Game companies:
I wonder if this is cultural? In JAV (a friend told me) they have for the vast majority middle-aged dudes with a belly, not stallions with 10”. The reason is quite similar: that is the audience that buys these products and they want this fantasy.
On the other hand it’s bizarre that despite knowing for decades Western societies are getting older still vast majority of entertainment is destined at teens and young adults.
Yeah, I agree, like a very core principal of product design and marketing has always been “who is the audience for this product? how big is that audience? How much of that audience will my product appeal to? How much would they pay for it?” Etc, and based on that you determine if there is a market for what your making, how to market it to them, and how much you can justify spending on building it.
Right now, ideology in western development has grossly warped those core principles.
An analogy would be, I’m a metallurgist. I decide I want to make wall mounted battle axes. So, who are the target audience for wall mounted battle axes? I look into it, but decide eewww I don’t like those people, I ain’t gonna make it for them, I’ll just make something me and my close circle of friends will like, so I’m gonna make it bright pink, and covered in ponies. Now I’m only appealing to a tiny tiny slither of my potential audience, so I should probably be frugal and not spend much building these things. But instead I decide to hire Tesla to build me a gigafactory with the best robots for mass manufacture and spend hundreds of millions making pink pony covered battle axes.
Finally I’m finished. All my friends say how amazing I am, and how great they look.
I put them up for sale, and buy one myself to go over my mantle piece. A few friends buy them too, they don’t actually like it, they just did it to support me and it now lives in their attic. I have friends in media so they post a lot about it and say how wonderful and brave the designs are.
But nobody actually into wall mounted battle axes buys them.
This is an allegory for Concord and the state of AAA in general imo. They’ve just totally forgotten the fundamentals, and are just making things for themselves and their friends that they personally like….and wasting for the most part, mountains of other people’s money.
Edit: forgot to mention that the battle axe maker deep down knew he was just being narcissistic and making something for themselves, so didn’t want to spend their own money, so they found a gullible foreign investor and convinced them that most people who own castles actually love pink and ponies.
automaton-media.com
