A 12-year-old Boston boy got an eyeful when his subscription to the canceled Electronic Gaming Monthly was replaced with Maxim and his mother isn’t too happy about it.
A few months after the plugged was pulled on EGM following the sale of the 1UP Digital Network to the Hearst-owned UGO in January, subscribers learned that the balance of their monthly magazine mailings would be filled by Maxim, the boobs-and-humor periodical popular among meatheads who aren’t quite sophisticated enough for Penthouse. A fine trade in the eyes of some, no doubt, but not for Kathleen O’Donnell, whose pre-teen son Jake has so far received two issues of the magazine despite her request that it be canceled.
Jake, who according to a WBZ-TV report is a big fan of the Wii, noticed a few weeks ago that his favorite videogame magazine seemed different somehow. He showed it to his mom, who wasn’t thrilled to have a pseudo-girlie magazine showing up in her mailbox unannounced. “When I saw it, I didn’t think it was a magazine my son should be looking at,” she said.
The first issue of the replacement subscription included a note telling subscribers they could “opt for a pro-rated refund for the balance of their EGM subscription,” but O’Donnell wasn’t happy that the magazine was mailed without prior approval. “I wasn’t given a choice if I wanted to receive Maxim as a replacement for EGM before it showed up in my mailbox,” she said. And although she sent in a written request to cancel the subscription, the August issue arrived right on schedule.
Color me shocked that parents of young gamers are surprised and not terribly happy with the surprise arrival of high-gloss sideboobs in their mailbox, pretty much exactly as predicted back in June. Maxim is far from hardcore porn but it’s still hard to believe that nobody involved in the decision-making process saw this particular switcheroo as anything but spectacularly ill-conceived.
