I find “capitalism” an incomplete solution to this problem. Hollywood and the gaming industry used to understand how hits worked: most stuff would just about break even, some things would flop, and some small fraction of things would hit it absolutely out of the park. Understanding that, they put people in charge who understand media and understood how people reacted to media.
But then something changed.
People started being put in charge who understood business and finance, but not the media they ran, they didn’t understand how people related to the media, and they didn’t understand the diversified ecosystem necessary for making an occassional hit. Instead, they think everything has to be a big hit, everything has to be a guaranteed return on investment. How do you guarantee a hit? Pack it with everything everyone loves, get rid of anything some people don’t like, and spend a TON of money on it.
The media landscape, be it games, movies, or TV, is absolutely littered with very expensive products that take no risks and, because they take no risks, have nothing unique to offer; meanwhile, mid-budgets products have disappeared, leaving only indie keeping the arts alive in competition with shovelware and reality shows.
I am invoking something other than capitalism, some undiscovered financial-anthropological principle, because this entire corporate media edifice is coming crashing down, something that as antithetical to captialism–they are losing money, they KEEP losing money, yet they KEEP DOING THE SAME THING.
I find “capitalism” an incomplete solution to this problem. Hollywood and the gaming industry used to understand how hits worked: most stuff would just about break even, some things would flop, and some small fraction of things would hit it absolutely out of the park. Understanding that, they put people in charge who understand media and understood how people reacted to media.
But then something changed.
People started being put in charge who understood business and finance, but not the media they ran, they didn’t understand how people related to the media, and they didn’t understand the diversified ecosystem necessary for making an occassional hit. Instead, they think everything has to be a big hit, everything has to be a guaranteed return on investment. How do you guarantee a hit? Pack it with everything everyone loves, get rid of anything some people don’t like, and spend a TON of money on it.
The media landscape, be it games, movies, or TV, is absolutely littered with very expensive products that take no risks and, because they take no risks, have nothing unique to offer; meanwhile, mid-budgets products have disappeared, leaving only indie keeping the arts alive in competition with shovelware and reality shows.
I am invoking something other than capitalism, some undiscovered financial-anthropological principle, because this entire corporate media edifice is coming crashing down, something that as antithetical to captialism–they are losing money, they KEEP losing money, yet they KEEP DOING THE SAME THING.