Dear Future Gamer,

I have noticed a worrying trend emerging. Your format lends itself to rapid publishing of news, which is great. As you are a UK magazine, and most of your readers (presumably) are also UK-based, it's a great way to get the news without
a) trawling through half a dozen US websites which are full of dull press releases;
b) getting bogged down with US sports title news;
c) and reading news about games we're unlikely to see over here.

What I don't want to see is any more "courtesy of IGN.com" at the bottom of your 'news' items. There were five of those out of the total 16 news stories this week, and a couple of others had a definite whiff of regurgitated press release about them, of which IGN and others are so fond.

I realise that you have to get your news from somewhere, and the US sites carry a lot of it, but surely we don't need to go down the road which produces stories containing quotes like: "'With the merger behind us, 3dfx will accelerate their efforts to deliver powerful new technologies for games, entertainment and more,' said Greg Ballard, president and chief executive officer of 3dfx Interactive."

We don't want marketing, we want NEWS about GAMES, okay?

Boggis

FG: No matter how hard we try, we can't please all of the people all of the time. We've incorporated news stories from IGN that we think will be of interest to the majority of our readers. The 3dfx piece was included because the majority of our readers are gamers and own PCs and we thought, therefore, they'd be interested in news about graphics accelerator cards. We don't cover much hardware stuff (though there has been some clamour for hardware reviews we still don't think the majority of readers want to get bogged down in benchmark results) but we reckon 3dfx are well-known enough to warrant some coverage occasionally. As for the Greg Ballard quote, a general rule is that quotes make a news piece more interesting. Sometimes they don't but most times they do and people like to read what other people are saying. We, and the vast majority of our readers think we've got the balance just about right though and will continue in a similar manner.