Val the Moofia Boss wrote: ↑
September 13th, 2025, 18:25
It's a similar mentality that appears with indie book publishing, called "writing to market". ... Or entertainment in general. Entertainment is a luxury good. It is an industry that only does okay when the economy is flourishing aka the 20th century. When the economy is not doing well, people tighten their belts and spend less money on entertainment. People working on movies or TV shows in the LA or Hollywood area (not just actors, but set carpenters, scriptwriters, etc) don't make enough to cover the cost of living. Blizzard employees living in vans. Anyone who wants to support a family will not do these jobs. The live music scene (guitarists playing at restaurants and bars, etc) died with the 2008 housing crash. Normal people left and the people who remain in the guitar are unwell people who pick at each other. Crabs in a bucket.
Good point.
Though it's worse than people tightening belts.
The issue is that the source of OPM changes. The culture of OPM changes.
Entertainment has the same problem that startups have. Hockey stick curve.
The issue is that talent for entertainment rarely coincides with inherited wealth. Edith Wharton was an exception in that respect.
David Gemmell was a bouncer and a journalist? Frederick Forsyth was a journalist? Broke. Robert Heinlein was broke. Stephen King was broke. Most of the famous writers in 1750-2025 were all broke before they started writing, by coincidence.
One of the reason many other markets work is simply that the people that enter them already have generational wealth (plus networking in the same market) along with the genuine skill that is needed to produce goods consumers want of that type.
So it comes down to the ease with which networking brings OPM. This changes over time based on financial factors but also based on culture.
The structure of this kind of market market and whether it thrives or not is far less up to consumers than groceries. It's mostly up to the networking and culture that pays for everything up front. If the culture that provides the up front changes, such that weekly variety declines for any reason, this kind of market rapidly withers. As the rapid innovation and variety withers, consumers stop checking regularly for updates. Meaning newcomers have even less of a chance than before of selling anything. By that point, consumers have given up foraging. They start waiting for marketing, because events are so infrequent. Big marketing becomes even more mandatory, but less justified than before, because the market has shrunk. The absence of serious marketing in general signals lower status to the market as a whole, and entire generations start mostly ignoring the market, because the overall status of an entertainment activity matters to quite a few people. They will only read if enough other people are seen reading and book ads are common, like they were before.
Tom Clancy was probably the only one who got a small first deal and then kept selling and selling until it became a huge deal. How the market is supposed to work. Doesn't need big marketing. Doesn't even need big spending from consumers. But it does require big foraging from the side of consumers. That, however, depends not on the author but on the state of the whole market, the rapidity and ease and probability with which interesting books come out to justify and reward costly search by consumers.
Much is the same for games.
Val the Moofia Boss wrote: ↑
September 15th, 2025, 01:24
The winning strategy is to do what Nihon Falcom has been doing (and to a lesser extent, Gust). Focus on one or two franchises. With a franchise, you will only need to particularly market the first game, and then fans who get through that will follow you from game to game and buy up the sequels at however much you charge for it.This is how you deal with the increasingly ridiculous cost of marketing: not trying to capture a new audience each time and casting a wide net.
That's one good strategy, though it struggles somewhat when consumers foraging too little because too few other interesting books, game, etc are coming out to reward search.
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