I was checking out the magazine Game Developer and was gonna get it, but noticed it cost $50 a year, so I wanted to here from the guys at GameDev if its worth that high cost? If anyone has it, what do you like about it, and dislike. Possibility

I have a GDMag subscription. It''s decent. I don''t think that it is for complete beginners. Some of the stuff wouldn''t be usefull if you didn''t have a couple university courses in graphics or have not studied a bunch of gaming stuff on your own for a while.

Check out www.gamasutra.com. Most of the content there is stuff that was previously published in GDMag.

I get a free subscription, so I''m not the best judge of its value, but its content is definitely interesting stuff. The discussion of what technologies other developers are creating and implementing for their games and game content is fascinating and insightful stuff. The coverage of SCEE Team SoHo''s "Talking Heads" technology for The Getaway was very thought provoking and helped me redefine the objectives of a similar system I was developing for skeletal animation. The Postmeortems are also excellent material, but as Parveen Kaler has noted most of the stuff gets published (for free) on GamaSutra.com.

At $50 a year out-of-pocket for a non-professional, I don''t think it''s worth it.

You can apply for a subscription at www.gdmag.com, I believe. Based on your responses to a questionner a committee will deliberate and decide whether you "qualify" to receive Game Developer Magazine for free. Basically, if you work as a professional developer - particularly in multimedia software - then you''re in. I was working for a company that did rules-based speech synthesis at the time I applied.

Thanks for the replys. I think I will hold off on getting it since you say most of the stuff is on gamasutra.com, which I frequent. The $50 is a little pricie right now, maybe in a year or 2 when I am working as a proffessional gamer.

Possibility

Personally, I''ve bought about 3 issues of it, and found it wasn''t worth the money. It''s quite a short magazine, without much in it. Some of the articles are mildly interesting, but the decent ones are very specific and won''t mean much to 90% of people anyway. And they have a Design Patterns column which I think is a complete waste of space, as they don''t go into nearly as much detail as the Design Patterns book. Instead, it''s pretty much just a ''Pick a fancy name for a programming idiom'' column which doesn''t really teach you anything: just perhaps gives you a new keyword to use if you meet these guys at the GDC or something.

So, as you can guess, I''m not at all impressed by the magazine, and wouldn''t consider a yearly subscription worth $50 unless you can''t find something else you want with that money.

Just sign up for the free subscription.

If you don''t work for an actual game company, just fudge the application. They won''t actually check.

This may seem unethical, but its not exactly like stealing. The reason they give it away free to almost everyone who asks is (unlike web sites) they actually make their real money through advertisements.

And, in all honesty, game dev magazine is not worth the cover or subscription price. Its mostly ads with only like 2 or 3 articles per month, and many of the articles are not very interesting. The post-mortems used to be kind of interesting but after reading a couple you realize they are all pretty much the same, very few of them give any real insight into the development process. But, it is worth looking at if you can get it cheap or free, particularly Jeff Lander''s articles.

Its a shame Paul Steed hasn''t done any writing for them (that I''ve seen, correct me if I''m wrong) recently. His articles were uniformly great (insert giant rasberry to id Software here for letting him go). I guess he''s real busy at Wild Tangent.

You can get Jeff Lander''s articles on his website at www.darwin3d.com