Not to continue beating a dead horse, this article is really about mainstream media’s relationship with video games, or the lack thereof. For the first time in my life, I pay for a subscription to news, because the same problems that crop up from getting news from reddit happen just as easily here in the fediverse. There are actually really great pieces written about video games and their creators in the New York Times, but they’ve only got a couple of bylines between them, and a frequency that matches how many people they’ve got working on it. Meanwhile, they do have a section under Arts dedicated to Dance, which I somehow doubt has anywhere near as many readers interested in the subject.
I’m not saying it’s not a story, just not one most people care about. Avid gamers had barely heard of the game before it flopped, average non-gamer wouldn’t care.
Joker sequel flopping is a bigger story because the first one was well recieved, also celebrities are involved.
If the next call of duty sells 14 copies and shuts down in two weeks it would be a big story.
Do you think more people care about the average video game story or the average story about the theater? Live performances, not movies. Theater, Dance, and Visual Arts all get their own sections in the NYTimes, for instance, but video games are demonstrably bigger and don’t get the same attention. There’s rarely even a mention of the likes of Call of Duty in mainstream media when they do exceptionally well, let alone exceptionally poorly, and that’s really the crux of the article.
That has more to do with New York having a thriving theater scene and a NY newpaper promoting a local thing that is popular with its readership and the companies that pay for advertising. It is something that sets NY apart from a lot of other locations, even if theater is pretty common in most areas.
Kind of a chicken and egg when it comes to games, since readers won’t be expecting games news in mainstream sources they don’t dedicate resources to writing the articles. That makes business sense because most people who are looking for game news already have a number of web sites to choose from.
I agree that theater is something that New York has in abundance over most areas, but are there not movie focused sites better delivering those articles on movies as well? Is it not worth covering something at all just because it’s at other news sources? If it wasn’t, any news outlet would only print exclusives. And this extends beyond the Times, as the article points out; that’s just the outlet I personally have a subscription to, and their circulation extends far and wide regardless.
I think more people who pay to subscribe to NYTimes care more about live theater than video game news.
