Do anyone still buy them? Do they even exist anymore? They were definitely useful in the days before just about everyone had ready access to good internet connections. My first connection was with a measly 56k modem, so downloading something like a video or game demo was totally out of the question. Sometimes I think I bought the magazine just for the CD that accompanied it than anything else. Feeding one to your CD drive with its 500 mb or so of demos, videos and drivers felt like opening a treasure chest full of gold, pearls and rubies.

I don't and never did (seems like i missed out...) but I just read about 4 months of Game Informer (published by the store Gamestop). Yeah, it was bad, but a subscriber moved out of my apartment building and the new tenant had no interest so left them laying by the mailboxes. I was actually ever so slightly sad about the lapse of the subscription a couple of months ago. Clearly nowhere near enough to subscribe, or set foot in a Gamestop, or whatever would be required to continue reading...

I still own a collection of issues of my local gaming magazine which stopped existing in the early 2000s. I think it was launched in 1994. It's a good complement to games from GOG as it offers a glimpse into what people thought about games in the year of their release. It's funny how they praised "realistic graphics", which today looks more like a blurry jumble of pixels than anything photorealistic, but back then it was a cutting-edge engine. The CD that came with the magazine was just about the only source of demos back then, and demos were even more important than views when deciding what games to get next. Nowadays, of course, there's no need for monthly gaming magazines. By the time the next issue hits the newsagent's, the newly released games reviewed in them are old news.

Most of the good ones are gone. What's left tends to be mostly about the website side of things now (like PC Gamer). It's kind of sad, but I was one of the ones that moved on when the internet became fast enough to be a viable alternative. So I can only blame myself as much as anyone.

I think that what we really lost was not so much a physical publication, but more so the credibility that went with that. The opinions might have been ones that I disagreed with sometimes. But at least they were the reviewer's opinions. Not Mountain Dews'.

The CDs (and sometimes DVDs) were a major selling point back in the days of shitty internet. There really was no other way of actually getting demos or even patches.

When I worked for B&N I got them all for free which means somewhere around here I have 500 Duke3D demo disc laying around. :P

That's why from time to time I dig out my stack of old gaming magazines from the back of my closet :) It's so cool reading about those old games as if they were new. One of my favorites is a PC Format review of Half Life in the list of pros and cons there was only a single entry under cons which read:
"Nadda, zippo, zilch"
Another favorite of mine is a very old preview article about Warcraft 3, from before it was turned into an rts. It actually sounded pretty cool. Can't help but wonder what it would've been like. Oh it's definitely sad. It's the end of an awesome era. I used to buy PC Format religiously for some years, and last year they released their final issue over here :(

Gaming magazines were expensive between $8-13 so I only bought one of those every other month. The demo CD was always the main selling point so I would browse the issues of the German PC Games, PC Action and PC Player magazines at the store for a quick overview and then buy whichever magazine had the best demos or crucial patches on it. We had a 14.4k modem at first which was just about useless and then upgraded to 28.8k (and eventually a magnificent 56k...) but that was no option for anything other than downloading small patches. Fortunately, many patches for DOS games were very small in size.
At one point, the store I used to buy my magazines at started aggressively shoeing people away who would stand around at the magazine shelves for more than a minute. It was at a train station and I can understand that the store owners didn't want to be abused as a library for freeloaders who were bored and waiting for their trains. But when you start acting like that towards potential customers indiscriminately then I'm out. I never bought any magazines or anything else at that store anymore. If you won't let me preview the contents so I can make a choice about which magazine to get then I'll happily not spend my money there.
Naturally, no one wants to buy a magazine that's all crumpled up because half a dozen people have flipped through it already and in the late 90s I noticed that some of the game magazines started to come in sealed plastic but at that point I had stopped buying magazines anyway as I had increased my game trading connections at school to such levels that I didn't have enough HD space to play all the games I was able to borrow from others.

I think, somewhere, there is a copy of PC Format edition 1, with a 3.5 inch demo disk of speedball 2. I told my mum to destroy it, because it wasn't important. She possibly did.

There were also the rest of the editions. I was a subscriber for a while. All hopefully destroyed.

Those magazines are best left dead.

I buy one of the local gaming magazines, although it's actually much more than that. It has a little bit of everything a computer/technology nerd might find appealing. I read it because it's right up my alley in regards to humor and how it presents the information to the reader - structured, intelligent and above all for your reading pleasure, not as clickbait hypebloat but otherwise quality deficient internet articles I might read instead. (obviously YMMV, but this is the gold standard now, as I see it.)

I subscribe one gaming magazine - its called CD-Action, alot of people buy it here (Poland), and i sometimes giveaway codes for games from there. This magazine is really old, it have around 16 years now, and almost all editors are the same from the beginning.

That's quite amazing, and probably extremely rare! One of the reporters of the German PC Games was with the magazine for more than 20 years but in general that's pretty exceptional.

I'm getting PC Gamer (US version). A bit heavy on the upcoming stuff, a bit light on the current release reviews, and some good coverage of free stuff and mods. I wrote to the editor one time to point out that they were listing Steam as the DRM for games that were actually released DRM-free (I didn't mention gOg). Probably didn't make a difference...

Only got it because CGW went under several years back and the subscriptions transferred over. I miss some of the CGW stuff but PC Gamer ain't a bad replacement.

I can't find the will to read the monthly periodicals online. Just doesn't do it for me. Too much 'noise' on the web pages of the articles, when I really just want to read that one thing at that time - without the other distractions.

I never had a pc during my childhood. It was those gaming magazine who kept me updated with gaming news. I used to had a diary in which I wrote game reviews and url and whenever I got time I tried to download a demo.
It was those magazine who told me how awesome Neverwinter Nights was.

They are great for reading when you are in the bathroom. But other than that...meh.
I know what that was like. During a part of my childhood, I would read GamePro magazines even though I didn't have any games and consoles new enough to be in those magazines. It was still nice to look at the screenshots and cool advertisements due to having the imagination of a child.

Ahh, one of my pleasures.

Thanks to Amazon I've gotten many old issues of "Dragon" magazine. Talk about a trip through time. I even found an old issue with an awesome game (Nibar's Keep) that my best friend and I played in college - which I mostly lost.

For modern gaming, I will recommend the "Gygax" magazine, which takes many cues from "Dragon." Old school look and approach.

I'm happy that I still have many "Twilight Zone" magazines; it's quite amusing now to look through them and read about the computer gaming era of the 1980's.