Steve Jackson Games announced that their venerable Pyramid magazine, which was initally print and most recently has been weekly HTML, will be going to a monthly PDF format. For $7.95/month, you get content equivalent to 4x the current weekly installment (so in other words, not an amount of content change, just a format/period change).
It’s still a great value for all those GURPSoids still lurking out there – Hi Bruce, I see you!
Now I want to talk about the most disturbing part of this announcement, however.
“The newsgroups will be closed down. Their functions have been taken over by our forums — including one especially for Pyramid! We recognize that some readers feel attached to the old NNTP format; however, the web forums are the current standard for message boards, and we need to serve the broader audience.”
Getting rid of NNTP? Noooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo!
Ah. memories. I cut my teeth on Usenet newsgroups. When I was in college that *was* the Internet! And really, I miss it. I find Web forums to be largely less usable than a trusty old newsreader, especially for things like gaming groups where you want to scan through the dross quickly. Good Web forums aren’t the problem – but which of the major gaming sites has a good one? It’s all “sorry it’s slow, and sorry search doesn’t work, and sorry you have to load up 100k of people’s tarded little avatars to see a page, and sorry you have to click and reload to see the posts you want to…” Bah!
Now, even I haven’t used Usenet News for gaming stuff consistently in some time. But old techies love it – in fact, at my work, we gateway our Web forums to and from NNTP still today, so that people that like the format can use it… Long live NNTP!
So Steve Jackson Games, you’re on warning! Your niche is the oldest, grumpiest, grognardiest part of the gamer community! No trying to get “up to date.” You can only soften this blow by going even more retro.
That’s right, it’s BBS time! Time to bring those old Austin BBS guys into action. We demand an all-2600-baud Pyramid immediately!
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