The difference is simple attitude. Japanese media knows you need to land the whales to make a profit, you want the people who always buy the special edition and that loyalty is both considered two way and often repaid by Jap Media companies, with either nods or neat stuff thrown into the bundles to justify their price tags and make a decent slice.
The issue we have with Western Devs is the increasing arrogance due to prevalent media attitudes Art is for Arts sake and not for entertainment and if you complain they have a barrage of excuses reasons why you suck and should just fuck the hell off.
We see the same in a lot of Western Media. The hardcore is being told to repeatedly fuck off and then these companies are all stood about confused as to why their bottom lines are tanking. You can see it repeatedly in the shitty movie remakes, the comics industry, and increasingly gaming. The people involved have no interest in creating new, just rebrand and rehash things with their own fan fiction "fresh new take".
We could easily blame SJWism but I wonder if its because we don't take media consumption as seriously in the West. There's a weird prevalence of ridiculous hubristic arrogance that seems to not exist for a lot of the older school developers. They're always in the right and anyone says they're not is obviously outright evil and not someone to ever be listened to.
To me, it is insanely obvious the difference between Eastern and Western mentalities regarding popular entertainment. Eastern pop-entertainment seems to cherish its audience (a little bit too much sometimes), which buys them insane amounts of loyalty. And its not just for one property. Its a compounding thing. Anime (in general) delivers enjoyable properties to their fans, which makes you want to buy shit. Even if its not from a series you watch, you get the feeling they want you there, they want you to consume their work and its welcoming. So it makes you buy shit and it elevates everyone.
In Western pop-culture, they treat the audience like absolute dog-shit. Like, I don't even feel like I matter when I consume Western media. I'm not talking about just a corporate coldness, that's to be expected. But just that the creatives don't respect the audience, the company doesn't respect the audience and it doesn't respect what they're delivering to the audience.
I've seen this cycle repeated. ENDLESSLY. In every Western medium for fucking years on repeat, like media companies and creatives have become these insane, rétarded children. Its making me go fucking crazy. To the point where I have to ignore every single popular franchise because its been destroyed. Its this disgust and disrespect for the audience and the medium by creatives, sanitization by the suits and mobs on Twitter. It really isn't SJWism. It can't be just this. There are many creatives whose politics and religion are off the deep end but still produce works that respect the audience and doesn't insult them.
Its gotten to the point where Western pop culture isn't just coldly distant to its audience, it actively loathes it. I don't feel welcome in any Western entertainment medium. And I'm not talking about demographics, politics or 'the gays' and shit like that or some gender or race bullshit. I don't give a fuck if my views or my gender or skin color are represented or even respected. I mean, me, as a faceless, gender-less audience member, they're spitting on me going "TAKE THIS YOU FUCKING FAGGOT AND PAY ME" and its like "Did I kill your dog? Did I not buy your book of poems on the discount shelf at Barnes and Noble? What did I ever do to you?" There's this hate directed at me for this imaginary person who doesn't exist, and I'm looking around the room for this person that isn't even there and never has been.
It just boggles my mind and after so many years, I just no longer bother with it. And a lot of people have dropped it as well. Its only amplified the screaming. As if screaming at an empty room will get you anywhere.
You're not wrong. The thing that gets me is, you can do the "Art for Art's Sake" thing and still have a good attitude about it; simply saying "Hey, we made this game for a particular type of game-player and not everyone's going to be into it" is a thousand times more palatable than thumbing your nose anyone who criticizes you and saying that they "simply don't understand what we're doing".
I mean, Quantic Dream (Heavy Rain, Detroit Become Human), Supermassive (Until Dawn, Dark Pictures Anthology), and even DontNod (Life is Strange)- you don't hear huge controversies about their developers flipping off the video game community, and I feel like that's either because they get that they inhabit a niche in the community(/market) and not everyone is Into them; they'll do their shtick about games as an art-form and valuing their particular way of structuring a game, but to the best of my knowledge they've always toed the line of "do not insult the gaming community, that is where our paycheck comes from". Sure, you'll get lower-level controversies of the social-justice type, but nothing to seriously piss off the video game community or their fans the way Naughty Dog has with this Last of Us shit.
Well, that or they all have good PR teams that cuts the "our games aren't meant to be fun" kind of comments off at the pass.
The difference between art for art's sake and popular fiction are two drastically different things. Art for art's sake is Bukowski getting fucking wasted and chain smoking lucky strikes and writing poetry, not really giving a fuck if anyone buys it. Popular fiction is reliant on an audience and you have to play to that audience somewhat. The line sort of gets blurred, as in, if I'm writing a story for myself and then it blows the fuck up, its hard to switch gears. Which is why you see a lot of independent fiction just implode when it gets popular, because the author doesn't feel like he 'owns' the work anymore.
Games are an exception because they're expensive to make generally. Like, Dwarf Fortress is the gaming equivalent of art for art's sake becoming popular in gaming. Its one guy programming this game by himself and then it massively explodes into this cult phenomenon. All of a sudden the features he wants are going to, consciously or unconsciously, get driven by this massive audience.
David Cage, for all his faggotry (and believe me, that's A LOT of faggotry there), just makes what he wants. He doesn't call people names if they don't like it. He's just making what he wants. And if its fun for you, great. If not, that's ok too. I know people mention Kojima, but Kojioma WANTS the audience to enjoy themselves, even if he is making games for himself. He is always very aware of 'hey, this needs to be enjoyable for the people', even in his own weird-ass ideas. He makes 'art for art's sake' but always keeps the people who play his games in mind and always tries to make them fun. Whether he succeeds or fails varies wildly (MGS V in particular is very polarizing, but that can really be blamed on Konami) but game-play wise it is very solid and a lot of fun.
And then, lastly, you have hacks, cunts, parasites and exploiters. Like the developers of Sunset. "Our game is art, fuck off and don't buy it if you don't like it." *nobody buys it* "WHY DIDN'T YOU BUY IT ALL GAMERS ARE FAGS FUCK GAMING* Druckman is basically all of the above, which is why he's such a loathsome individual. I know he desperately wants to be a movie director because he said 'we don't do fun' and for shoving his fucktarded politics into it. Its like (I forget the movie) it just has a hardcore rape scene and they even tried to adjust the sound during it to make it an even more miserable experience. I mean, in cinema, you've got a lot of that freedom and there's always a history of being experimental. The problem is, intellectually, Druckman would probably make something equivalent to 'A Serbian Film' and think it was amazingly deep. There's a really LONG history of film makers who want to make their audiences miserable, and some people eat that up. John Waters is an example. He loves making audiences uncomfortable, and he has a cult following because of just how he does it. And it can be done well. The thing is, a movie is $10 bucks (or like $5 or 6 or 'free' with a streaming service) and two hours or so worth of your life. So not a huge investment there. "Alright, I'm open to a little self misery for that price, lets see if this is art or trash". There's not much investment, time or money wise.
With TLOU2, you're asking people to self-flagellate and make themselves fucking miserable for a $60 entry fee and 20 to 30 hours of their time. If you can't see that difference, you're a fucking idiot who shouldn't be making video games. Especially AAA, expensive ones. Movies can get away with it because of low time and money. Books can too, low money investment. Games cannot. You cannot say, "Oh, we don't do fun here." Like you fundamentally misunderstand the point. You should always be aiming for an enjoyable experience and make the audience feel like they're satisfied with their time spent. You don't need to cater to their every wish (a lot of creatives make this huge mistake and get really arrogant about it), or even make them comfortable. The problem with 20-30 hours and making it 'not fun' is that shit gets. EXHAUSTING. I played Spec-Ops the Line on Hard (Just...never ever do this unless you hate yourself) and it was a fucking exhausting 8 hours, so much so that I felt like I was going crazy with the character. I cannot even imagine that experience times 3 or 4. It was a miserable experience, but I found it rewarding because the game is a meta-narrative, and being miserable enhanced it.
The problem is TLOU 2 is not a meta narrative. You being miserable doesn't add to the experience. It not being fun doesn't add to it. It doesn't enhance anything. It just exhausts your audience. Like, look at a movie that makes you feel like utter shit (but is good) and how just mentally exhausted you are after an hour and a half or two hours. Then multiply that time by over ten and the price by about 6 times. You'd punch that person in the face. Its the supreme point of arrogance to expect your audience to take this amount of punishment with a smile. Which is why I post so much in this thread and detest creatures like Druckman. I love shit-talking him. He is such a piece of creative trash.
You can write a thesis of just how wrong Neil Druckman is on every level. From story-telling, to his creative ideas, to how he includes his ideology, his managing practices, just at every level a failure. His game is pretty and it probably functions ok is the bare fucking minimum in a AAA title. And his title is built all on the story. It just boggles my mind still the ego of some creatives who believe they deserve this audience and will treat them like trash when they treat their audience like trash.
And if this was too long, I'll let my man Shakespeare sum it up on the stories in modern Western media:
"It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing."
Just like all of my posts. (If you think I would just let someone else have that joke, you're out of your mind).
but I think that this increased competition will reduce other nations' dependence on American media, forcing large American companies to actually pay attention to anti/pro-consumer behavior. So if you hate what's happened to Star Wars or The Last of Us, there's a host of other people with great stories to tell, and your money means a whole lot more to them.
