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.
I agree that theater is something that New York has in abundance over most areas, but are there not movie focused sites better delivering those articles on movies as well? Is it not worth covering something at all just because it’s at other news sources? If it wasn’t, any news outlet would only print exclusives. And this extends beyond the Times, as the article points out; that’s just the outlet I personally have a subscription to, and their circulation extends far and wide regardless.
Do you think more people care about the average video game story or the average story about the theater? Live performances, not movies. Theater, Dance, and Visual Arts all get their own sections in the NYTimes, for instance, but video games are demonstrably bigger and don’t get the same attention. There’s rarely even a mention of the likes of Call of Duty in mainstream media when they do exceptionally well, let alone exceptionally poorly, and that’s really the crux of the article.