Feature: The Hsu Drops: EGM Editor Dan Hsu on the gaming industry and media Subscribe to this RSS feed
DR: On that note, what do you think that magazine can offer at this point that the Web still can't?
Hsu: Well, a lot of things. It offers like a tangible and a more permanent way to read stories. Online stories can get the information up quickly, there's unlimited room and you can put whatever you want up there, but there is something sometimes more fulfilling about reading a story in print. When you get done with it you can save it or pass it along to a friend, in a way that's not as come and go with an Internet story. You can also do photography and get creative with the art as we kind of have a bigger budget than most websites. We can spend a lot of money on illustrations and art that you wouldn't bother doing for a website story that will be gone in another week. We can explore stories a little bit more deeply than maybe a typical website If a site's source doesn't get back to you,you're going to run the story anyway and write that the person was not available for comment at the time the story was written. It's kinda nice having that monthly lead-time to do things more in depth than you can on a website.
PS3=Fozzie from the Muppets
DR: At EGM you seem to run a lot of non game-specific covers as of late. Do you think they have a place?
Hsu: It depends like our newest one, BattleStation. Did you see that one?
DR: Yeah.
Hsu: That was a risk for us because that was even further from what we traditionally would work on... a little bit more industry-oriented and I think you have to be more "in the know" than the average consumer in America to be interested in reading, so we are eager to see how well that does.
DR: You have taken quite a few somewhat controversial stances in like the last year or so. In terms of the "covergate" thing between EGM and Games.Net and the contentious interviews with like Peter Moore and Jack Tretton, do you think those kinds of stances have paid off?
Hsu: Let's start with the covers and coverage for sale thing. I don't know if it has paid off because there's nothing tangible I can point that says, well this is a result of that. There were people who said "that's good; he needed to say that" and others that said "This is no good unless you name names" and I understood all of that but I went in that with the idea that I know this is going on. It has been verified and I can't name names, unfortunately. If I could have, I would have definitely named names and given it some more backing, but what I really didn't want to do was trash specific competitors and then say "We have to work together to make this a more respectable industry".
Response continued on the next page.
