PC Player

PC Player was a German PC games monthly, published from January 1993. At 112 issues and 16,983 pages it is the largest German title in this library, and the fourth largest from any territory — behind only Britain, Italy and the United States.

Its Chefredakteur was Heinrich Lenhardt, who appears in its own pages arguing that CD-ROM games should be cheaper, not dearer, than floppy ones: “CDs sind billig in der Herstellung und nahezu unkopierbar — also runter mit den Preisen!” — CDs are cheap to make and near-impossible to copy, so bring the prices down.

It reported its own sale, at the last possible moment

The September 1999 issue carries a note that had plainly gone in late:

“Praktisch direkt vor dem Belichten unserer Seitenfilme kam die Nachricht: Ab dieser Ausgabe gehört die PC Player nicht mehr zur WEKA-Verlagsgruppe, sondern zum Future Verlag GmbH.”

Practically right before the page films went to exposure, the news came: from this issue PC Player no longer belongs to the WEKA publishing group but to Future Verlag GmbH. The editorial then reassures readers that alles wird wie gewohnt weiterlaufen — everything will carry on as usual.

Two facts fall out of that sentence beyond the sale itself. It names DMV Verlag’s parent as the WEKA group, which the monthly colophon does not. And it dates the change precisely: DMV is named in every issue held from January 1993 to June 1999, Future Verlag from September 1999 on.

What Future looked like from Munich

The note goes on to explain the buyer, on the assumption German readers had not heard of it — “Wem dieser Name nichts sagen sollte”, for anyone to whom the name means nothing:

“Future ist eines der führenden Unternehmen in der Spielezeitschriftenbranche und veröffentlicht alles in allem 108 Magazine, unter anderem die Marktführer in Großbritannien, Italien, Frankreich und USA wie beispielsweise die amerikanische PC Gamer.”

This is a useful thing to have. Future Publishing appears elsewhere in this Vault as the Somerton startup that launched Amstrad Action in 1985 and grew into the British Amiga press. Here it is described from outside, by a magazine it had just bought, at the moment of buying: 108 titles and the market leader in four countries, Italy among them.

It is also the second time this Vault has watched a national games-magazine publisher sold to a foreign multinational and read about it in the acquired magazine’s own news pages. IDG bought eleven Europress titles at the end of 1994 and Amiga Computing ran the story under “AC joins IDG”, quoting Europress’s founder on Britain being the one gap in a network of 220 publications across 64 countries. Five years later the direction is reversed — a British company buying into Germany — and the note strikes the same two beats: here is how large we are, and nothing will change for you.

⚠ This entry is built from three issues and from the publisher named across the run. This library holds PC Player in quantity and no secondary account of it, so nothing here describes its reviewing, its scoring, or its standing among German readers. The run held ends in December 1999 and this entry makes no claim about when the magazine closed.

See also

• Future Publishing — the buyer, in 1999
• IDG — the same shape five years earlier, in the other direction
• Amiga Joker — the other German title here
• Magazines across borders — the three ways a title reached a second country