If you have ever seen the iconic episode of the Simpsons where Homer gets the opportunity to professionally create his “perfect” car, you’d humorously remember it having a handful of ridiculous features and an inharmonious ugly design.
In marketing and design, from my few years of professional experience, you find that getting a good product means narrowing down your designs or your message to appeal to your targeted audience.
The problem I’ve painfully observed in the past decade, so much so that I decided to write this in depth blog, is that modern entertainment has marked its target on EVERYONE. Everyone is a potential consumer for these companies, and thus every group needs to want to CONSUME that entertainment.
To my creative friends and colleagues reading this, you can tell where this is going. When the target is everyone, the entertainment suffers painfully. The Chinese have turned into a huge consumer of media, but them being the dystopian propaganda ridden hell-scape that they are, means that our Hollywood media has to be boiled down to meet their media standards. There is a list of media standards set by the Chinese, or else that media faces heavy censorship. Hollywood wants their money, and they’re not going to let a few pesky scenes highlighting revolution or resistance keep them from raking in all of that sweet sweet cash.
Large scale MMOs and even multi-national game studios are getting in on this action of watering down media to hit a larger target audience.
This write up isn’t about the threat of media censorship through corporate pandering to totalitarian entities, but I do highly recommend researching that.
No; I want to focus more on the monetary gains that have lead to this watered down landscape of entertainment. Even if China was a perfect uncensored democratic entity, we’d still be suffering from a similar watering down.
God, I hate going back to cars all of the time, but it’s what I know the best, and thus what I can compare my query to. The automotive industry used to have this business model of “shotgunning” a blast of different models and trims to appeal to every possible consumer. This worked great in the 60s, 70s, and especially the 80s.
Media had this business strategy as well. In the 80s, large mainstream studios started marketing and distributing a large variety of films to hit all of the target markets. This is how Paramount Pictures jump started the original low budget Friday the 13th film into a billion dollar franchise.
The gaming industry in the 90s and 00s had this runaway energy of exploring every fundamental form of “fun” in a 3D environment. Large scale publishers were pushing out a game for every audience.
Here is where my observations desperately require more research to find a plausible connection. It seemed that after the financial collapse of 2008, business models changed in almost every large industry.
Due to terms in the U.S. bailout, automotive manufacturers were forced to cut all unnecessary products down to only a few offerings, and thus a new era of bland cookie cutter SUVS, Crossovers, and Trucks began.
The “shotgun blast” multi variety strategies fell off in favor of mass marketing singular products. Apple doesn’t give a fuck what you want, because you need this silver IPhone exactly how we sell it. Fuck your individual tastes, because you buy what we tell you.
I know it sounds very dramatic, and almost a bit aggressive, but we’ll be damned if we said that strategy hasn’t worked wonders for Apple.
Media and entertainment have gone the same business route. I briefly talked about censorship for added sales, but large studios also just produce bland movies that have mass market appeal. Marvel films are some of the most boring and bland mass media entertainment in the history of film. I’m guilty of going to see them too, but they are just all so damn predictable.
Alright, let’s play devil’s advocate so I can get to the point of all of this rambling. Let’s just say these studios have the right to fund bland entertainment that yields high profits, so just don’t watch them, right?
The issue is then NOTHING creative gets produced on a decent budget. The only spark of creativity comes from lower budget home grown production efforts and kickstarters. Yes, I also know the subject of creativity is debatable as well, but I just seem to see a general consensus from people. I would need some peer reviewed evidence to back it up.
Risky creative adventures usually come from industry professionals you have a lot of clout. Any amateur creative efforts have to be done on an indie level.
The same can be said with games as well. I hate to personally attack any of my friends from school, but a sci-fi shooter/rpg and military FPS are the most overdone genre themes in the industry. Yet they keep getting made, because people buy what they are marketed. As much as Red Dead 2 wasn’t my thing, it was refreshing to see a big budget game aimed at a western setting.
The budgets of these media projects have ballooned, because these cash cows have to be as sophisticated as possible for mass market appeal. High budgets yield high rewards when combined with mass market appeal. This holds bold for film and gaming. These companies are reporting record margins too, just ask our overlord, Disney.
I understand that trimming the fat of your expenses can make a company stronger. You can even ethically accomplish that with the correct levels of empathy. What suffers however is the creativity and variety. I will always say until the day I die that variety is the spice of life.
I want variety and I want my sense of individuality through the media I consume. Now my close friends will just think, ” Brandon, you just want car combat games back, you dweeb.”, and you bet your ass they are right. However…my favorite multi-million selling 90s hit gaming genre aside, there are plenty of more mainstream examples that have fell by the wayside.
Skateboarding and arcade racing games were a huge market in the late 90s and 00s. They sold relatively well, but I suppose the margins just didn’t justify the cost of production to these large publishing entities. Why only target a small amount of the market, when you could make a generic ass sci-fi schooter, and make quadruple the amount of money?
I understand the fundamentals of capitalism, but at the same time, it feels like I got into this industry (or am attempting to get in) at the worst possible time. I won’t get to make any genre I love unless some miracle occurs.
I suppose my plea here is for “AA” games and medium budget films to come back into fruition. Media companies didn’t have to adopt that automotive industry business standard of stripped down post recession product variety. They still made good profit margins making a variety of films.
I don’t want creative folks like me to have to beg and borrow with malicious dedication to get even a mildly large indie game or film made. At the end of the day, I have no creative power yet, and the boring trend of today’s media shall continue on, but I shall hope.
There’s so many factors to this singularity, but it really boils down to greed and stubbornness. I wish creativity and profitability found a happy medium. I want more creative projects funded with a better budget. Give these creative visionaries some freedom. Yes, I think a budget can sometimes benefit a creative project by keeping it scoped down, but I also see a lot of awesome and popular projects resorting to kickstarters.
I also think a little marketing goes a long way. I mentioned it above, but if you market your product right, it will sell. Skateboarding games, car combat games, cosmic horror films, or whatever just needs the right amount of audience exposure to be a hit in 2019. Skate fans didn’t just go extinct. Car combat fans aren’t dead yet either. We are just kind of waiting around for some millionaire executive to sign off on a project.
I could honestly research this and write about it for hours. I just feel like things have fundamentally changed for the worst in the creative world, and it needs to be brought back on track. I am just thankful for the niche and creative media still being put out smaller dedicated creators.
Now I just need to get my own ass in gear in terms of creating my own media.
