General Gaming Article

My Thoughts About Maximum PC and Our Community

Posted: 20 Dec 2014 01:40 PM PST

Weekend Thoughts About the Future

It's now December 20th, and I've spent a few short weeks at Future working with the Maximum PC team and interacting with the community. I'd thought it would be valuable to our readers if I share some of my thoughts.

So many of you have reached out to me to share ideas and voice concerns. I think when people voice their opinions and concerns, it means they do really care about what they're talking about. I feel that it's our responsibility in return, to be equally transparent and give insight into what goes on behind the scenes and what goes on in my own head.

Keys
I took a close-up shot of my keyboard for this article. Care to guess what it is?

I've been compiling a list of ideas based on the feedback that you've been providing, and the way I've broken things down are for short term and long term goals. Things like interacting more with the community, producing more podcasts, publishing more in-depth guides and features, are all things that we can do immediately. Then there are things like creating a next generation publishing platform, and integrating new valuable features that help you digest our content and engage with other readers and our own team that take a little bit more time to think through carefully.

The long term future for Maximum PC is to get the website to be very comprehensive. The magazine, needs to support the site in a useful way. For example, for those who subscribe to the magazine, it would be nice to read things that aren't replicated on the site. There needs to be a symbiotic relationship between the two.

Then there's the method in which we cover technology. Plainly speaking, all tech coverage has bias in some form or another. But to be honest, I think sometimes this is a good thing, especially for Maximum PC—the name in itself is leaning towards a particular side of the tech spectrum. I think readers value what our editors and writers think on a personal level. If you wanted dry content, Wikipedia might be a better read.

All of Maximum PC's writers and editors have different lifestyles different point of views and "Maximum" can mean many different things: maximum value for the money, maximum performance, etc. Your maximum may not be my maximum. I'm certain that if you've been reading the publication for a long time, you have gravitated towards a particular writer or editor for their style, and thoughts. Maybe you've developed a connection with them because of their lifestyle or something else, and therefore value their opinion. If I wrote articles about tech for fitness, and you don't really give 2-cents about tech for fitness, then you'd have no interest in what I have to say.

Of course, we still back-up what we say with data when it matters. Benchmarks, endurance tests, and other evaluations are necessary to sustain a level of trust as well as meaning. Without data, everything would just be a personal opinion. This doesn't mean we should go out and start being totally well-rounded though.

If we stayed completely neutral to all aspects of technology, I feel the publication would lose its personal touch, and consequently lose its personality. And it's this personality that has allowed us to make such a strong connection with you and you to us.

And if we lost that, then we might as well rename ourselves to Yawn PC.

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