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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 15 hours 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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[-] ampersandrew@lemmy.world 1 points 13 hours 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 13 hours ago* (last edited 13 hours 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 13 hours 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.