Death Stranding is one of my favorite examples of how many ideas are out there to make games out of without resorting to making a game loop revolve around violence.
I don’t think this game is AAA or that they sunk much money into it. From what I can tell, they just fell $100M short of very optimistic revenue projections based on high initial player numbers.
The Switch starts at a lower price point, it’s available at Walmart, it’s more durable for the average child to handle, and Mario/Pokemon/Zelda are what someone like Warren Buffet might call a “brand moat”, where nothing’s really going to interfere with that business model.
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.