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.
Movies have flopped this hard before, it’s like when they made Catwoman and decided they’d rather shelve it and take the tax write off.
I’ve seen analysis that said Catwoman may have been more about royalties in the streaming era rather than solely tax write-offs, but this article does point out “this year” specifically. The lower bound for how much Concord lost is in line with the highest recorded box office loss of John Carter, according to the article. Previous Kotaku reporting confirms from multiple sources that Concord lost at least $200M, but did not fully corroborate the $400M figure that Colin Moriarty reported.
A game no one heard of until it shut down isn’t that interesting of a story. It’s not that deep.
I think it’s a story when it’s perhaps the largest flop in the medium, much like John Carter. It’s somehow worth writing five articles about the Joker sequel flopping.
John Carter didn’t get that much attention either, and what it did was mostly about the leadership changes in Disney tanking the advertising and not about the movie itself.
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.
It’s interesting in the sense that something went catastrophically wrong here.
This isn’t just a small indie dev wasting a bit of money, it’s hundreds of millions set on fire by an established company in this industry.
The fact that “no one heard of it” is exactly the point. What went wrong here?
Also, generally speaking, people interested in news about games read and seek out gaming sources that cover gaming info. Like kotaku.
Gaming is popular enough that there are several dedicated news and information sites to choose from. The “news” is for stuff of general interest. They could cover some gaming news, but for the most part people who want gaming news get it from more dedicated sources.
WWIII: Special Military Operation still going on. WWIII: Religious Extremism expansion pack just dropped. COVID: 2: Electric Boogaloo in some areas. Election year in like 4+ major countries. Multiple major entertainment failures across the board in multiple entertainment sectors. And major scandals to boot, most notably a massive media icon’s fall from grace via nice and friendly things like coercion, conspiracy to murder, human trafficking, etc.
Gee Kotaku idk. You would think a Japanese corporation’s failure and loss of revenue would be more important to American media outlets during an election year. Crazy how that managed to slip through the cracks.
The American mainstream news media has been obsessed with pushing/covering politics for the last 6 or 7 months, and both political parties are giving the media massive stockpiles of ammo for ragebait-fuelled ad revenue. Why would they ever cover video games, something mainstream media outlets have historically blamed some of the worst tradgedies in American history on, when it will neither give them free ad revenue, nor continue to villanize video games?
A live service game failing isn’t newsworthy. It’s newsworthy when one isn’t completely terrible
