well above its weight. Everyone was working at full capacity – you couldn’t get a single drop more blood out of them – and then NewBay came in and went ‘Right, how are we going to get 15% growth on our investment?’ And we were like, ‘Well, we need more staff here, and we need to buy Develop Brighton….’ And they were like ‘Oh no, we don’t have any money. We spent it on the business.’ That’s where things started to go wrong.”
“From that point on it was kind of a death spiral”
Dring remembers one effort to cut costs that
involved removing swathes of people from the MCV subscription list, including the whole of Square Enix and the influential founders of Rockstar Games, all made without consulting or informing the staff. For years “MCV was always in people’s faces” adds
itself, there was a grim understanding that there was no passion for the business, the magazines and the teams - which would have a negative impact on the company culture. “The reality was,” says then-editor Chris Dring, ”that NewBay bought a company that was punching
ENDANGERED!
Because they document a side of the industry that rarely gets written about, the likes of CTW and MCV have become important sources of historical record. Sadly, older issues are rare today because they tend not to be kept. Even worse, the one archive that was preserved by Intent Media was pulped when owners NewBay closed down its Hertford office. MCV founder Stuart Dinsey had arranged to save the collection and turned up with a van to take thousands of magazines, but NewBay allegedly had them cleared out the day before. Some say it was a deliberate act of sabotage. It was certainly tragic, as there are only a handful of MCV’s weekly issues to be found. If you find any old MCVs or CTWs gathering dust, please don’t throw them away!
Dring. “It was a weekly mag. It had a daily newsletter that went out and there was an event maybe every six weeks - a pub quiz or a football tournament or an awards show. So when you cut the circulation and events from the schedule, you lose touch with the industry.”
22 | MCV/DEVELOP September 2023
The GMAs (and Greg Davies) recovered from the Grainger episode, but it was forever tainted.
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