Future mags down, down, down

Apart from Edge. Which is up less than half a percent year-on-year.

Future Publishing's first ABC result for a year have shown a heavy slide for its entire games portfolio, with all but one of its magazines falling year-on-year for the 12 months ending December.

The PlayStation Official mag and OXM both dropped, and PC Zone suffered a 12-month decline of more than 40 percent.

Here's the lot:

• Edge: 29,007 (+0.4%)
• Games Master: 34,313 (-16.2%)
• OXM: 60,834 (-4.8%)
• Xbox World 360: 25,874 (-16.6%)
• OPM: 47,033 (-12.3%)
• PSM 3: 21,224 (-19%)
• PC Zone: 11,357 (-40.3%)
• PC Gamer: 26,487 (-18.8%)
• Official Nintendo Magazine: 51,271 (-12.8%)
• N Gamer: 12,499 (-29.8%)

Publishing head James Binns told us on the phone this afternoon that Future would ABC on an annual basis from now on.

"A lot of media owners do annual ABCs, and some of our competitors do annual ABCs, so it's not crazily out of context," he said.

He added: "We chosed to do annual because it's what our nearest rival did, and obviously we didn't feel there was a lot of point in spending all that money at that point halfway through the year and doing an ABC, but we maintain the fact that you should be open with your numbers. That's why we've ABC'd all our mags, big and small."

Binns said that annual figures also help strip out the "seasonality" of the first half of the year traditionally being slower than the Christmas period.

Future showed a 12 percent decline in revenues to £36 million for the first quarter yesterday.

Keep an eye out for the full interview with James tomorrow.