Tag Archives: PiQ

PiQ Crashes and Burns. Is ADV Next? [Updated x2]

Saturday, June 14, 2008 – 1:50 pm

Apparently trying to diversify from NewType USA was a mistake. Unofficial reports say that the current issue of PiQ is it’s last. So will those of us who still have an outstanding subscription get our money back, or are they going to herd us over to yet another publication.

PiQ had hoped to expand NewType’s subscription base by 10 times by diversifying it’s content.

My guess is that people who would by magazines like that had no incentive to buy PiQ over magazines that already existed that covered the same content, while PiQ’s already existing subscribers who were used to NewType ditched the magazine in droves. I had basically already decided to not renew my subscription when it was up myself, though I wasn’t going to go so far as canceling the subscription I already had.

Perhaps the more alarming news is that the person who made this public also notes that “apparently the parent company is going out of business.”

Now, last time I knew, ADV was PiQ’s parent company, unless there is a corporate layer between ADV and PiQ and that extra layer is what is being folded (assuming that part of the report is correct). ADV has been hurting for a while, and I noticed that my copy of Kanon 5 is already on backorder from RightStuf even though it was just released (though Amazon apparently has it in stock).

I really hope this doesn’t mean that ADV is going down as well. If so, that would mean we would effectively have only 3 major anime distributors left: Funimation, Bandai Entertainment, and Viz.

Update:

Apparently a PiQ LLC exists, with offices at the same address as and is itself owned by ADV. Whether the reference to “parent company” just meant PiQ LLC or meant to include ADV, I don’t know, and from the sounds of it, the author of the post doesn’t necessarily know for sure either.

Update II:

The PiQ webpage makes it official:

It’s unfortunate that we’ll never get a chance to see how successful PiQ could have been, but a combination of low advertising revenue, poor business management and a lack of proper marketing and promotion all hamstrung the magazine from the start. We, the editorial/creative/production staff, did the best we could to put together a quality publication, but as we’ve discovered, without a good financial backing, it’s all an exercise in futility.

So basically the reasons for this were:

  1. We tried to re-launch a formerly anime and manga based magazine into an already saturated market, and for some reason no one wanted to buy ads in it
  2. We wasted money
  3. We didn’t advertise ourselves, and
  4. ADV screwed us over

As nckl notes in the comments, I’m not sure I would advertise that you basically drove your magazine into the ground via “poor business management” but oh well. Actually, it kind of sounds like some guy who decided to give ADV the middle finger just as he’s walking out the door to me. The “exercise in futility” especially seems to make it read like that. It’s not just a “we’re going bye-bye” announcement, it’s a “we’re going bye-bye, and these are the reasons why we are but didn’t have to if the people above me weren’t morons.”

Look at it: complaining about poor business management and bad financial backing…those would seem to be targeted at either the people put in charge of PiQ LLC or towards ADV itself - especially the part about financial backing.

As for those of us with subscriptions, they say they will have “more details later.” If they’re just going to refund money, I don’t know why they wouldn’t just say so, which means that we’ll probably eventually get our money back in some sort of round-about way.

By Josh | Posted in General Blather | Tagged , | Comments (13)

PiQ Issue 2: Better or Worse?

Monday, April 7, 2008 – 6:33 pm

PiQ Issue 2As one of those “I got NewType for the anime, dammit” people, PiQ is in the unenviable position of needing to prove itself as something that I should renew when my remaining 12 issues (well, I guess 10 issues now after this one) of it are up.

Things didn’t start off ultra well this month when I look at the cover and I’m like “WTF is that?!” I didn’t know if it was a game or an American show. All I knew is that it wasn’t anime. OK, I guess I shouldn’t expect anime on the cover of every issue, but the second issue already going off the plantation seemed like they were going “OK, we appeased the NewType anime fans with the first issue, on to other things!”

Luckily, things got a little better inside the issue.

I’m not sure if it was the organization of the content, or whether there really was more anime-related content, but it sure felt like there was more than in the first issue. While issue 1 seemed to mix everything together in a mish-mash, this issue seemed to pile the anime-related things more up-front.

If my count is correct, 25 of the 60 first non-ToC, non-ad pages dealt with with anime, manga, or the NANA live action movie (including big articles in Lucky Star and Vexille and the before mentioned NANA movie). Note this doesn’t mean COMPLETE pages, just that pages had something on them.

After that, except for a single 1-page editorial and the section on cons, there were no articles that dealt with anime or manga (while we had 3 or 4 dealing with other stuff). So I can pretty safely say that the anime got more front loaded in this issue.

As if there is more if it, not including the manga excerpts in the back (and again assuming my page count is correct), anime and manga made up about 22% of the magazine, including ads in the total page count, but not including anime or manga related ads in the anime/manga total. Comparing this to the breakdown of the first issue, it looks like we had roughly the same amount of anime-related material in this issue.

Whether pushing more of the non-anime related stuff to the back (if this is even permanent) is enough to placate me and others….well, we’ll see I guess. I think this issue did better than the first one, but I’m hardly ready to give PiQ the thumbs up quite yet.

But I should give this piece of advice to PiQ: If you’re writing an article on a show, make it at least reasonably easy for one to figure out what show it is. Unless you guess from the URL in the tiny info box, the Vexille article didn’t say it was about that movie until the lead-in paragraph. Lucky Star didn’t even confirm it’s name (though the title had “Lucky Stars” in it so one could give a guess from that) until the first paragraph of the main body. And I know these articles aren’t the only one with this problem. They really should have the title of the show they’re talking about more upfront - in the little info box makes the most sense. If I have absolutely no clue what the show is, there isn’t any obvious way to look it up. Bad.

Oh, and the cover? The Sam & Max series of video games.

By Josh | Posted in General Blather | Tagged | Comments (2)

PiQ Review Post Updated

Thursday, March 6, 2008 – 9:54 am

I’ve updated my original post about the first issue of PiQ, adding in the main body a comment by someone at PiQ as well as my comment in response (and an additional blurb by me).

I just thought that the post may be too low on the page to really notice that I had updated it, so I thought I’d just add a note letting people know.

By Josh | Posted in General Blather | Tagged | Comments (0)

Received my first issue of PiQ [Updated]

Monday, March 3, 2008 – 6:10 pm

Updated Below

PiQToday I opened my mailbox and saw that I had received my first issue of PiQ, which I am getting since I had been subscribed to NewType USA. Having glanced through the magazine, there seems to be several good things and several bad things about it at first glance:

Good:

1. It still seems to be mostly about East Asian Culture, though I won’t say that it is an overwhelmingly “mostly.” Maybe 60% of the magazine or so

2. Anime reviews still looked like the old NewType style to me, which was nice in that at least it had a feeling of familiarity to it.

3. They did keep the manga insert

Bad

1. Things didn’t seem to be grouped together like they were in NewType. In NewType, you would start off with the anime section, then move into the manga section, and then into the gaming section. However, it seemed to me in PiQ, things were just kind of splattered all over the place. If you wanted to find all the anime stuff, you had to go through the whole thing.

2. While as I noted above, most of the magazine still dealt with anime and manga, it took me until page 17 for me to actually run into any of it that wasn’t an ad. Meaning they probably front-loaded a lot of there non-anime stuff up front to attract those who may not look at an anime magazine, but then halfway through, the magazine goes into full anime and manga mode. It partly felt like, to me, that they took their old magazine and peppered some non-anime things through it to make it took more “mainstream” but that it was still, at it’s core, and anime and manga magazine. Not that that fact may be seen as something bad, but by do something if it’s half-assed? If you wanted to make an anime magazine, then make an anime magazine.

3. It’s quite a bit thinner than even I expected. Maybe it’s just the paper being used, though for half the price, I probably shouldn’t complain too much.

4. Unfortunately the manga insert stopped being Kobato, much to my distress.

Overall, I would probably rate PiQ overall pretty good given it’s price. I realize the point of throwing in things about the Terminator TV series and Avatar into the magazine, but frankly, having my anime reading interrupted by Battlestar Galactica was somewhat annoying.

I’ll still have to think about whether I want to resubscribe once my subscription is up, but I thought that the transition from NewType over to PiQ could have been a lot worse.

Update:

I thought I would add to the main post a comment by someone from PiQ in response to my post, and my response to their comment:

First, their comment:

“If you wanted to make an anime magazine, then make an anime magazine.”

Funny you should say that because we’ve tried to make it very clear that we’re not aiming to make a strictly anime-related magazine. I suppose we haven’t been the most effective in doing that so far. The main goal behind PiQ is to cover various forms of entertainment, and while we’re still primarily focused on anime, we also know that there are other interesting things worth covering too.

Nevertheless, thanks for the words of support (I think) and I hope you’ll stick with us as we continue to grow and improve.

Then mine:

Thanks for commenting.

I guess part of what I was getting across is that my feelings about the first issue were mixed. I was glad that it was still (mostly) anime related, since I feared that it might be just kind of there to appease the masses, which ended up not being the case.

As for mixing in other stuff, I think that’s more of a preference of the reader. If people don’t mind the other stuff being mixed in, then I think the magazine works perfectly fine. I guess me personally liked how NewType was more anime-centric and so I was kind of annoyed by the additional stuff, but as I said, that’s more personal preference than anything.

I still have something like 5 issues to go on my subscription, so I’ll see whether I warm up to the new set-up by then I guess.

I should add that it’s true that they weren’t really marketing PiQ as “an anime magazine” so in a sense my negative on that point was a little off-base. I guess I’m still just used to it being a completely anime-centric magazine and it moving off of that. So in reality, the magazine is what they advertised it to be, largely.

I guess my biggest beef as far as how the magazine is set up, regardless of it’s actual content is what I highlighted in point 1, where things didn’t really seemed to be grouped together in sections anymore. I suppose one could argue that’s what the table of contents is for.

By Josh | Posted in General Blather | Tagged , | Comments (6)