Future Publishing has released details on the ABC audit of its print magazines, which show a strong increase in its video game publications. 

9 out of 17 magazines in the audit were from its game magazine porfolio, with the official Nintendo, Xbox, and PlayStation magazines being of notable mention.  The Official Nintendo Magazine saw a year-on-year rise of 27.6 percent, coming up to 61,159 sales per month.  The Official XBOX Magazine, also known as OXM, went up up 2.2 percent and hit 67,097 copies a month.  Lastly, the Official PlayStation Magazine went up 12 percent, to 51,533 per month.

On a year-on-year basis, Future's own PSM3 and PSW magazines were up 29.5 percent and 33.7 percent, respectively.  Nintendo magazine N-Gamer saw an increase of 19 percent, selling 20,290 per month.

Along with print publication statistics, the audit also mentioned a growth of 35 percent for GamesRadar.com (the folks who never run out of Top 10 lists to write about) in the GamesRadar Network of websites, with 7.3 million unique users.  There were no specifics on how these numbers break down by region or website, so they're mostly general figures.

Games publishing director James Binns told GamesIndustry.biz that the increasing popularity of gaming magazines, which goes against current trend of a decline of printed publications like other magazines and newspapers, is based on reader interest in more specific subjects.  Binn goes on to further explain the reasoning behind the usual success of video game publications:

"If you look in the men's market, pretty much all the men's lifestyle titles are down.  The men's mags that have done well are the ones that are very, very focused on an individual audience, like Men's Health, which is one of the only ones that has gone up.  So in the same way that specialist media targeting other males has done fine, videogame mags have done fine as well. What people don't want is general interest stuff... 

We're a dynamic market... we're meant to be able to go up, we're meant to be able to grow our numbers right now. What's nice is that we actually are, because there's nothing automatic about it because our audience is dead web savvy as well."

He also attributes increased sales to the overall growth of the gaming industry.  While most printed media might worry over making a transition to the internet in order to keep up, Binn doesn't seem at all worried by competition from gaming websites:

"Websites are so good at first access content. You've really got to play to the strengths of the media... If you want to know about a great game first, probably, the web's the best place to go... [but] our readers have always said in surveys that the main reason they buy us for is for reviews - reading a review in print is still quite nice and print has such a legacy of respect which is one of the reasons we keep coming back."