UK independent Nintendo magazines Switch Player and Ninty Fresh are set to end their print run, but a new venture is promised.
Sad news today, as it was announced that both Switch Player and Ninty Fresh will cease publication.
The first issue of Switch Player launched in January 2017, and was the brainchild of Paul Murphy, creator of the PlayStation Vita website The Vita Lounge. The magazine was designed to fill a Nintendo-shaped hole in the magazine market at the time. “When the Nintendo Switch was announced, there was no dedicated physical magazine presence in the United Kingdom for Nintendo platforms,” declares the magazine’s website. “So we made one.”
Switch Player has been published monthly since then, but today the Ninty Media Twitter account announced that the upcoming issue 69 will be the last one, saying: “It’s been a great run, but the writing has been on the wall for some time.”
Not long after, Switch Player’s sister magazine Ninty Fresh, which covers past Nintendo games and consoles, made a similar announcement. Issue 8 of Ninty Fresh from Winter 2022 has been confirmed as the last issue of the magazine, with the editors saying it has been too difficult to make any more: “We’ve tried to make a final issue work, but making these issues is a huge labour of love and sustaining two products has been challenging.”
It’s been a difficult few years for UK games magazines. Most of the major publications have closed over the past decade and a half, although a few independent magazines have emerged in their wake, such as Switch Player, Amiga Addict and others, which are typically run as passion projects on tiny budgets. But the recent rise in paper costs has made life more and more difficult for magazine publishers, and was one of the reasons for the closure of Wireframe at the start of this year (although thankfully the magazine lives on in some form in this very website).
“We make these in our own time, and the model, combined with how much work is required to make two products – not to mention the cost of paper these days means that a magazine is not viable,” said a post by Ninty Fresh magazine.
However, there is a silver lining. Ninty Media has promised that it’s “not the end of us covering Nintendo in print”, and there are plans afoot to evolve the company’s output into “something bigger and more premium”. The company has said it will make an announcement about what’s to come in the near future.
