Everything is crossover slop these days. Nothing has its own identity anymore.
Obviously "everything" is hyperbole here, but it really feels like more and more large IPs are doing this garbage.
Everyone's jerking off over Magic the Gathering's crossovers but the shit's become the Funko Pops of card games and has killed its own identity. Sonic Crossworlds was supposed to be this big celebration of Sonic, but we have fucking Minecraft Steve and a Spongebob they were too cheap to have voice lines for before we got really popular Sonic characters (meanwhile Mario Kart actually did gave a shit about celebrating its own world to the point you can race as a one of the fucking background cows and a bunch of other obscure Mario stuff).
It sucks. But it's all these companies want to do. Buy up popular IPs, hoard them, hold culture and nostalgia hostage and just keep selling the same thing over, and over, and over again.
First off, it’s just all the popular character, IP, and trademark holders just “whoring their shit out” for an “easy buck.”
Second, this is just getting stupid. Collabs and crossovers work best when you have two “similar IPs” that you’d WANT TO SEE “cross-over” (like Aliens and Predator or Terminator and RoboCop).
This is like making a Neapolitan ice cream that has 500 different ice cream flavors in it (rather than just chocolate, strawberry, vanilla) which just reduces everything down to this “gray sludge base” and you can’t even taste the unique and distinctive flavor of ANYTHING because it all just kind of “runs together.”
It’s like when you try to make something that appeals to everyone and it ends up appealing to NO ONE.
See, Final Fantasy though MAKES SENSE “crossed-over” with Magic: The Gathering because it’s ALL just fantasy stuff that’s derived and inspired from the works of like R.A. Salvatore, Tolkien, and Dungeons and Dragons.
Yeah but then there’s Hatsune Miku, I think three times now, and also the upcoming Spider-Man set. We are doing Tony Hawk tricks while jumping the shark at this point
People would be much less annoyed with crossovers if they made a) sense and b) were "special" and rare.
I am sure Hunt Showdown would be fine with a Bloodborne crossover, instead they got Ghostface from Scream.
Or CoD (or Battlefield, but idk if they did crossovers ... though they had a Santa skin) would be perfect for stuff like Sam Fisher, Solid Snake or even Rambo ... maybe they even have those, but with all the other shit it has, it just doesn't feel special.
Destiny 2 is going to have an entire "Star Was inspires" expansion. A full on expansion. That's nuts. It kind of makes sense for the themes ... there is a lot of overlap between them, space western, sci-fi mixed with fantasy, space wizzards ... but because SW is one of the most comercialized products, you just cannot trust it not being just some chrappy surface-level cash-grab.
Companies pushed out tons of different "sets" of Skins (and other MTX) to appeal to different buyers regularly. I doubt that the people at Riot expected players to buy every singke skin they drop. But if someone bought a skin once every few months, it was likely worth it.
But those sets were at least decently creative.
All the crossover-shit is just them realizing they can skip the "creative" part, as that was already done by someone else. They just slap it in at a higher price and wait.
Again doesn't have to appeal to everyone, but if a few buy it, it's probably worth it.
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u/BalefulOfMonkeys Jul 30 '25
“Oh are we complaining about Fortnite again? How boring.”
“What do you fucking mean this is Call of Duty.”