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A Video Game Flopped Harder Than Anything At The Box Office This Year, And The Mainstream Press Barely Noticed (kotaku.com)

submitted 2 weeks ago by ampersandrew@lemmy.world to c/games@lemmy.world

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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.

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[-] spankmonkey@lemmy.world 4 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago)

My point is mostky about people's expectations and that people who want news on games probably aren't interested in gaming articles from papers/major news sites and companies in general aren't looking to advertise on gaming articles in the same way that makers of fashion would want to advertise in the theater section.

I really like this post btw, I never really thought about how sparse reporting on games is outside of dedicated sites.

[-] ampersandrew@lemmy.world 1 points 2 weeks ago

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.

[-] spankmonkey@lemmy.world 1 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago)

An article about Joker 2 has the novelty factor of bombing as a sequel to Joker, which was a massive hit. They will got a lot more views on any one of those five Joker 2 articles than they will from multiple articles about a game nobody heard about.

More views = more money. It doesn't matter whether something is more 'worthy' or not.

[-] ampersandrew@lemmy.world 0 points 2 weeks ago

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.