InterGame
InterGame is a trade magazine for the international coin-operated amusement and gaming industry, published from London and read by manufacturers, distributors, operators and venue owners around the world. Its publisher describes it as the only monthly magazine covering the international coin-op amusements and gaming industry, a claim that captures both its niche and its longevity in a sector that has changed beyond recognition since the arcade boom of the 1980s and 1990s. Through its website, intergameonline.com, and its print and digital issues, InterGame reports the pay-to-play business in all its forms, from video amusement games and redemption machines to bowling, family entertainment centres and the wider leisure venues in which coin-operated equipment earns its living.
The only monthly in its field
InterGame's positioning is unusually clear. Where general leisure titles touch on amusements occasionally, InterGame exists solely for the coin-op trade, and it publishes monthly, the rhythm its publisher emphasises when calling it the only monthly magazine covering the international coin-op amusements and gaming industry. Monthly publication suits a trade driven by product cycles: manufacturers launch games, redemption pieces and payment systems through the year, operators need to know what is earning in other locations, and exhibitions from Mumbai to Guangzhou punctuate the calendar. The magazine's website presents full features that are then read complete in the print issue, inviting readers to subscribe to receive every print and digital issue, a model that keeps the website as a showcase while preserving the value of the subscription edition.
Part of a family of gaming titles
InterGame does not publish alone. Its website lists a portfolio of sister publications that together cover the whole gambling and amusement waterfront. InterGaming is presented as the leading magazine covering the international land-based casino and gaming industry. A bimonthly sister title covers the international online gaming industry, and further titles address the iGaming sectors, children's indoor play, edutainment, outdoor adventure and simulation, under a publication devoted to innovations for children. Coin-op Community covers the latest news for the UK's amusements, attractions and leisure sectors. For readers and advertisers, that family structure means the publisher can follow a company across sectors: a manufacturer selling redemption games to arcades, machines to casinos and play equipment to family entertainment centres can be covered by the appropriate title in each market, and a reader moving between sectors stays within the same publishing stable.
Reporting the arcade's survival and reinvention
A recurring theme of InterGame's features is the resilience of the arcade. One major feature on the United States market, the world's strongest market for arcades and amusement products thanks to expertise and investment, began by observing that twenty years earlier many people would have proclaimed the arcade dead, killed in its prime by home consoles, mobile phones and accessible high-definition televisions. The coverage then examines why that obituary was wrong: arcades reinvented themselves around experiences that home entertainment cannot replicate, including large simulators, redemption games, social group play and food and beverage-led family entertainment centres. For the magazine's readers, this is not nostalgia but business intelligence. Operators deciding how much to invest, and in which categories, rely on exactly this kind of market reporting, drawn from the countries where the industry is strongest.
Licensing, brands and the making of a hit game
InterGame has examined in depth how licensed brands drive the pay-to-play sector. A feature on licensed amusement games and prizes noted that for decades the sector had pioneered the use of licensed brands, in both the themed machines themselves and the prizes available to players, and that a truly special licensed product could make a manufacturer, raising its profile to previously unknown heights. Contributors from manufacturers such as UNIS explained that a brand needs a simple, loud message that is easy to recognise, selling the game within seconds and making a passer-by want to play. The feature pointed to companies such as Namco, synonymous with Pac-Man, which continues to bring the character to new audiences through amusement machines and themed plush prizes. Coverage of this kind serves manufacturers weighing licence costs against earnings, and operators choosing which licensed pieces will justify their floor space.
Bowling, malls and the wider leisure mix
The magazine's remit extends well beyond the arcade cabinet. It has reported on tenpin bowling, a nine-billion-dollar industry, as it stood at a crossroads between old-style sports occupation and modern family fun activity, with the latter becoming dominant. It has covered the importance of shopping malls and centres to the amusement industry, reporting operators' views that such environments provide unique opportunities, expanding into video and redemption product for a wide audience, with bigger locations accommodating centrepiece games and simulators. Photo booths, a classic coin-op category, received attention for their performance in malls, including outdoor, all-weather models. These features reflect the reality of the modern trade: amusement equipment earns money inside bowling centres, cinemas, malls, resorts and family entertainment venues, and InterGame follows the equipment into all of them.
People and long industry careers
InterGame gives considerable space to the people of the trade. Its features include long-form interviews with industry figures, written by contributors such as David Snook, who caught up with one salesman marking sixty years in the industry, having spent a lifetime selling coin-operated games into UK and international markets. Profiles of that kind do more than entertain; they preserve the memory of a trade that has always been relationship-driven, in which distributors, operators and manufacturers deal with the same counterparts for decades. For younger readers entering the business, these interviews are an education in how the industry works, whom to know and how its markets developed. For the subjects, they are recognition from the title of record in their field.
Events coverage across the world
The coin-op trade is an exhibition-driven business, and InterGame maintains an extensive events service. Its listings have covered the IAAPI Amusement Expo in Mumbai, the GTI Asia China Expo in Guangzhou, described as a premier international business-to-business event for the game and amusement industry attracting more than five hundred exhibitors, and ATRAX, the amusement, attraction and park industry exhibition in Istanbul, the first specialised exhibition of its kind in Turkey, which in 2015 hosted 198 companies from 33 countries and more than eight thousand professional visitors from 61 countries. By cataloguing events on that scale, with dates, venues and organiser contacts, the website functions as a planning tool for exhibitors and visitors, while its reports from the shows feed the magazine's news and features. The international spread of the listings, from India and China to Turkey and Europe, mirrors the industry's own geography.
The InterGame Year Book
The brand has also published reference works. The InterGame Year Book for 2013 went on sale in December 2012 at £25, and was offered free to subscribers to its leading print magazines. It contained a comprehensive directory of industry suppliers covering the coin-op amusement, casino and online gaming industries, a review of all the major news from 2012, an account of how business had fared over the previous twelve months, industry commentary and supplier profiles. A year book of that type is the print-era counterpart of the website's directory functions: a single volume an operator could keep on the shelf to find suppliers, check the year's developments and read informed commentary. It underlines the publisher's self-image as the trade's record-keeper as well as its news source.
How the magazine is read today
Contemporary InterGame works across print, digital and web. Features are published online in extract, with the full article available in the named monthly issue, and readers are directed to subscribe to receive every print and digital issue. The website organises content into coin-op features and news, preserving an archive that reaches back more than a decade, so that a feature from 2012 on retail locations or a profile from the following years remains available as reference. That archive has value in an industry where product categories and companies persist for many years; an operator researching a category today may well begin with analysis published several seasons ago. The combination of a monthly subscription magazine, a searchable feature archive and comprehensive events listings gives the title a utility beyond its news function.
Place in the coin-op world
InterGame's position is that of a specialist chronicler of a trade most people encounter only as customers. The machines in arcades, bowling centres, pubs and family entertainment centres around the world are designed, sold, sited and serviced by an international industry, and InterGame is the monthly magazine written for that industry, from within a publishing family that also covers casinos, online gaming and children's play. Its coverage of markets, licensing, venues, people and exhibitions reflects a sector that has survived predictions of its death and reinvented itself around social, location-based entertainment. For manufacturers launching a game, operators planning an arcade or suppliers entering a new territory, it remains one of the essential places to be seen, and to see what the rest of the trade is doing.
