I usually buy an APG (Action Pursuit Games Magazine) every month.  This month I also decided to buy another magazine and compare the two.

*I am going to hunt for new magazines and keep comparing them in this article.

Simple facts about each:

APG:

Claims to be: “World’s leading magazine of Paintball Sports”

Price: 4.99 U.S.

Pages: about 240 pages per magazine

Paintball’s oldest and most well know publication

Crossfire Paintball Digest:

Claims to be: “The Ultimate Paintball Authority”

Price: 4.50 U.S.

Pages: about 75 pages per magazine

This magazine has been around for a little over one year.

The APG magazines are broken down with 133 pages of advertisements, 89 pages of paintball articles, 15 pages of paintball pictures (full pages), and 0 pages that are non-paintball related.  There are about 240 pages total so 38% of all of the pages are useful from an information standpoint.  For $5 a month I think that APG has a good mix of articles, pictures, and advertisements. 

Crossfire’s Paintball Digest has about 75 pages total.  Out of 75, 33 pages are advertisements, 24 pages are articles that are paintball related, 15 pages are paintball pictures, and 3 pages are non-paintball pages (totally useless when it comes to paintball).  Only 33% of Crossfire’s magazine is useful.  In my opinion, there is too much garbage in this magazine.  If people wanted to know about videogames they would buy a magazine that specializes in videogames for $5. 

I understand that everyone likes cool pictures that take up the whole page, but for a magazine of this size I think full page pictures get a little redundant when 20 percent is just pictures. 

One thing that I thought was terrible about Crossfire’s magazine was all of the crude comments that are found throughout the magazine.  When some of your readers are as young as 12 years old, magazine publishers have to watch what comments they put in.  I doubt that their fathers and mothers know what comments this magazine contains. 

I’m not going to rip on this magazine anymore.  One thing I liked about this magazine is there are a lot of gun pictures in it that are very cool.  They also do a good job of showing action shots.  They string a series of pictures together usually showing someone getting bunkered.  I think this is awesome!  The last thing I liked is that the whole magazine is in color, which is definitely a plus.   

Overall, for an extra 50 cents, I would rather have an APG magazine.