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Saxonia Issue 03 Part 012
A fine start
By Rumrunner/VOID
l
Seeing the latest Eurochart (issue 47), Saxonia is found in the 12.th place
in the chart for most popular diskmag. Having only released two issue at
the time of release for the said issue of Eurochart, I think that this is
a decent placement, considering that the competition is between all diskmags
from past and present.
I want to speculate a little in what does people like about Saxonia. There
are several topics to discuss here. First of all, the part that should be
most important for any diskmag - the articles - should get some attention.
We try to have articles covering widespread topics. People perhaps like this
and enjoy reading about other topics than the scene itself in a diskmag.
Another possibility is that voters have found the scenetopics interesting
and written from another point of view than in other mags. What I think is
most important for people regarding the articles though is that they get
them. There are not many mags released often anylonger, and so everything
is better then nothing. Don't get me wrong, I like Saxonia and it's
articles myself, but since it's a small mag (so far, let's see what happens
in the future) I don't think that it would be rankek so high ten years back.
The code can also be the reason for our decent placement in the charts. This
is perhaps not likely to be the case, as many people seem to dislike the
keyboard-only functionality which have been used in issue one and two (and
in this one aswell). On the other side, there might be people who got
nostalgic flashbacks from the code and liked it because of that. Perhaps it
reminds them of a time when things weren't so complicated. I for one think
that the code reminds a lot of the second one that Stolen Data from Anarchy
used. Leaving that alone, like I have said in other articles, the code will
most likely be updated for next issue but the keyboard-support will ofcourse
still be there. It's a matter of preference at the reader's. I for one use
to sit in my chair with the keyboard in my lap, and so I have never been
too fond of mouse-only mags, or mags that lacks important functionality from
keyboard.
We have never had much graphics in the mag, neither have we shipped it with
megs and megs of modules. Eventhough such features improves the feel of
the mag, the archive gets smaller, and perhaps this is the reason why
people voted for us. Afterall, if you don't know a production from before,
you won't waste as much time downloading 50-60k's as if the production was
megabytes big. So we might have reached an audience that wanted smaller
mags.
There are several webpages people visit regularly, like 1 diskmag.de0 and
also 1 jpv.wmhost.com/releases0 . These nice people have contributed in
spreading the mag, and so we have most certainly got better known because
of this. Before, mailswappers could have spread a production widely in just
a short time, but today mailswapping usually takes longer time as people
have other things to do, they don't have much to send, or they are fed up
from mailswapping. If we consider Darkhawk's articles in Eurochart 47, I
don't think that he is entirely right that mailswapping is dead, but I agree
that it's not the main source of getting new stuff like it once was.
Darkhawk also reviewed Saxonia 2 in his mag, and if people share his opinion
about the music, this cannot be a reason why people like the mag. For me
the music in a mag is there to have a relaxing setting to read the mag in
and not to be there as if the production in question was a musicdisk. Don't
get me wrong, a diskmag without music wouldn't be half as interesting as
one with such. And I think that this issue has the best music out of the
three released so far. A very big thank you to Curt Cool and Mice for that.
Having shared these thoughts with you, I would like to recommend reading the
comments we have gotten on www.pouet.net, and perhaps you would also like
to enter your own comments there. I must admit though that some of the
names listed from commenters here, I have never seen other places. Perhaps
these are people from another scene (like the pc one) who has got hold of
an emulator or similar. Another possible answer is that they are not into
the scene in the way that they make productions themselves, instead they
watch other people's work. If so is the case, we should encourage that and
hope that one day they will start making some themselves, becoming an
active part of the scene. It's never a bad thing to get new interested
people to join the Amigascene. The last possible solution is ofcourse that
I have not payed enough attention to catch their work, but I don't think so.
Anyway, I will still continue to improve this mag and write articles for,
and I also hope that those who already have contributed aswell as others
will still do so.
