Kyle Gaddo said:
I can respect this perspective, but I still disagree.
Like, he admits his own "stupidity" in
this article and then goes on to praise them for their success just over a year ago. And now he wants to collect on that success? He's already admitted that he made a poor decision by not believing in the medium or in CDPR. If he gets anything, it's because the company is doing him a kindness and to shut him up. It would be a formality at best, not because he deserves anything.
Video games have been the largest entertainment industry in the world for almost two decades at this point. I can understand not believing in them in their infancy, maybe in the late '80s to early '90s, but they're literally too big for their own good at this point.
You can make a stupid mistake lending your friend your car for the weekend. Doesn't mean you should put up with multiple speeding tickets and them totalling it. Also clearly videogames is not the 'largest entertainment indstry' for two decades. Hell, it's still not as big as tv and movies when you consider merchandising and movie sales alone.
Harry Potter has $9B in box office ticket sales, not incl. merchandising, lateral monetization, movie sales, etc ... if you include all of that,
incalculable amounts of money. Something like My Little Pony gives Hasbro $680M+ annually to their bottom line just in toy sales from 2014. Not including share price growth, licencing, dvd/blu-ray sales, other merchandising...
Videogames are kind of nichely consumed in Western markets. TV and film can be felt
everywhere at a far reduced buy in.
It's part and parcel why I can watch MLP in like, what,
35 different languages and counting? Whereas most games they won't even bother doing multiple VOs. Even really popular games ... you might get lucky and
get three language options. Whereas something as popular as a successful tv program will end up giving you Korean Twilight Sparkle. Tara Strong still nails it, but Korean ponies is amazing...
Witcher 3 you get a whole of English/French/German/Polish. For
text surprisingly even less options if I remember correctly. So they're kind of amazingly certain what their demographic is going to be.
Sorry, videogames will never be as big as movies and television. At best it still caters to the the predominantly bourgeois materialist sensibilities of Western consumers ... and only if the rest of the world enjoys increases in their disposable wealth will it take up the slack of diminishing Western savings pools.
People seem to forget that with a tv set and a cheap player, or a cheap laptop they can watch infinite amount of televised content.
If videogames were as widely consumed as television they would simply giveyou newly released games for $25 and wouldn't be so draconian with DRM. As it stands the industry is turning to 'games as a service' model precisely because they want their 'If You Are the One' that supposedly half a billion people watch religiously while
Mao is turning in his grave ... about the good ol' days where women were postmasters, world recognized computer scientists and soldiers shooting Japanese invaders and Nationalist scum.
And increasing disposable capital in foreign countries is ging to bolster tv and movie consumption before you get Indians buying
$60 games like American consumers. Image's
The Walking Dead often outpaced all other major print series from competing Marvel and DC titles over the last few years. And let's face it ... they're paying for the tv licence fame.
Sure ... you have your Rockstar games ... but not every studio can be Rockstar Games. Indie developers can make stupid amounts of profit ... but then again so can a formerly small studio like DHX basically hit a gold mine with a single animated series.
