The sad quiet death of computer and console magazines
The newsagent shops in Australia are often full of undelivered packages, cluttering up the remaining tiny magazine display space which is always empty of people. Birthday/occasion cards dominate the previously full magazine display stands.
The lines of people in the newsagent you see sometimes are for the post office delivery collection and for buying Lotto tickets...
The reality is that in 2025 very few people are still buying magazines from newsagents. In Adelaide's Central Business District (CBD), all but one newsagent in Rundle Mall have already shut down.
I visited that newsagent in the city last weekend. They have a slightly larger selection of magazines than my local, but still very small indeed, with many copies of the same magazine across multiple locations to fill it out, as below:
So where has the magazine audience gone?
These days, on the internet you can see everything you ever wanted to know about pretty much any topic.
Any new or old computer or console, any new or old game, application, tool or device. Read or view in real time - from the comfort of your smartphone or tablet.
Just search for and watch a short video on YouTube (as below), or watch development of new games live on Twitch, or read detailed posts about newly released devices on a blog.
Such content is created within a few hours of a product release anywhere in the world.
We get notified on our smartphones and tablets that something has happened and we can check it out, or use an AI tool to summarise it if we are too lazy or time poor to watch 5-10 minutes of content.
I can also watch short review or full long play videos online of any game ever made that I want to play. For any platform, current or old.
If that is not enough, I can watch popular streamers live playing these games and talk directly with developers who are often present on popular streams to gauge real time feedback and suggestions. I can save the videos to my smartphone or tablet device to watch later on a plane or train trip.
Take, for example, the latest release Hollow Knight: Silksong game on console (Switch 1/2) and Steam (PC/Mac/Linux) this past week.
This game is made by talented local Adelaide developers Team Cherry over the past 7 years.
First, let's check out YouTube and Twitch - Hollow Knight Silksong full and quick reviews, play throughs and live streams - huge quantities of instant content for you to consume...5.6 million people watched the release trailer alone!
You can see exactly what the game looks like and plays like - you don't need to rely on the reviewer - you can see it, and hear for yourself without buying it.
I quick search on Facebook also has plenty of videos showing the game, and feedback to read.
Using Twitch (shown below), YouTube live or Kick, you can watch many people playing the game all around the world in real time and in your local language.
You can ask questions in chat in real time too, to make the decision to buy it or not even easier - over 8,000 people are watching just one Twitch streamer in real time playing Hollow Knight Silksong during my lunch time Adelaide time (in the screenshot below):
As I screenshotted the discord channel below, note at the top of the right pane that there are over 55,000 people online at lunch time on a Tuesday in the official Hollow Knight Discord channel - just for this one game!
*This* is where all the magazine audience has gone.
Would you write an email for a future Magazine letters page asking for help to get an answer in a few months. Why bother, when you can get an instant answer in Discord, watch a long play in YouTube or watch full review and play through in realtime with all tips and tricks shown!
They don't. And they aren't.
So the magazine companies are selling up, amalgamating multiple titles into one as readership and revenue from ad companies plummets, and then closing them down and disappearing.
Quietly up until ten years ago, but much more rapidly in recent years. It is a generational shift.
This situation in 2025 is VERY different to what used to happen with magazines covering obsolete computer and console platforms.
In those eras in the 1980's and 1990's, when the platforms life came to an end, the specialist magazine closed as people moved on to newer platforms, with new magazines to cover them. For example: OS/2, Amstrad, C64, Atari ST and Amiga users moved on to Windows, Mac and Linux magazines.
Web forums were in their infancy in the mid-late 1990's - mostly places like usenet - and there was no YouTube, no Facebook, no Twitch, no Steam, no Discord, no WhatsApp. No DLC, no "fremium" games, no micro-transactions in games to progress, no games dependent on online internet servers to run. Operating system patches and games were actually finished and tested fully internally before they were released to the public, back when Kickstarters, Early access, DevOps and Agile development processes didn't exist.
Now in 2025, this is not happening with current computer and console platforms. The platforms are not obsolete yet, but the magazines are still gone - even the magazines that are available in Digital form on tablets and smartphones for many years!
Where is "Official Nintendo magazine", "Official Xbox magazine", "Official Playstation magazine", "PC Format", "Official Windows magazine", or MacWorld to cover current developments for current platforms in 2025?
Young gamers were the first to move away from magazines and now almost everyone has, for the reasons I showed with Hollow knight Silksong example earlier.
Specialist platform magazines are also quietly disappearing.
I saw Computer Music magazine, Linux Format, 3D World, Australian MacWorld and MacUser have also now closed.
Multi-format magazines are also mostly gone in the last ten years - C&VG, Electronics Gaming Monthly, Game Informer, Megazone, Games(tm), Games Master and many others.
Specialist magazines also got the axe. None of the magazines below is still around as a physical printed magazine today.
"Edge" magazine is one of the few multi-format magazines to still survive in 2025 - but seriously, take a look at the tiny thin size and page count of it. Other US and UK specialist magazines such as "PC Pro" and "Admin Network & Security" magazine are also still around in 2025. There are probably others that I can't get here in Australia, and I am only looking at English language magazines.
I bought Retro Gamer and PC Pro latest issues from the newsagent here in September 2025 (note we get magazines one or two months later than they are released in the UK/US.
Ironically PC Pro magazine this month is running a feature about 30th anniversary of Windows 95 in 2025! :-)
Some Retro related magazines like Retro Gamer, recent new specialist Retro computer/console related magazines like Amiga Addict, re-started Zzap 64/Amiga, Boing, Amiga Future, Freeze64, K&A Plus, and similar have also survived.
This I believe is because there is still some new software and hardware released for the C64 and Amiga, and an entire generation keen to learn more about their childhood computing/console history from Retro Gamer.
The next generation sadly couldn't care less about magazines or physical box classic game content. They seem totally engrossed with digital game licensed (with DLC upsell) gaming consoles, smartphones and tablets. This is when they are not live streaming or sharing snapchat, telegram, instagram, YouTube, Kick and Twitch content to their online friends and discussing in real time via Discord, etc.
This is not limited to the home either. IRL (In Real Life) live streaming, emojis and chat are replacing magazines, real conversations and text for a new generation.
Next generation adults are now watching YouTube shorts and Tik Tok videos - they last 1 minute or less. Their attention span has narrowed for whatever reason, and the need for companies to adapt ads to get eyeballs onto sponsored content to make money still rolls on without magazines.
Content quality and quantity has consequently reduced in favour of shoddy clickbait, constant pestering for subscriptions and likes, and deliberate drawing out videos to meet minimum eyeball viewing time statistics for payments from platforms like YouTube.
You probably know the sort of thing.
Terrible "YouTube watch party live streams", YouTube videos reviewing of other people's popular videos, Unboxing videos, AI generated artwork, AI voice overs and AI generated videos are being released for a generation too lazy or not willing to spend the time to create their own content, all to make a quick buck.
How many AI generated videos do you watch and learn something useful from?
Is this change a bad thing? I think you can be the judge of that.
Given the situation, I decided to get a selection of these closed down computer/console magazines that people are chucking out while there are some still to be had. You have already seen some of them earlier in this post.
For me, particularly sad is the death of nearly all local Australian magazine content. No one talks much about Australian magazines, so I will!
If I missed any other local Australian computer/console magazines still sold as physical magazines in 2025, please let me know!
I bought both those Australian produced magazines below in September 2025 - APC has been released every month since 1980 - it's now 45 years old! PC Powerplay magazine has been released since 1996, so next year will be 30 years!
I paint a bleak picture about magazines future in 2025 because it is bleak. Very.
I am glad to see that Australian government is working to preserve copies of Australian produced computer magazines so they will not be lost forever as the world moves on.
I openly wonder how will content created on Discord and other walled garden social media applications be preserved in the future after they are inevitably discontinued and their supporting servers turned off?
In ten years, I predict no one will be able to buy a magazine in a newsagent - they simply won't exist.
Your children's kids/grand kids will grow up not even knowing what a magazine is, the same way as your kids don't know what a floppy disk, DAT tape, Minidisc, cassette or Iomega zip disk is today.
Technology moves on. People move on. Not all progress is good progress, but it is what it is.
While we older people may wipe away a tear, I assure you the next generation is losing no sleep over the quiet death of magazines in 2025.
So here on my blog I wanted to show and preserve a small piece of what are wonderful memories for me - the humble and long lasting computer and console magazine.
You can also read more detailed videogame magazine history on the very excellent Forgotten Worlds website. Many scanned collections of these old magazines are available on archive.org and elsewhere on the internet if you want to read them without further filling your house or apartment with old magazines!
I have a special thanks to everyone who has ever worked on, or written an article for, any computer or console magazine in any era.
Especially I want to acknowledge those still creating magazines and content in 2025 for the tiny remaining audience. I do my best within my financial means to support those who continue to produce magazine content in a format that is now considered "old fashioned and obsolete".
Like most others, in 2025 I have embraced the new tech as well, but I love magazines still - the fact I kept so many old magazines to remind me of that era, and still buy 2025 new release magazines from overseas and occasional issues of local magazines should hopefully prove that!