I've been getting at this topic pretty much constantly lately – I could write a couple thousand words about it, but why do that when GQ is doing it for me?
Read "The Death of the Movies" here, and substitute in "movies" for "the games industry" and you'll begin to understand how broken the mentality of game developers and marketers is. It might not be quite as bad as Hollywood, but it's getting pretty damned close.
The thing that's perhaps most disheartening about this is that it's GQ that's behind this – about as mainstream a source of media as you can get. That kind of writing just isn't present in mainstream games coverage, which is part of the reason why I'm so pessimistic about the situation getting any better. The games media treats all games as products, and developers aren't really doing too much to buck that idea. Depressing.
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There are a few differences between games and movies. One of the biggest problems I think is that a) The worst games are worse than the worst movies. At least bad movies actually fucking work. b) Games are marketed extremely poorly and in fact the whole industry can seem pretty infantile sometimes. The recent Guitar Hero fiasco is a good example in that at one point one of the quotes was that unfortunately, people only bought guitar hero once. Yeah, like most products, where's the forward thinking here? And for such a billion dollar industry there's a helluva lot of turn over of staff and studios that come and go after a single game. c) Movies don't have an effective shelf life of a month.
I feel your pain bro.