NEW GAMES MAGAZINE FOR KIDS
DC THOMSON INVESTING £500,000 IN NEW GAMES MAGAZINE LAUNCH
110% Gaming arrives in October, and caters to a younger audience
that actually doesn’t think print is dead. Michael French speaks to DC Thomson’s head of publishing Neil O’Brien and the magazine’s editor Gareth Whelan about their new venture
A
new games magazine will launch in a month’s time from the company behind
the Beano, MCV can reveal. DC Thomson will launch 110% Gaming on October 15th and has invested £500,000 on the launch, with support from EA, Sony and Warner Bros already secured. It’s a new monthly games magazine targeted at younger gamers that’ll set readers back £3.50. And crucially it’s a print-first title designed to share age-appropriate information to an emerging generation of core gamers.
KNOWING THE MARKET 110% Gaming comes following on from two years of market research by DC. “We identified a group that is ultimately the 12-year-old age range, who have access at home to many devices – a tablet and laptop, plus a games console. But more often than not they have a console passed down from their parents, usually their dad,” says DC Thomson head of publishing Neil O’Brien.
“Gaming is obviously massive for that audience, but they aren’t all consuming the newest releases or the same titles as your typical core gamer. And in terms of getting advice or information on games it was
August 29th 2014 08
coming from their friends, or they were going to magazines or websites that weren’t exactly age appropriate. “Children are warned so much now about safety online that they can be good at self- censoring and they don’t engage as much with those sites as you might think. And on the parents’
side, parents are concerned about the types of content out there for children.
“Those things together
presented us with the opportunity to create something that has the design and production values of a grown up gaming magazine, but feels entirely age appropriate.”
But a print magazine? In this climate? O’Brien isn’t phased by the
Kids told us that parents mostly limit
their screen time and that they would rather have a physical magazine to read through when they weren’t playing games. Gareth Whelan, DC Thomson
over-egged view that print is dead. Because it’s alive and kicking for those who do it right – especially someone like DC Thomson, not just famous for the misadventures of Dennis the Menace, but a brand with a strong line in licensed kids magazines. “The Beano, which is 76 years old now, sells 32,000 copies a week. Our WWE Kids sells over 30,000 copies a month. Look further than our titles and you see titles like the Moshi Monsters magazine are still selling well, and that was spun off from an online property. So we see and know the demand is there.”
NO LOVE FOR DIGITAL 110% Gaming is headed up by Gareth Whelan, also editor of DC’s WWE Kids magazine. He led rounds of focus tests looking not just at the designs and tone of the new magazine – but the delivery. One of the big bits of feedback
there was that the target audience, which you’d assume as pure ‘digital natives’, wasn’t actually that interested in reading games media content digitally – they rejected digital editions of magazines out of concerns it would eat into their screen time actually playing games. “Kids told us that parents mostly limit their screen time, and they
www.mcvuk.com
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44