and get it distributed up and down the country in neighbourhood newsstands.
Those lower overheads meant publishers could produce more targeted magazines, sell fewer copies, and still turn a profit. It allowed magazines like Sega Pro and MegaTech to sell 30,000 - 40,000 copes a month and remain commercially viable.
That didn’t work in the US. The huge land mass and the associated distribution costs meant the margins were a lot tighter. So it was all about volume. Which meant the largest possible audience. Which meant covering as many different systems as you could to bring in more readers.
Greg Sewart can provide additional context on that front. He co-founded the Gaming Age website in the mid 90s before joining EGM around the turn of the millennium.
“I was told that the US and UK markets were different based very much on the size of the countries,” says Greg. “The UK is relatively small, which means it's much cheaper to distribute periodicals compared to the US and Canada, which is so much bigger geographically. I was also told that newsstand sales were much more healthy in the UK, where subscriptions tended to make up the bulk of sales in North America.”
Newsstands vs subscriptions
The subscription thing is worth noting. Subscriptions are generally sold at a heavy discount and are primarily used to drive up circulation. Higher circulation rates allow you to charge more for your ads. And if you look back through an old issue of EGM you’ll find plenty of those.
Point being. The US business model was very much about building a subscription based audience, which would then allow you to sell more ads, for more money. Which is all well and good, but it only works at scale.
The UK took a different approach, with the majority of magazine sales coming from local newsagents. These magazines were sold at full price, which provided a nice profit margin.
And when you combine it with the UK’s cheaper logistics and distribution channels it allows for more specialist magazines with more modest sales targets.
Terrace boys and casuals
Geography, sales graphs, balance sheets and common sense can go a long way towards explaining the differences between the UK and US magazine publishing models. But it still doesn’t tell the full story.
Keith Stuart has a theory about that. You may recognise his name from the video game column he regularly writes for The Guardian. Prior to that he served as a magazine editor for a number of titles, including the Dreamcast focused DC-UK magazine.
“I also wonder if there was a cultural element,” begins Keith. “A lot of gamers in the UK were very platform-centric, in that they were only interested in the consoles they owned. This came from the whole Commodore 64 vs Spectrum rivalry in the 1980s. I think there was something almost tribal about games buying in the UK that meant single format mags did particularly well.”
Meanwhile, the US market had clear winners when it came to home computers and video game consoles throughout the second half of the 80s. IBM Compatibles and the Nintendo NES were the market leaders and it wasn’t even close. So the tribalism you might find in UK playgrounds was more tempered… Until the 16bit console wars kicked off, anyway.
Sega Vision, Sega Force and Mega Play
It’s perhaps a little late in the piece, but I should mention that Sega specific magazines did exist in the US. They just didn’t have much reach, and were mostly an after thought.
Sega launched Sega Visions magazine in 1990 as their answer to Nintendo Power. It was produced up until 1995, but its subscription focused model and glorified catalogue vibe limited its reach.
Meanwhile, the larger US publishers did launch console specific spin-off magazines. But these tended to simply repackage material from the main publication, and were sold via subscriptions and giveaways.
Sega Force was a glorified supplement that was given away with EGM magazine between 1992 and 1994. Six issues were produced. EGM’s parent company (Sendai Publishing) also launched Mega Play as a Sega specific magazine. It ran from 1990 until 1995 and was, once again, mostly repackaged Sega content from the main magazine with additional guides and stuff.
End of an era
If the early 90s saw various Sega specific titles launched in the UK, a lot of them had closed up shop by the middle of the decade. Because a video game magazine is only as popular as the systems it covers, and by 1994 / 1995, it was clear that Sega were struggling to maintain their market share.
Steve Merrett was there. He was the editor of Mean Machines Sega from 1994 until 1997. As he recalls, the latter years weren’t so fun.
“It isn't great to work on a magazine with no games. I remember the last days of Sinclair User which was basically old budget reissues being reviewed, and it is soul destroying. Mean Machines Sega was the same. The calibre of games on the cover went down, as did the page count. It then only becomes a matter of time until it folds.”
Still, for a brief moment in time, Sega magazines were everywhere. As long as you lived in the UK… and maybe Australia.
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