MOG Magazine Not to be Published

IMGS announces, with regret and some embarassment, that MOG is now officially cancelled. There will be no MOG #2 or MOG #3. We sincerely apologize to everybody who did so much hard work on the magazine over the last few months.

No subscribers to MOG have had their credit cards charged, and they will not have their credit cards charged.

After our first publisher went out of business after issue #1 (through no fault of MOG's), we decided to try to publish elsewhere, avoiding some of the mistakes from the first issue. Our first idea was to experiment with internet-only subscriptions. This didn't work. We needed several thousand subscriptions to self-publish, and we got a few hundred.

Then we found a publishing company that was interested in doing MOG. We received verbal promises to that effect. We kept working on issue #2, based on the schedule we'd agreed on. At E3, the company seemed excited and ready to go ahead with publication.

Then they took a REALLY HARD look at what was involved in publishing a magazine. This was all information that had been available to them from the first, but they'd sort of never put it all together before. Without going into details, they decided that there was no way they could go ahead and launch the magazine at this time. That left us with a magazine ready to go to the printer, but no publisher and no remaining options. So we have to pull the plug.

How do we feel about all this? It's complicated. On the one hand it's annoying that all the work we all did based on their promises has gone down the drain. On the other hand, there was no signed contract to break, and we're really convinced that we were never lied to in a malicious way ... they just bit off a bit more than they could chew. Actually, it feels a lot like a fiance who's been left at the alter ... you're annoyed and embarrassed and hurt, but there's also a feeling that we might have narrowly escaped something even worse.

IMGS is currently negotiating to return to our original business of producing high-quality strategy guides for MOGs and other games.

In the event that IMGS is able to continue operations, we are planning to keep www.MOGonline.com in operation. Exactly what form the site will take in the future is still under consideration.

Since we have basically all of issue #2 layed out and camera ready. In gratitude for the patience of our supporters, we are planning to PDF the articles and make them available via the net (subject to permission of each piece's writers). Continue to watch MOGonline.com for information about the availability of this material.

Does this mean there will never be another issue of MOG? We don't know. MOG remains a great concept, and we've all seen that people will get behind it. There are folks out there (besides us) who would be interested in seeing this happen, but nobody we know of is ready to move ahead with the project right now. So if MOG ever does return it will probably be a year or more. If that happens, we will not solicit subscriptions until financing is firmly in place.