It would definitely be fantastic to have a pristine, high-resolution collection of every issue if anyone is up to the challenge without having to destroy their copies.
After listening to the interview I see I was
half right then. Carry on producing an entertaining mag and hope enough people continue buying it to turn a profit. No real contractual obligations to fulfil on either side. Sink or swim.
It's hard to tell if it would have worked had Amiga games kept trickling in to maintain the core focus, obviously to a lesser extent than ever before. Maybe if AP was the only outlet left from which to source your Amiga game news pre-internet, people would still have bought it. I suppose economies of scale would have made it difficult to reduce the price, reflecting the diminished content.
Reading the 'Do the Write Thing' pages during the twilight years and retro gamers' opinions in hindsight, you can see that reception to the new approach was polemic. Lots of people ran with it, embracing the random creative writing/gibberish, while others abandoned ship because they couldn't cope with anything other than straightlaced, pure Amiga content.
Circulation numbers fell from about 60k in its heyday to 18k right before AP's demise. Most of the ads were placed by game publishers and if they’re no longer publishing Amiga games…
...and who else would want to invest in a publication with a rapidly declining readership and no clear USP? That's kind of what Look-In and Fast-Forward were; general pop-culture mags. I can't remember if they'd already folded by this stage. Obviously not remotely in the same league and shouldn't really be mentioned in the same breath, but you get my point.
Reliving the journey brought all that woeful melancholy flooding back.
It would be interesting to find out where all the writers are now to see what works/pays the bills in 2020. Shouldn't be difficult with a bit of Googling (plus Cam touched upon this topic in the interview). I doubt they struggled to find other outlets.