Future, the overseeing publishing company for publications like GamesRadar, PC Gamer, and others announced the shutting down of video game magazines CVG, Edge Online, and the online versions of the Official PlayStation, Official Xbox, and Official Nintendo magazines. This follows a hard fiscal year for the company, reporting a pre-tax loss of £30.6 million, or about $51 million. The shut down will mean 170 people will lose their jobs in the near future. As unfortunate as this is, the loss of the company also means that the world loses the oldest video game publication, CVG.
Computers and Video Games, abbreviated CVG, began in November of 1981. To put that in perspective, its first issue featured Space Invaders on the cover and contained articles about Chess, Othello, and programming how-tos. It is a UK-based publication that produced print articles until October 2004 when it started only publishing to its website that launched in August of 1999.
It should be noted that CVG is still publishing at this time and it has only been announced that it will soon end. So if you want to read anything from them, you still can for a while and can get access to some of the archives from the ’80s here.
This news has released at about the same time as EA’s announcement that major the MMO developer of Warhammer Online and Dark Age of Camelot, Mythic Entertainment, which was founded in 1995 and obtained by EA in 2006, will also soon be closing down. The reason for the shut down is so that EA can “… concentrate (on) mobile development in (their) other studio locations.”
With all of these shut downs, could the video game industry be in trouble?
