A relevant Yahtzee article on the modern entertainment industry

[ZigzagPX4]

An article by Yahtzee Croshaw that I feel is very, very, relevant to everything in entertainment as of recent late. Not to mention it goes over clearly the exact points I'm seeing so many threads about. If any of you are confused what lot of the forum posters have been "complaining" (read: properly criticising) about with Star Wars: TFA and Fallout 4, this will make it clear. For the record, I liked both. But they had their flaws.

Extra Punctuation - Get Out of Your Comfort Zone for 2016

 

[Walpknut]

Nerds today fear conflict and discomfort, even things like a story having themes of divorce merit a warning nowadays... And there is also that whole "Safe Spaces" debacle. Nothing but mediocrity can come from that.

 

[Risewild]

We live in a society of disposable things, everything is disposable after being used for a short bit and entertainment is like that too.

I come from a poor farmer family that lived in a time where things were made to last, you bought a fridge it would last longer than your life, same with a toaster or a TV or whatever else you would buy. Now we buy something we are lucky if it has a 5 years warranty, a toaster might last one year if it is used once every day, stuff like phones get "obsolete" in one year, games and movies are mostly for entertainment at the moment, they are shiny and distracting for a bit then lose their charm fast, and why is that?
The answer is money, we live in an age where the average consumer has more money than they need or have their priorities all messed up, people have so much money they don't mind spending a lot for a new phone every couple of years, or buy so many games they will never finish or even play them at all, people pay money to go to the movies and have fun watching the new shiny *insert whatever movie franchise you want here* and then move on after a bit.

I am glad people have money and most will never know poverty, that is a good thing for sure, but it is also true that one only know the value of what they have once they lose it and that is the thing, the average person don't value their money, specially when they don't even earn that money and it's their parents that buy them the games and stuff.

Also thanks to the new technology humanity is actually losing their attention span, there are recent studies that say the average human today has a shorter attention span than some animals, because thanks to the new technologies we can just jump from one thing to another, we can watch a video and then read an article and then jump into a game in minutes, if we get bored doing something we just change into doing another almost immediately, which also contributes to the entertainment being made just for the moment, most gamers today would get bored of long dialogue based RPGs for example because they have short attention span and reading in a game is boring because it stops the action.

So those are the two reasons I think the entertainment industry is always playing safe and do the same thing over and over without taking risks: People have too much money and so they don't mind spending it in something fun for a short bit and they get bored of things fast so if entertainment is not "disposable" it would make them bored.

 

[Akratus]

Spoiler

The problem is that the culture in the games industry has changed. There used to be way more knowledgeable, veteran designers who knew a bit about making a good game. They were slowly replaced by yes-men with perhaps more knowledge of modern game design from a technical perspective, but only the basics of actual design and art.

And now EA is scratching it's head as it wins the worst company of america award twice, and Battlefront is derided on all fronts (pun intended). Similar things happened with Ubisoft, and other publishers. THQ failed to make enough good products, and since they weren't big enough to do that strategy well as EA and Ubisoft do, it went bankrupt.

But gamers still buy shit because that is what people are raised on by now. it's too late to change it, gamers flocked to the decline and so the decline is here to stay for at least some time. There's smaaall signs of hope though. There's kickstarters now, and the Witcher 3 raised the bar for Open World games to the point where Fallout 4 received a less than stellar reception. However it still sold like hotcakes because marketing, hype and brand names still do more for sales. It's all about making people want your product before they even know what it contains, by being flashy and famous enough. Such is the decline.