A Shift in the Winds? - How the Entertainment Landscape Might Be Changing for the Better
Between games like Space Marine 2 and Astro Bot, and movies like Twisters bucking "modern audience" chasing trends, could we finally be seeing the early signs of Western entertainment healing?
Video games aren’t a typical topic for my Stack. I’ve mentioned in the past that I rarely buy new video games these days. It’s an unusual year where I’ll purchase even a single game, be it new or old, especially considering the very limited time with which I usually have or allow myself to play them. Between my work and home lives, as well as wanting to keep up with my writing, the priority for leisure gaming simply isn’t very high, and rarely will I permit myself time to play more than one or two hours before I go to sleep on any given day.
Additionally, I’ve also recently noted that I’ve been getting a great deal more reading done this year than I previously have. Granted, between Substack and audiobooks1, I’ve done more reading within the last three years than I had in the decade before that, but 2024 has been a banner year for reading. However, much as is the case with games and yes, movies as well, I read very little in the way of new books. Exceptions are made for authors whom I know and like, which of course includes some of my fellow Stackers, but most of what I’ve been reading has either come from the era of the pulps or the speculative novels and novellas from the 50’s through the 80’s. Of course, classic fiction has found its way in there as well. I recently read and reviewed Mark Twain’s The Mysterious Stranger and, as noted in my review on Fritz Leiber’s Lankhmar series, I am currently reading James Fenimore Cooper’s The Last of the Mohicans. I’ve also got Herman Melville’s Moby Dick waiting in the wings, likely to be picked up after I finish the rest of Leiber’s series, and none of this touches on the historical texts I’ve perused in this time.
My point with this introductory ramble is to show that a lot of what is new in entertainment has failed to appeal to me. I’m not alone in this feeling, either. As a good deal of evidence from the last four years shows, mainstream entertainment stands upon a crumbling foundation. Naturally there are many reasons for this. One of the biggest is the insistence not just of the entertainment industry, but the whole of the Western media apparatus to chase after the mythical “modern audience” as though they were addicts chasing the dragon. Within this year alone, this particular inclination has resulted in some of the most colossal failures that we’ve witnessed in recent memory.
Yet for all the schadenfreude that these high profile failures can bring us, such as the complete shutdown of Sony’s big new multiplayer hero shooter Concord within a mere two weeks of its release, failure isn’t the only thing that’s been on the docket this year.
Within my little corner of the independent fiction community, I know that Warhammer 40,000 is a property that isn’t necessarily well loved. I won’t blame the detractors for detracting, either. The property is one that’s of distinctly mixed quality, and Games Workshop, the IP’s owners, haven’t exactly engendered much in the way of goodwill from their fanbase over the years. In many ways the relationship between Games Workshop and the fans of its IPs is reflective of abusive codependency. To say Games Workshop has not treated us well is an understatement, and yet despite all their missteps, they still managed to pull out a colossal win in the form of Space Marine 2, the long awaited sequel to the decently liked but rather low impact Space Marine from September 2011.
I mentioned at the top that I rarely buy new games nowadays. Well, 2024 has proven to be an exceptional year for me in this regard, too. As I’m sure you can guess, Space Marine 2 is the most recent on the list of video game purchases which I’ve made this year. Alongside it stand Final Fantasy XIV: Dawntrail, and Elden Ring: Shadow of the Erdtree. Okay, yes, I’ll grant both of those are expansions and not entirely new games in and of themselves. Still, I’m going to count them, because the very fact that I actively purchased three separate video game titles in a single year is itself such an anomalous thing that it bears mentioning in relation to what I’m about to discuss, as is the fact that I can think of at least three other releases from within the last year and change that I’m interested in picking up2.
Those among you who’ve followed me for a little while now are already aware that I’ve written about the Dawntrail expansion a few times already. While I wouldn’t call it a massive success, certainly not when compared to some of the other things I plan to discuss, I wouldn’t deem it a failure either. Frustrating though a certain few elements of it were and are, those haven’t been enough to damper my enjoyment FFXIV on the whole. However, I’ve also noted in the past that another group of much beloved games for me are the high challenge action RPGs of From Software, the newest of which is Elden Ring. I’d mentioned in previous articles where I discussed From’s ARPGs just how much I was looking forward to the Shadow of the Erdtree expansion. Now that I’ve played and beaten it, (I finished it a few weeks ago, actually) I can safely say that it was one of the most fun and memorable gaming experiences I’ve had in years, flaws and all.
My hours clocked in Space Marine 2 are very few compared to Elden Ring, and especially to FFXIV. I’m only a small handful of missions into its story campaign and have otherwise only played cooperatively with a couple of my friends once. However, even that limited experience is more than enough to show me exactly why this game has exploded in its popularity and therefore, its success. Success that’s reflected in its sales numbers: 2 million copies sold within its first three days of release, which were the most recent figures I could find.
This isn’t the only success story we’ve seen in the gaming world this year, either. I’ve already mentioned Shadow of the Erdtree which, despite receiving some mixed reviews, went on to sell a whopping 5 million copies in three days and is still being hotly discussed. Builds, boss strategies, balance changes, and mountains of lore talk continue to come at a breakneck pace despite the expansion now breaking the 3 month age marker, which is usually when interest in games tends to die off3. In addition to that, there’s also been the surprise success of a small project from Sony by the name of Astro Bot, which by all accounts has provided fun and creative platforming and puzzle experiences that hearken back to the days of SNES, Sega Genesis, and the original PlayStation.
I’m not here to review any of these games today. I’ll leave that to those better qualified than I am, those who have the time and dedication to really dig deep and get to the ins and outs of what does or doesn’t work about each of these examples. What I want to do is look at what each of these games has in common, to see why it is that they’ve done as well as they have while games like Concord, which had eight years of development and hundreds of millions of dollars in funding, continue to die in their well deserved obscurity. However, before I do that, there’s one point I’d like to address first, and that’s the common element which these all lacked.
A good many people out there will point to the successful gaming titles we’ve had across the last year and point to one thing which they all lack as the reason why they succeeded: the influence of DEI. For the uninitiated, of which there are few of you here on Substack, DEI is an acronym that stands for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. These initiatives come packaged with the ESG loans offered by massive investment firms like the deservingly infamous Blackrock, and they often require that certain quotas be met regarding the vague notions of diversity, equity, and inclusion. They’re also a boogeyman which is commonly pointed to as the big reason why so much of what’s currently on offer from the entertainment industry just flat out sucks. While I won’t disagree that DEI certainly has some thoroughly unpleasant impacts, it’s not the cause of our current woes, but rather a codification of long lingering symptoms.
The move towards shoehorned “diversity” and “inclusivity” in our entertainment is something that began as far back as the 1990’s. It’s not new, not by any stretch of the imagination. We started seeing the first signs of this pop up on television in the late 90’s and early 00’s, with sitcoms being the area where I’d argue it was the most noticeable. For sake of clarity, I’m not saying that diversity in and of itself is a negative element. Don’t go clutching your pearls at that, either, not until you’ve heard me out at least. Diversity is a good thing to have in our stories when it occurs naturally. By pairing together characters of diverse backgrounds, thoughts, beliefs, sexualities, races, and so on in manners which lend themselves to the stories trying to be told, they will naturally enrich those stories. Be it comedy, drama, horror, fantasy, or what have you, these points of difference are key for building the bonds and conflicts that help to make intercharacter relationships interesting.
Where we end up having a problem is when the nuanced diversity of characters are reduced to their most surface levels, the lowest common denominators. Suddenly, the multifaceted character who also happened to be gay, or the character who’s homosexuality once provided a genuine point of nuanced interest within the story being told, is simply reduced to being the token lispy gay mocking the straights. Same goes for the fat kid in school. He doesn’t cope with and disarm his bullies by laughing and being goofy anymore, nor does his better looking friend get to see how he’s using that humor to hide how shitty he feels for that bad treatment. Instead, he’s just the fat and goofy kid because all fat kids are goofy! It’s reductionist, taking what were interesting characters with a bit of depth to them and watering them down into dull, Flanderized (or Homered, in the case of the fat kid example) stereotypes.
One can certainly argue that this effect has worsened under the codified checklists of DEI and ESG, but much like bacteria under favorable conditions its incubation was only quickened by them, rather than caused. As pointed out by Royce over at A Drink With Crazy, part of it is simply the incestuous nature of the larger entertainment industry. Another part are the investment firms tying these regulations to their funds. Ultimately, though, the seeds of ideological capture which led to this were sown long before these terms were even a twinkle in the minds of those who coined them.
But let’s move back to the positives. What is it, then, that makes the successful examples I listed above different? Why did the likes not just of Space Marine 2, which is but the most recent example, but Shadow of the Erdtree, Black Myth Wukong, Stellar Blade, and Helldivers 2 (at least before Sony’s terrible decision making butchered the game’s community) reach such heights of success in a market that’s been largely apathetic to the titles on offer?
Let’s not just limit it to games, either. Why was Deadpool & Wolverine not just the biggest movie of the year, raking in $1.61 billion worldwide, but the biggest success Marvel Studios has seen in the last three years? Though technically released at the end of last year, why did Godzilla: Minus One, a Japanese giant monster movie, sweep the Western market and become the only entry to win an Oscar4? Why was Twisters, a sequel to a pretty ridiculous, nearly 30 year old disaster-adventure movie from the late 90s5, one of the most popular movies domestically this summer? Granted, it did ultimately lose money, but that has more to do with an issue we’ll touch on later: bloated budgets. Still, even despite that, it raked in $250 million domestically. Not a bad showing at all for a movie three decades removed from its predecessor.
So why did these examples do so well? The answer lies, in part, in a recent YouTube comment made on one of popular streamer Asmongold’s videos by Matthew Karch, the CEO of Saber Interactive, which is the studio behind Space Marine 2.
For those who may have difficulty reading the text on the image, or those few of you using Substack’s text-to-speech function to listen to this article instead, the Mr. Karch’s comment is as follows:
“Hey man. CEO of Saber here. I love your videos. When we signed the deal to make Space Marine 2, all I wanted was a throwback game. We had the chance to work on something which by its nature was “old school”. I can’t even comprehend many of the current games that we play these days. They are too complex and too much of an investment. We worked on Halo back in the day, and that game could be distilled down to the simplest of shooting loops, but it was entirely addicting. That is what we wanted to recapture. I hope that games like Space Marine 2 and Wukong are the start of a reversion to a time when games were simply about fun and immersion. I spent some time as Chief Operating Officer at Embracer and I saw games there that made me want to cry with their overblown attempts at messaging or imposing morals on gamers. We just want to do some glory kills and get the heart rate up a little. For me that’s what games should be about.”
Mr. Karch’s comment hits on the core reason why games like Space Marine 2 and movies like Deadpool & Wolverine succeeded where many others failed: they give the customer base what they’ve been asking for.
Obviously there’s more to it than just this. The overall quality of the product needs to be considered, as well as the dedication of the team behind it. In past articles on similar subjects I touched on the fact that the types of people who are likely to produce the best entertainment; be it fiction, video games, movies, television, animation, comic books, comedy, or whatever other subsection you can think of; are the types who are passionate about what they’re doing. People with burning passions and a clear vision for their creative endeavors will always stand the best chance at creating something lasting that others will value.
Mr. Karch’s comment, as well as a recent one from his LinkedIn profile, shared below, showcases this passion. Likewise, he correctly points to a handful of the issues which have plagued mainstream Western entertainment for far too long. Bloated budgets, oversized teams, excessively long production and development cycles, interference from major investors, and yes, bad actors driven by ideology are all things which can and will damper the passion and vision. That the point of ideology is most frequently blamed is due to the very simple fact that it’s the cudgel most commonly employed by the mainstream “journalists” and “reviewers” that the companies which produce mass market swill have bought and paid for.
The final paragraph of this post is the most important for us here. Again, for those unable to read the comment or who are listening, the last paragraph reads as follows:
“Saber is committed to changing the way we make and deliver games. Gone will be the days of $100+ million budgets and the nickel and diming of gamers. Our industry has been stuck in the Jurassic era of bloated budgets and risk-laden releases for way too long. With Crestview and Aleph by our side, we are poised to change that.”
By now, every one of us ought to be familiar with the adage, “be the change you want to see in the world.” It seems as though Saber Interactive is positioning themselves to do just that, and they’re not the only ones.
However you may personally feel about what they produce, one cannot argue that either the passion or the consistency of vision with which From Software approaches their games is lacking. Divisive as their action RPGs may be, Hidetaka Miyazaki and everyone else at From have consistently delivered on games that are much beloved by their core fanbases, flaws and all. One need only look at how rampant discussion amongst the community of Soulsborne loyalists continues to be not just for Elden Ring’s expansion, but for any of From’s ARPGs. Yes, that even includes the black sheep of the bunch, Dark Souls 2. Their games aren’t perfect. Far from it, in fact. However, From’s dedication to quality and their particular vision continues to shine bright. This not only keeps their fans largely happy, but has also enabled them to reach a larger audience than they ever have with Elden Ring, all for being willing to buck modern trends in an effort to stay passionately true to their vision.
Astro Bot is a similar sort of story, a tiny PS5 exclusive that was released with minimal advertising and little fanfare. It was a project which Sony clearly didn’t expect to do as well as it has. Yet because it kept to a simple, gameplay focused vision that actively celebrated many of the PlayStation exclusive franchises which became much beloved over the decades. Word of mouth spread quickly, turning the game into a remarkable success story.
Much the same can be said of Space Marine 2, Black Myth Wukong, and Stellar Blade, all games which were also faced with backlash from the likes of IGN, Kotaku, and other “games journalism” outlets that have rightly lost the trust of those who should be making up their primary readership. I have my own opinions about how genuine some of this backlash is, as well which controversies were likely manufactured, but to take a quote Michael Ende so often used in The Neverending Story, another piece of wonderful fiction which I read this year, that is another story, to be told another time.
We’re seeing much the same in the film world, too. Movies which are bucking modern trends in favor of playing either to genuinely good storytelling, such as Godzilla: Minus One; or playing up to the fun of their premise, such as Twisters; or even doing both, as was surprisingly the case with Deadpool & Wolverine; are succeeding. Conversely, those films and shows which continue to play into the trends of modernism that the public has become so tired of continue to languish, fail, and cost their studios and investors hundreds of millions of dollars in lost revenue for each doomed project.
Are we experiencing the early signs of a shift in the wind? Do these success stories portend an abandonment of the bloat, the mismanagement, and the ideological swill in favor of bringing back entertainment of a better quality? It’s difficult to say for certain. Our world today is still very much obsessed with the culture war that’s been raging since the early 2010’s, particularly among those who are terminally online. Meanwhile, the majority of us have been stuck in the middle of it all, either wondering what the fuck is going on, or slowly awakening to the fact much of this swill is being pushed out by so-called creatives more interested in their politics than producing meaningful art, or even just decent entertainment.
Lest you assume I’m being one-sided with this by pointing to Disney Lucasfilm’s most recent abysmal failure, The Acolyte, know that I recognize this as a relevant truth on both sides of the political spectrum. The Daily Wire’s comedies, Mr. Birchum and Lady Ballers, were also terrible for very similar reasons.
The youth of today tend to say stuff like this is cringe. In my day, we just called them lame or said they sucked ass.
No matter the slang you prefer, it all amounts to the same thing: poor quality work developed by people who care more about the political messages they want to force than making a genuinely good product; produced by bloated teams of workers who are either incompetent or having their necks proverbially stood upon; and funded by an investor class that I can only imagine is either so risk averse that they insist on sticking to this same failed path, or whom are actively attempting to sabotage and destroy the companies they’re funding. I can see no other reasons why they’d hold to this insane path of proven failure so ardently.
Yet in the face of that, we seem to be seeing the first real signs of a pushback against it, and perhaps the most notable example is a movie that’s gone largely ignored by the mainstream access media despite breaking into the box office top-ten - Matt Walsh’s, “Am I Racist?” which I’ve heard described as the republican Borat, for those of you who remember that movie.
Have I seen it? No.
Will I see it? Probably not, honestly. Amusing as it sounds, at this point I’ve spent years listening to the haranguing nonsense of the supposed antiracist activists, inclusivity consultants, and activist professors put on display in that movie. Some of them, such as Robin DiAngelo, actually ended up in the movie somehow. Anyway, it’s old news for me, been there, seen that; and I’m not the type who’s going to go out and spend $20 on a movie just for the sake of supporting it from a political angle. To my mind, the most interesting thing about the movie is the fact that Matt Walsh was able to successfully disguise himself around people who vehemently claim to hate him by styling his hair and putting on a pair of dorky glasses.
That, and the fact that one of the most fair and relaxed movie reviewers on the internet, Jeremy Jahns, got pilloried for daring to upload his honest views on the movie. To his credit, the review is still up despite the mob of hate that’s been baying at him, though it appears that YouTube has blocked ad revenue on the video.
Interesting as all that may be, though, there’s only one question that really matters here: is the success of Am I Racist? remarkable or not?
I think so.
Like Astro Bot, Am I Racist? is succeeding on the power of word of mouth. This is a movie that the mainstream seems to have actively ignored the existence of, despite breaking into the top-ten. Rotten Tomatoes, at least the last time I checked, has yet to post even one critic review of the film, leaving it with a nonexistent critic rating against an overwhelming audience rating of 99% Fresh. From all accounts I’ve heard from people who saw the movie, the general public has been going to see it and laughing their asses off when they do.
This falls in line with a phenomenon that I discussed with Royce of A Drink With Crazy,
, and before our Starshatter TTRPG session a couple weeks ago: comedy and humor are returning to the spaces where they’d been chased off. The kinds of jokes that would get your accounts limited or outright banned a couple years ago, are starting to trickle their way back onto social media. The general public is turning their backs on the modernist trends that have caused so much damage to Western entertainment, and we’re finally starting to see creatives with passion and vision stepping up with the kinds of large projects that can start to fill the gaps in quality left by the AAA gaming and blockbuster film and TV studios.Only time will tell whether or not the tide is genuinely turning, or if we simply happen to find ourselves amidst an anomaly. My hope is for the former, but hope alone won’t be enough. The adage must be followed - we must be the change we wish to see in the world. In the spirit of that, if you found this essay to be interesting or enjoyable I’d ask that you give my fiction a try. I’ve got a wide variety of short stories and serialized fiction available on my Substack.
If you’d prefer recommendations, I’d suggest my dark fantasy mystery novella, In the Giant’s Shadow; my primitive fantasy-adventure novelette, The Claws of the N’longu; or my ongoing serialized novel, The Jarl’s Son. Each of these has been thoroughly enjoyed by those who read them, and if you’re a fantasy lover, I expect you’ll enjoy them, too.
Thank you for reading,
~The Man Behind the Screen
Not my preference, but given I’m stuck at work six days per week and also need to help my wife handle the multitude of chores we have due to fostering as many animals as we do, they’re my best option for keeping up on reading.
Those would be Tekken 8, Final Fantasy XVI, and ARMORED CORE 6, if you were curious.
Considering From Soft’s penchant for indirect storytelling which requires players to piece together the stories and lore of their games for themselves, this isn’t necessarily the most surprising thing on the surface.
Not that these awards amount to much of anything these days.
As nostalgic as I am for Twister, I will fully admit that it’s a stupid, stupid movie. It just happens to be my stupid.
I might have to check this game out. I'm not a Warhammer 40k fan myself, but a friend is. Would you still recommend it to the likes such as myself?
Perfect timing! Literally waiting for Space Marine 2 to download as we speak! I'm like you, my last bought game was Halo Infinite which despite having great potential, sucked ass. Would be awesome if this was a sign the tide is changing. But you're right - one benefit of crap games is getting more reading done. And certainly I've done a lot more reading lately. In fact, I'm quite skeptical of video games even being a net positive for society - given all the atrocious hours I've spent playing when I could have doing a range if more productive things. In saying that, I do have magical memories of exploring virtual worlds with my friends, so I decided a while ago that I would only purchase a new game if I could play with friends ... And Space Marine 2 looks like that game, for now.