Closing Out the Old Year... and Maybe Game Trade Magazine

I tend to reserve placeholder art for the holidays.  I've rambled on about this before. Between Christmas, New Years, Easter, and Jul, and everything else gnome (tomte) appropriate, I have scheduled posts reaching out nearly decades in the future.  

The only thing I wanted to finish off the year with was my monthly "Another Month of Gaming" post, where I take the monthly solicitations out of Game Trade Magazine (GTM), from Alliance Game Distribution, and label the stuff I want, the stuff that intrigued me (if money were no object), and an "Imaginary Store List"  were I list most of the cool stuff coming out that I would order if I had a store.  

It's fitting and quirky that my first such post on the blog was December 2010 for Issue #130, while the latest one I did last month was Issue #310.  

But it wasn't the first month I performed this mental exercise.  I've been technically doing this ever since Issue #1, hell, I've had the pleasure of doing monthly gaming solicitations for pay well before Alliance was a thing, where the pre-order packet for The Armory and Chessex would show up at the store I worked at.  When I first started working at a FLGS in the early to mid-90s, it was far more exciting to see everything coming out, instead of being subject to magazine advertisements or articles in company house organs.  

The physical copies of GTM were either mailed to the store, or they put in with a shipment, but the digital copy (PDF) has been normally available online two weeks earlier, give or take a few days.    One of my bookmarks is the web address for the latest issue, which I update by one number once the I finish reviewing the latest one.  

Like I mentioned, I wanted to take care of this before the New Year, before the #CharacterCreationChallenge in January overwhelms everything else.  However, my updated link for where Issue #311 should be going didn't update prior to Christmas (not a big surprise).  After Christmas I started getting a "Our website is under construction, look for a new website for December 29, 2025."

This was not a complete surprise.  Alliance Games was a division of Diamond Comics, and with drastic and catastrophic bankruptcy of Diamond, and way back in May, Universal Distribution, a Canadian-based distributor of games, comics, and trading cards, had acquired the assets and debts of Alliance.  

It was only a matter of time (and a reasonable new year for accounting purposes) until Universal took over completely.  

Now I don't have a view of the back end (and too be honest, it was always easier in the 90s to do things over the phone than limited online access), so perhaps it's the greatest thing ever, but the Universal website has a very 2004 vibe to it.  Not that I need a lot of fancy graphics and such, but the model I'm accustomed to in some iteration since 1993, is gone, reverting back to a very antiquated version.   

As I write this, the Game Trade Magazine website is still up, promoting a few articles for an alleged Issue #311, and working links for articles back to Issue #300.   It will probably manifest itself in some form, but I'm not holding my breath for #312.

GTM is an imperfect entity.  I enjoy the high gloss production values, I appreciated them trying to tie-in existing product to a new release.   I've always been disappointed with Alliance (and Diamond) with not providing consumers with non-bulk pricing of items, due to varying discount structures for retailers, and possibly varying prices store to store.    I enjoyed a few of the columns they put in each issue (with online video content for certain things.   

Promotion and marketing, the sole purpose of GTM, was as erratic as the release schedule and cooperating companies.  Early issues had mini-scenarios, exclusive stat blocks and samples, heck there were Munchkin, Lunch Money, and Tsuro exclusives I still have hiding in a drawer.  

But it was inconsistent to all but a retail dork like me, and the price tag on an item they originally gave away five copies to each store for free was always crazy.   We promoted the copy we left on the counter, gave one or two to our better purchasing customers (We did this for Previews customers as well, especially those who ordered .... and picked up big-ticket items.)

In recent years, I tend to find new issues of GTM tossed into some dusty bin underneath a display, along with the last two years worth of copies, so I do realize most were not optimizing.  

I could go over the Meeple Monthly, the pre-order book for ACD Distribution.   It could be argued very well that Meeple Monthly has become superior to GTM,  but they're very proprietary with the solicitation information digitally, and despite inflation, $50 for a year's subscription is still outrageous for something that provides even less promotional material to the consumer.  

But I'm not the target demographic for these, maybe I was when GTM was in single digits, but certainly not anymore.  Just another sign that that only constant is change.