Concord? No, it didn’t, but this article isn’t so much about Concord.

For the New York Times, that’s not really their incentive system compared against their subscription model. Still, it’s a disparaging difference between how they treat both industries. Losing hundreds of millions of dollars would be news in any industry.

Like I said though, they do have some really great articles in gaming, just not with their own header, so they’re harder to find. And they do know what isn’t covered by other outlets, because they tend to do profile pieces rather than news coverage. But if Joker’s sequel is worth writing five articles about, surely the largest failure we’ve seen in games is worth one, you’d think.

I didn’t move the goalposts. I brought up some of the other publications listed in the article.

How about CNN, ABC, BBC, etc.?

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.

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.

Sounds familiar…

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.

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.

They’re also in the enviable position of having made a game with some of the highest profit per employee in history, so they’re not under the pressure that most are.

Yeah, last year was not a weak year. There was a new highly-regarded Zelda game as well, which is easy to forget when Baldur’s Gate 3 won every award so unanimously.

I’m not asking you to stop liking a studio you like, but I am asking you to take them off of the pedestal you put them on. If you care about the SKG campaign, that new shooter of theirs is at odds with it.

Whether it’s any more exploitative than any other game, it’s still got all of the same baggage. It’s always online and will one day be unplayable, and it’s relying on continual revenue to support it rather than just selling it for an up front price and letting it rock, which both encourage exploitative monetization anyway.

I know, but this past year in particular, there wasn’t much contention over what the game of the year was.

If I buy the game on Epic, I’m given no assurance that the game will continue to work for me on Linux. Others will have different issues with the service that Epic offers. I’m not going to buy from Epic just because Valve has reached some threshold of market saturation.

Not with how unanimous BG3’s award was at basically every outlet.

Didn’t they just announce a live service shooter? Isn’t that caving into current money-making models?

Probably not, unless Remedy buys the publishing rights back from Epic, which they did for Alan Wake 1, from Microsoft.

Well, we’ve seen gameplay of this one already, and it’s got more in common with Dishonored than it does Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines. I’ll happily be pleasantly surprised, even if that means they made a really good vampire version of Dishonored, but I also know The Chinese Room’s track record, so it would be really wild if this was somehow the game that Bloodlines fans wanted.