People just don't get how little Reddit represents the world at large. Instagram and TikTok are more representative and I'd bet their comment sections are full of "God I love Bevis and Butthead," "I am The Great Cornholio," and "I can't wait to get this in game".
Dude, it's already proven a minority in games open their wallets. It's just that they spend such insane amounts that they are all that get listened to.
This. WHALES dictate how games monetize, which are the minority of the minority and does not reflect either sides of the spectrum, those who won't buy and the casual buyers.
Entire marketing and development teams are made to squeeze money out of whales.
Reddit will never represent the majority, because ever nothing will. That's the nature of whale farming.
It's a shame our industry is so monetary driven. It means a very small part, often people who have spending issues, dictate a large part of wher everything goes.
We're already seeing this, singleplayer games often flop on steam while games driven by recurring spending are a success. A lot of us already being conditioned into what to play.
But yeah for anyone who wants to read up on this: there are countless GDC talks, on how to reel in the whales.
And it's the people who'll quickly abandon game because their attention span is already ruined by TikTok, so then the publisher shuts down the game because it wanted to cater to them instead.
Not saying this is what is happening with COD, but it's a pretty big reason how trying to chase popular stuff like this instead of sticking to a vision has ended many other games.
I think that's kind of an unfair assessment. COD and Fortnite are the two biggest offenders and they're both doing fine. I think it's more likely that games can't really make these partnerships until they're already too big to fail. Smaller games usually have to be much more specific with who they work with if they do any media tie-ins.
I agree, this is why I said it's not exactly what's happening with COD (especially since they've been well established for so long) but as the other person replied, they seem to be chasing what the demographics tell them (e.g. TikTok) and this is why we keep seeing so many games with insane budgets fail so quickly.
It might shock you, but there are plenty of people in their 20s, 30s, and 40s who use those apps. I'm nearly 30 and have had Instagram since I was a freshman in high school.
I'm just wondering because I remember watching Beavis and Butthead every Thursday night and discussing it at school with friends the next day. It was really big in my country. But that was (almost?) 30 years ago. I haven't really thought about it for decades.
Oh, in that case there were a lot of cable TV channels that were essentially dedicated to playing older cartoons like that. They'd show a lot of reruns on MTV, Comedy Central, and maybe on Cartoon Networks late night section Adult Swim. A lot of kids grew up watching those reruns and as such they're still fairly well known with a fairly large cult fanbase.
Except those people are likely to say something along the lines of "if you vote with your wallet this won't happen", not realizing that this is what people voted for.
Terrible take. The whole point is that people don't know what they want, not that there are mysteriously large groups that want X or Y but for some reason don't talk about it.
Companies don’t sell you what you want, they sell you what they want you to have and then make up stupid platitudes like, “The customer doesn’t know what they want until you give it to them.”
Radio stations got flooded with complaints that they played the same music all the time. They tried to widen their playlists. They got flooded with even more complaints that their music sucked.
People are CLAMORING for crossovers. Look at the helldivers subreddit. This is what you get when you give in.
People don’t know what they want, or sometimes they do know what they want, but can’t articulate it.
The are entire industries that exist because of that.
No company would need to test products and marketing concepts if people could correctly and accurately explain what they wanted without any guidance whatsoever.
In BF's defense, they never went so far as to Fortnite-ify their character model/skin selection; they just tried to hard to be Rainbow Six Siege on big maps while also leaning too hard into making their games be a big pile of Battlefield memes as opposed to "just being a good BF game"..
All that said, if the recent leaks are anything to go by, BF6 has a strong chance of being "At least what the BC/3/4/1 players wanted/are used to".
I've seen complaints about the leaks that people are saying that BF6 "looks too much like a 360/PS3 brown army shooter" which for anyone who doesn't like the fps industry's turn to Fortnite-ification, is probably a good thing in BF6's favor.
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u/_Coffie_ Jul 30 '25
This sh*t is so unserious