When Activision announced this past week that they were effectively discontinuing the Guitar Hero, DJ Hero and True Crime franchises, it became big news – even non-gaming friends of mine heard about it and were shocked that something so seemingly ingrained in the popular consciousness would be terminated so unceremoniously. That's not to say that any of them actually played Guitar Hero, or if they had, maybe it was one time at a basement party like five years ago.
Activision has made their name by treating the world of video games as a corporate shark tank, and though it's almost become cliche to rip on the company as "evil," they are at the very least the most Machiavellian company in the entertainment business. No other company is as committed to repeating the same process over and over again, promising short-term windfalls at the expense of long-term investment (not to mention the complete bankruptness of Activision's artistic policies, which are non-existent, but I'll get to that in a bit).
Here's the template:
1) Do extensive market research to see whether a carefully crafted product will be an immediate hit OR buy out a franchise that has been a hit already OR rely on licensed games that will sell to their specific target market.
2) "Iterize" – if a game can be successful for one year it can be successful for at least a few years.
3) Buy out a respectable development company. Hire hundreds or thousands of extra programmers to get the game out in time for the Christmas holidays.
4) Promote the shit out of the game. Potentially pay less than scrupulous review sites for favourable reviews. Essentially alter the conversation about video games away from "is this art?" to the video game equivalent of obsessive box office tallies.
5) Profit. Reassure shareholders. Make plans for spin-offs, sequels, and minor refinements to a formula. But most of all, stick to a formula, because risk is the deathknell of profit.
6) Fire or layoff the hundreds or thousands of extra programmers hired, essentially creating a climate of temporary work in the video games industry, moving artistic vision away from auteurs and towards the big Hollywood studio ideal of complete corporate control over artistic endeavours.
7) Rely on the less-controllable developers to produce their own things in the meantime (such as Blizzard, or the recently-acquired Bungie) – stew that you can't really control them, but depend on the resources they bring in anyways.
And now, with this latest news, we can add an eighth step to their process, which is to unceremoniously terminate franchises once they've been milked dry and no longer have any sort of cultural and more importantly, financial impact whatsoever, and to shut down the once-promising development houses that fueled them.
I'm not saying that I'm weeping over the loss of Guitar Hero. It was an innovation precisely once (and even then was far more in debt to the music-game genre found in arcades across Japan than anyone at Activision was willing to admit), and the ever-escalating ridiculousness and focus on stupid fucking music that no one actually likes made me stop caring about it far before Activision did.
The problem is that Activision is probably the most influential and publicly-known third party video game company in the world. I don't know anyone who doesn't know what Call of Duty is. And that's worrisome in its own regard, from a cultural standpoint – the largest video games company doesn't see value in video games whatsoever, beyond profit projections. If that's not a worrisome thing to you, think about it this way: imagine if Walt Disney actually hated cartoons, and only put out soulless creations that were focus-tested to death and released as disposable fare, prime only for one box office weekend and nothing else. If that were the case, then Disney would look… well, OK, a lot like the Disney of the last ten years or so, but still, we wouldn't have a legacy of anything relevant from the company.
The idea of disposable culture is not one I'm necessarily against (I do run a bad-movie-only blog, and more often than people give credit for, there is artistic merit in a lot of disposable culture), but when it's done in such an overtly corporate manner, it's both hard to give a fuck if you know better, and depressing when you see that almost everyone else doesn't. This website is dedicated to attempting to foster discussion about moving the medium forward in meaningful ways, but it almost feels like one should give up when the entire culture surrounding video games has decided that games don't matter, since they're just silly trifles that a predatory business can make billions of dollars off of. And that, to me, is only going to make video games worse, and I already think that video games have gotten, on average, worse since the last generation, and worse still than the golden age of the 16-bit era. Experimentation is verboten, and too often, only the stupidest ideas from previous generations get recycled and slapped with a new coat of paint, called "brand new," and sell millions upon millions of copies. It's not fair, perhaps, to lay all of the blame at the feet of Activision, but I do lay a lot of it there.
The True Crime saga is also depressing for other reasons. Though the series has always been a poor man's Grand Theft Auto knock-off, there was at least the potential for something interesting to be done with the series. But the game wasn't an automatic hit, and that just wouldn't do for Activision's bottom line (the same company who passed on freaking GHOSTBUSTERS because they couldn't see a way to iterize it, for christ's sake).
Once again: not broken up about the loss of True Crime. It was a pretty shitty series to begin with. But that corporate attitude towards it makes one think, what if they did come across a potentially great series that would benefit from the unlimited resources that Activision can offer? A truly revolutionary series? Well, it wouldn't get made, and video games would be left worse off for it (and I'm not saying that only Activision would do this – so too would EA, Ubisoft, or any other huge third party). These companies have the resources to truly push video games forward (not to rag on indie development, of course), and they're not, so that's reason enough to actively hate them.
The stock defense of Activision or EA or whoever, who exist primarily as corporate structures who couldn't give two shits about the artistic experience of video games, is that they're just businesses, and it's a business's prerogative to make as much money as possible. To me, that's not a defense: ultracapitalism isn't something we should be extolling the virtues of, especially at the expense of a meaningful artistic culture. The other defense is that if these companies weren't giving people what they wanted, then they wouldn't be making so much money. True, to some extent, but I don't know if you've noticed, but people are pretty easily swindled. I'd say that true personality and taste almost doesn't exist in most people, and that most people's tastes are a motley collection of things they've been advertised and things their friends tell them to like. When Activision stacks the deck by not only taking out almost literally twice the budget of games development on advertising, but also carefully manipulating the far-too-easily-manipulated games media, effectively controlling both the critical and commercial discussions of a game, it's no wonder that these games sell like hotcakes.
So Activision's termination of Guitar Hero doesn't make me sad because of the loss of Guitar Hero. It makes me sad for the state of the entertainment sector of North America. I dread the future for my eventual children if this is the foundation we're building upon.