Incite
From Magweasel
The correct title of this article is incite. The initial letter is capitalized due to technical restrictions.
incite is the name of several video-game magazines published worldwide simultaneously by Computec Media in 1999. The magazine was part of a large-scale initiative by the publisher to establish itself as a major game-industry publisher in the United States, but the entire project fizzled out in mid-2000 due to a lack of advertising support. Editions of incite were also launched in France and Scandinavia, where Computec had no previous PC-game publication.
The name "incite" is a combination of the words "inside" and "excitement". It was invented by SBG (now called Enterprise IG), a brand agency that Computec worked with before the magazines' launch. (One of the early names thrown around was "Dorsal".)
In America, Computec published incite Video Gaming and incite PC Gaming, as well as the weekly newspaper MCV. See the individual magazine pages for more information on each publication.
Computec
Computec Media, established 1989 in the German city of Nuremburg, is the largest game-media publisher in its home country. Its current game titles, including PC Games, PC Action, Xbox-Zone, and German-language editions of Edge and Computer and Video Games, have a combined guaranteed circulation of over a million copies.
The company also launched MCV in December 1998 as a business-to-business weekly newspaper covering the game industry; it published editions of MCV in Germany, France, and the UK. After its US failure, the company sold the non-German editions of MCV to Intent Media in 2002, which still publishes the title weekly in Britain.
An extravagant launch
In late 1998, Computec -- gifted with millions in dot-com-era investment money -- decided to aggressively pursue the American marketplace. The full-court press it launched on the industry in the ensuing year was like none seen before or since.
Computec USA head Torsten Opperman began by investing $100,000 in a market survey of American gamers. The survey, which was one of the first to look at the PlayStation-era game marketplace, confirmed the now-common knowledge that over 80 percent of male gamers were between 16 and 34 years old. "We also found that 86 percent of people who play games had never read any hard-core gaming magazines because they didn't think they were written for them," Opperman told PR News magazine in 2000.
With this knowlege in hand, Opperman and crew began to put together two magazines that were at once hardcore and accessible to the general public. Much of the editorial staff was headhunted from other game magazines (especially Gamers' Republic), and a $12 million ad campaign was prepared to launch alongside the magazines on TV, in print, and on outdoor media like billboards and kiosks.
To cap it all off, Computec held the Charge! event in July 1999, an industry conference meant both to discuss the study's findings and to launch the incite name. The publisher spent over $1 million on the conference, which included ice sculptures, comedian Dana Carvey, over 300 industry attendees, and coverage from CBS, Fox, and other national news outlets.
Success and failure
incite Video Gaming and PC Gaming hit US newsstands simultaneously on October 26, 1999. Both were priced at a loss (Video Gaming at 99 cents, and PC Gaming at $1.99 with CD-ROM) to get them in the hands of as many curious readers as possible. Computec's incite.com gaming website also launched on the same day, featuring a large staff and more video than had been seen before at the time.
The sales strategy was enormously successful at first. The first issue of PC Gaming sold 408,000 copies, while Video Gaming sales topped 548,000, making it the most successful game-magazine launch of all time. However, this success did not last long, as Computec failed to attract long-term advertising for either title -- non-endemic advertisers found the magazines too much of a "hardcore" game publication, while video-game companies were concerned that its audience was too casual to be interested in their games.
This was disastrous for Computec, which overestimated their predicted ad-sales figures and subsequently relied heavily on advertising for incite's revenue. The ad rate for a spread (two adjacent pages) in the incite magazines was set at $16,000 per issue, the same rate that Maxim charged and one that was far above any other game magazine. Management was anticipating each issue to be over 200 pages in size -- an extremely optimistic target even at the best of times, but downright impossible by mid-2000, when the game industry was about to enter the lull before the launch of the PlayStation 2.
The magazines proved to be a huge income drain as Computec struggled with the post-dot-com landscape, and Opperman was recalled to Germany on June 26, 2000, essentially shutting down the US arm. Total losses on the venture amounted to over $23 million.
Legacy
The incite magazines failed primarily because they were unable to target a specific audience. The titles were infamous for its intertwining of model- and celebrity-based interviews and features with its game coverage, something that neither the hardcore readership nor the magazine's staff were particularly enthuisastic about. Since the editorial was primarily picked from "hardcore" gaming magazines, they naturally preferred to offer hardcore gaming content -- but this butted against Computec's original aim to produce a magazine for gamers "threatened" by hardcore gaming magazines.
In retrospect, both incite magazines feature surprisingly entertaining writing, arguably the equal of Maxim and other "men's lifestyle" magazine. However, readers of all persuasions were turned off by its lack of focus, and the magazine wound up attracting no audience when it hoped to attract the entire audience. IDG attempted a similar editorial design with GameStar in 2003, but that magazine was also shut down before it could find an audience.
