Circulation's dropped, as anyone who visited the EUG website (www.acornelectron.co.uk) will know, and EUG will now be published once again every two months. This could be blamed on a lot of things but in the main it comes down, as always, to lack of submissions. Even throwing opportunities and freebies at most readers is mostly a case of the head and the brick wall and, with membership itself now faltering, the time has come when monthly issues cannot be maintained any longer.
This is a dramatic enough announcement in itself, but unfortunately, it must continue even further. One of the major policies since EUG changed hands has been a regular distribution on the 1st of each month and this has proved to be very beneficial at having it recognised as a serious 8 bit magazine. The decision was taken that, unlike previous editors, demands to "send it in" would not be repeated each issue, despite both's recommendation that they should be. The hope was that, by publishing little-seen archive material and reviewing new games, a new optimism would seize BBC and Elk owners (who by that time were beginning to wonder if EUG would ever produce another issue!).
This never happened. Most submissions over EUGs #45 to #53 were only elicited by writing to readers with a suggested contribution specifically detailed. It has now come to the stage where almost every letter sent is either being answered with a paper promise or simply meeting a wall of silence. EUG enthusiasm has all but disappeared and the Ed's is no exception.
As explained, for the time being, circulation is only being halved. But help is required to even keep it at this level and, help not forthcoming, the slide will continue. On the Acorn Electron World front, the interest level remains high though and time spent putting EUG together will instead be deployed in maintaining and improving a huge on line database cross-referencing everything ever produced for the Electron (including EUG issues).
In the worst case scenario (which is probably also the most likely!), everything written here will simply be ignored. If so, while the group itself may continue, the EUG disk magazine as we know it will simply become an addition to the 8 Bit Software catalogue; perhaps with an extra disk being completed and added to it whenever there is time to do so. If in conclusion it is stated that if this is the case, outstanding subscriptions will be returned, then hopefully the seriousness of this editorial will be driven home.
1st October 2000