Summer 2024, an entertainment project Something more serious went wrong Probably more than any entertainment project in human history. The project, which cost around $400 million, is believed to have only recouped $1 million, a failure that puts the likes of disaster movies to shame. Clown: Pas de deux and Borderlands. However, if you don’t read professional gaming media, chances are you’ve never heard of it.
Why This huge story remains so obscure that it touches on a very specific problem within mainstream media at large and its decades-long refusal to accept that video games have become a normal part of everyday life.
harmony is a multiplayer shooter developed over eight years by Sony, one of the largest entertainment companies in the world. Released into a very crowded market of so-called “hero shooters” – where players pick from pre-designed hero characters and team up to fight online – it feels generic, derivative, and in-character The design, narrative concept and use of color are very reminiscent of Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy.
Yet even taking all of these factors into account, no one could have predicted the scale of its failure. The game releases on August 23rd for PlayStation 5 console and PC, sold estimated 25,000 copies, never seen more than 700 people playing simultaneously on PC. This is a huge disaster, Sony The entire game is offline After about 14 days, they removed any evidence that it ever existed from their website and online store. This erasure even extends to Remove purchased games from PS5 user’s game catalog.
Loss of $399 million
If all the estimates from industry experts are correct (Sony has never been eager to say they were incorrect), then the project made $1 million and lost $399 million. By comparison, the biggest box office loss ever for a movie was Disney’s 2012 film, John Carterwith total revenue of $284.1 million and a loss of $255 million.
However, if you Search this site new york times Regarding the word “harmony”, You won’t find any results mentioning this game. search”pas de deux You’ll find some fragments including A company reports its severe box office losses.
If you’re watching, chances are good morning america Or read an article in a business magazine of your choice, and when the topic of gaming comes up, it starts like this:
“Video games have come a long way since their inception table tennis!
It’s cringe-worthy, as if spoken from another dimension where video games aren’t an international industry that dwarfs film, television, publishing, and a part of everyday life over the past half-century.
Imagine your breakfast TV show of choice turns to news about a blockbuster movie flopping at the box office and it starts like this:
“Cinema has come a long way since then horse in motion!
impenetrable wall
huge failure Joker 2 Received full coverage from all media outlets. It’s certainly a good story! The first movie of 2019 clownBeyond all expectations – a $70 million R-rated movie directed by the director the Hangover movie, which grossed over $1 billion at the box office. So five years later this sequel came, but not now taxi driver Tribute, an unlikely courtroom musical starring Lady Gaga. Can director Todd Phillips repeat his incredible alchemy again? No, and how.
So it’s certainly a funny story, a piece of schadenfreude entertainment, a car crash that we could all easily listen to for days. So, you know, it seems reasonable that you could also write a story like this harmony. You can create an editorial campaign for “the greatest entertainment disaster of all time.” It’s a title, right? marvelous.
Yet this separation between the broader news media and video games is so solid, so incomprehensible, that harmony Gained meager coverage at best. Of course, gaming experts at major stores have chosen it. Gene Park neatly covers it this washington postbut as an opinion column rather than a news report, it begins with a personal anecdote about the theme park. But trying to find actual mainstream news about this epic entertainment story has me baffled.
I searched abc newswebsite, then CNNlooking for rough stories that I can effectively criticize before wondering if I’m using the wrong search terms. Maybe I listed the results incorrectly. However, no matter where I looked, I couldn’t find any mention of the game or its failure. Then again, CNN‘s entertainment section only contains the “Movies,” “TV,” and “Celebrities” subcategories.
this British Broadcasting Corporation There are indeed news reports on this topic! Apart from this one, which was submitted under the title “Newsbeat”, the BBC’s youth news outlet is broadcast primarily on its youth-focused music radio station. Of course, because this story of a business losing nearly $500 million is for kids!
It shows this increasingly inexplicable separation, this imaginary wall that the media has built around itself that – for some reason – keeps games out.
fifty years later
This made more sense in the 1990s. Video games became mainstream in the 1980s, and despite the fact that a large number of games were primarily aimed at adults, their penetration lay in their cartoonish imagery. mario and pacman. Never mind the outstanding success of a franchise like this Elite and Genesisand more. The popularity of these cartoon-like games among adults is certainly true. Instead, those video game things – they’re just for kids. They’re kids’ stuff, a cheesy thing, and covering them is like looking back at Saturday morning cartoons, right?
So even by the late 1990s, when gaming had become an established pursuit, best-selling games like Grand Theft Auto Even though this content is distributed under adult-only certification and a huge multi-billion dollar industry has been built around the hardware, software and media coverage, in the mainstream mind it still exists only as a property that is An unexplainable disturbance. They’ve certainly come a long way table tennisbut not enough to be taken seriously.
This has long been thought to be a result of the age of newsroom managers. These are people who were born in the 1950s and 1960s, and gaming is an abomination to them. But eventually they will grow old and retire, and a new generation will arrive, born in the 1970s and 1980s, for whom gaming has been around at least since their childhood. At this point, as those in power rebuild, we can move beyond this anachronism. However, this did not happen. In the late 1990s, when the PlayStation 2 was a phenomenal success and the pursuit quickly became a core part of mainstream entertainment, the media remained completely detached from the phenomenon.
Of course, by the 2010s, as people in their 40s who had spent their teenage years gaming Tomb Raider and diablo Hitting the floors of newspapers and TV networks, can gaming finally escape journalistic purgatory? No, even as games surpassed movies to become by far the bigger industry, non-game media still ignored it. Cut to today, the scale of the story we’re about to tell is harmonyfor so many outlets, it’s not even worth mentioning. Not even like the boring, “interesting” stories at the end of local news broadcasts.
Clearly, there is no easy answer to the question “Why?” But this is likely due to the incompatible nature of games and non-interactive media. You can show movie clips on TV channels and publish excerpts from books on newspaper pages. However, defining the essence of gaming is not transferable, and the past 50 years have been filled with disastrous attempts to portray gaming on television. This incompatible, conflicting nature of the media may help maintain this wedge.
we are all playing games
Even in my third decade as a games journalist, it’s easy for me to protest my arguments with “But not everyone plays games, but everyone goes to movie theaters!” But that’s simply not true. (Ask anyone who owns a movie theater, for example.) Gaming has become so mainstream that even readers of specialist gaming sites are reluctant to believe it exists, mostly out of snobbery, since so much of that success depends on things like digital billion dollars call of Duty The huge success of the franchise as well as mobile games, e.g. candy Crush Saga— excellent games with broad appeal and therefore considered by some to spoil niche details from lesser-known games they might enjoy. Having a PlayStation or Xbox is perfectly normal, but not having some games installed on your smartphone is completely abnormal.
At this point, CNN and boston globeMost of the world wouldn’t cover a story as massive and catastrophic as Sony’s $400 million entertainment failure this year. Boy, on the surface, this is a funny story, a piece of schadenfreude entertainment, a car crash we could relax about for days. Ultimately, as much as we may try to excuse, explain, or defend this blind spot, we ultimately fail.
Not involving extraordinary stories harmony Exposes a profound failure of the mainstream media that stems from a foolish bias against a medium that is higher than film and television that these outlets are willing to understand.
There is no point in believing that it will change anytime soon. Of course, we might think, surely Next Will a generation of editors and reporters recognize the reality of their existence? But the evidence suggests they don’t do that at all, instead continuing to assume gaming is a niche interest that their readers don’t engage in, even though they may have played it Zen language or block explosion They were on the phone that morning while taking the subway to work. They will leave a sensational story harmony Set aside completely.
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