David_Anthony_Guevara@cup.portal.com (03/05/89)
I am posting this for some friends who don't have access to the net. The following is the original post and the company's response to your questions/concerns. Please send any additional comments or questions to me and I will forward them to the company. Thanks! > We need your help! We are a small company in the Silicon Valley > that is considering publishing a newsletter directed to computer > game players. There is a lack of a media where a person can get > an objective rating of the various games that are cascading onto > the market. I think we have all spent $30-$40 on a game, only to > find out it was nothing like the description on the box. > Very frustrating, isn't it? > > We want to address the problems computer gamers have in finding > good software games to play. There are not many publications out > where a person can find computer games rated. And the current > publications are somewhat biased due to the advertising dollars > they receive from the game publishers. Would you give a company > a bad rating if they had full page ads in your magazine? The games > are also rated by a variety of people; so there is no common basis > for the ratings. The evaluations are structured so that a person > looking for a rating on the game is also given critical clues on > how to solve the game. And the list goes on. > > We want to solve these problems by providing a newsletter (with no > advertisers) that rates games on a bi-monthly basis. The games > would be rated by a team of people so that there will be a common > objective basis than if only a single person rated each game. The > same team will rate all games published in the newsletter. There > will be a thorough 1-2 page evaluation of the each game without > critical clues to aid you in making a purchasing decision. A > supplement will follow with a deeper evaluation of the game that > will include hints on how to solve the game. The cost of the > publication would be somewhere between $17-25/yr. > > We are currently finding out if people would be interested in such > a publication. We are asking for replies to tell us if this format > is intriguing to you. Do you have any comments on what you would > like to see in a game rating publication? Please give us any > suggestions you may have. GAME NEWSLETTER READERS Thank you all for the great response to our previous posting asking opinions about our possible newsletter format. We apologize for the delay in responding to your questions. This delay was due to the large number of responses received. It was great to see that the gaming community is definitely hungry for a quality publication on games. We want to address some of the major concerns that were expressed in the responses. We do this to stay as close to the game players and their opinions as possible. One major area of concern was the machine formats we were going to cover. Many negative references to "clone" rags were made. We are going to cover the widest range of current machine formats as possible. When we rate a game, we will indicate which machines it will run on as well as if the publisher has made any moves to port it over to other systems. We will also indicate many of the differences one will experience playing the game from machine to machine. The format of the newsletter will be such that six to ten games will be rated in each issue. We will provide a rating scale of some sort (to be decided later) but we will also go much further by informing the reader of what the game is all about. Play ability, content of the game, how it compares to similar games, copy protection used, and provisions for 3-1/2" disks are just a few of the items we will cover. Space will be made available for reader responses on games reviewed. We also noted in the responses that readers were concerned about getting value for what they were paying for. We understand this situation wholeheartedly because our main desire is to help you to get the most value out of each game you purchase. To ensure that you are happy with our publication, we are offering a money-back guarantee if you are not satisfied. Any further comments or questions about our newsletter are welcomed and encouraged. E-mail your responses to me at: David_Anthony_Guevara@cup.portal.com or UUCP: ...!sun!cup.portal.com!David_Anthony_Guevara I will forward these to my friends. Thanks!