Corporate Vs Creativity

“The Coleconauts are after us!”

Sit down, kids, and let grandpa Tronix tell you a story. Sorry if this one gets rambly but I’m feeling in a very stream of consciousness mood today, with only minor edits.

Back in my day we had a gaming machine called the Atari 2600. Yes, that thing that’s making a comeback despite using pixels the size of snack cakes. Back in my day we sent one set of boxes against another set of boxes and we liked it that way. None of them newfangled paleegon things or voice acted cut scenes. You got maybe 8 bits, one joystick and a big red button, and you were thankful to get it! Wait…where was I? I got lost in the bit.

Atari was the king of video game consoles. Nobody was making movies tied to the Colecovision. Sure it was just the one small movie about a kid who imagined his almost absentee father was the hero of his favorite video game as he dealt with spies after his dad’s company but it’s still more than the Adam ever put out. Atari was huge. They had their own comic. They had a chance to be something.

So why is Atari now just a nostalgia brand? You can trace that back to the purchase by Warner Brothers. Now I don’t know what was going on businesswise and maybe they needed WB bucks to afford to stay afloat, but they also screwed up things on the creative side. Granted, video games were still new back then but forcing the creators to follow a more corporate structure backfired. Atari had always tried to maintain a creative atmosphere, and while you can debate the specifics of how they did that, the new structure drained them of their creativity. Activision was founded because creators didn’t like that the new Atari bosses wouldn’t let them be acknowledged for their games out of fear of one of the other consoles trying to snatch them up. Creating the third party led to trash game cash grabs but Activision was putting out stuff gamers really liked. Now Activision is falling under the sway of the corporate and fans are not happy with their content, and even less with their lawsuits and treatment of “controversial” gamers. Putting Nicki Minaj into Call Of Duty probably didn’t help.

It’s not just video games. Now we see TV, movies, and comics also being hit with this wave of corporations buying studios and publishers and making them a shallow image of their former selves, Disney being the worst of it and now has practically abandoned the reasons Walt Disney started his own company. What the heck happened? The corporate mindset, which really doesn’t work with the creative mindset.

“My analisis states you need all of these elements even if they don’t go together.”

The corporate side is, or should be, the financial side. What does this cost? Is this a project we can put that much towards? Can we get it out in time to make a decent profit? That last part is where the problems can start. They insist on a game coming out by a certain date, not realizing putting a game together takes longer than a movie, not that the movies are faring any better. “Change all the things even though you’re mostly done because we need a duck in there because ducks are oddly popular now!” ET was a terrible video game because they weren’t given enough time to even come up with a good idea, nevermind being able to make it fun or easy to play with eight directions and one button. I played it as a kid and while the anti-hype caused by modern game reviewers calling the worst game ever overshadows actually playing it, the game was confusing but not AS terrible once you started getting a handle on it. One of my old Reviewers Unknown colleagues did a good video about how it isn’t the worst thing shoved in a console. I had a flight game and submarine game for the Atari 800 by the same third party indie creator with no instructions and no way to figure out what you’re supposed to do in it. I’d rather play ET on the 2600 than try those again.

So many terrible games are the result of not having time to work on it, but it’s not the only issue. Corporations tend to live and die on marketing, and the marketing guys, while storytellers in their own right, aren’t very good at dealing with other storytellers. They like their gimmicks, and have forced shows to do a story for some theme week or other gimmick, like when Disney bought ABC’s parent company and all the TGIF sitcoms had their characters go to Disney World, even when the show was set in a place or recorded in a studio where Disneyland would be closer. In video games they look at features in successful games and insist that Parie Princess & The Magic Forest NEEDS online multiplayer maps and other features never intended to be made for the game. On the movie side this means adding things to the script even after the whole thing is finished, thus causing reshoots and costing more money, the opposite of what they’re supposed to be doing, because this other movie did it even when it doesn’t make sense in the movie they’re making.

Then you have the overuse of a popular genre. One of the reasons people claim there is superhero fatigue (which I think is BS but that’s not important now) is that so many came out so close together, and then got buried in the other problems. When Pokémon was popular everybody was scrambling to make their own Pocket Monster style game or show, or something with the “gotta catch ’em all” concept. Even Transformers did that with Armada, as much as I love the Mini-Con idea and think they didn’t do enough with it. This is certainly nothing new and led to a lot of the past genre juggernauts, like Westerns and musicals, only appearing once in a while. They’ll take an existing idea and rework it to match something popular. Battlestar Galactica and Battle Of The Planets were altered from their original idea to cash in on Star Wars as part of the action sci-fi renaissance. The “re-imagined” Galactica was part of the not-stalgia craze of reworking old concepts for cheap marketing, which is what we’re stuck in now and that’s sure to ruin nostalgia…which at this point would be a mercy killing since they couldn’t care less about that source material either. Seth Rogen wants to do a Darkwing Duck series. Need I say more?

Because they think the average viewer/player is stupid they focus on their charts and algorithms, seeking the equivalent of the “One Ring To Rule Them All”. They want as many people on board as possible and don’t see the niche as profit, or at least not enough profit. They don’t want to offend (except for folks they disagree with because there is an active activist culture within the industry) so they sanitize and try to fit as much of “what’s popular” as they can. That’s decided by social media because it’s the laziest easiest way to gauge what they think is public opinion rather than the louder voices, even when their profit margin says otherwise. Asking someone who doesn’t care about comics what should be in a comic, especially a genre they don’t care about or a group who isn’t them, will not tell you how to make a better comic, and the same holds true for other media. How do you fix Game Of Thrones? Don’t ask me. I didn’t like the parts fans love.

Additionally we have an issue of distribution. The corporate is afraid of anything new and takes a long time to adapt. They did it with home video, they did it with streaming, and they’re STILL doing it with the internet in general. You can have the most creative thing possible, but will anyone see it? The corporation likes what it can control and what it already understands and that hurts new things getting to people as well. If they can’t work it into a formula they’re already comfortable with they’ll rework it into something they do, hurting advancement even in distribution.

Now what happens when they bring that mentality to the studios they scoop up? Marvel Studios was doing better under their distribution deal with Paramount when it came to Iron Man and Captain America. The last Universal Hulk movie was considered part of the MCU even though they were a different distributor. Disney dollars did allow for a deal with Sony to get an MCU version of Spider-Man, but Sony tried to limit iconic depictions in case it failed, not realizing that it could have actually made the failure MORE likely, plus it’s not like Sony has done anything good with the Spider corner of the Marvel universe since Spider-Man 2. DC Comics and Marvel Comics are afterthoughts now by their parent companies so long as they have a basic premise to build a movie on, whether it matches the source material or not. Disney’s take on LucasFilm properties haven’t been much better, and I don’t just mean Star Wars. The streaming series sequel to Willow was not well received and I could probably find more fans of Indiana Jones And The Kingdom Of The Crystal Skull than I can the more recent Dial Of Destiny. The MCU streaming shows are a joke compared to the old Netflix Marvel shows (not counting Iron Fist), which is funny when you see what Netflix has done with their live-action demakes of beloved anime like Death Note and Cowboy BeBop. And we talked about the state of the MCU yesterday. The only reason One-Piece is doing well is because the creator is getting on their case hard.

“Why does Solitaire have a multiplayer versus mode?”

Video games have been suffering the worst of that. Activision, created to do an end run around the system and essentially created the third party game company, has become more corporate in it’s operations. Electronic Arts, or EA, has the same problem, as does Microsoft. Every time they buy a new company it’s a waiting game to see how long it takes before one of the popular franchises they bought the company for will be reworked by the previously listed factors into a shadow of the game it was. If they don’t shut down a newly acquired studio they’re now forced to play by other rules and they aren’t rules that benefit creativity. Time crunches, unnecessary modes of play, sometimes being made into a whole other game type (a real time strategy franchise being forced to make a first person shooter for example), changes to make this group happy or not offend that group or because the charts say it’s currently popular (though it might not be by the time the game is done), and with a less than friendly budget are all issues that come up. Companies that used to get along great with fans no longer do because the corporate mentality has supplanted the creative one because none of these CEOs and CFOs ever try to find out what makes creative media different from other products they were taught in college to push. They aren’t very creative, the marketing guys are more interested in selling the product than giving a good experience, the creators are seriously limited, and all of them look down on the very people they’re trying to get to part with their money. It’s rather asinine.

And it’s getting harder to become an indie creator in the same way that it’s becoming tougher to run a small business. The bigger companies remember they started out as smaller companies, just forgetting WHY they were able to grow, and see them as potential rivals they need to stop now. Pardon my moment of political commentary but why do you think it isn’t the bigger companies complaining about new laws supposedly protecting workers? Because it isn’t the big business that will be hurt by them as they’ll find a loophole or something while the smaller business is hurt further by it and goes out of business, thus eliminating a potential rival. The current attacks on certain indie comic creators are mainly political but they also don’t like the idea that some upstart comic creator is doing well enough to become a potential threat. If not for indie comics we wouldn’t have Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, and Image started as creators wanting to do their own thing. So they know if someone who has a better grasp on new technologies and distribution methods prove it can be done without their control they want it shut down. See also most of what happens to YouTube that isn’t itself caused by the corporate mentality of Google and parent company Alphabet Inc. Once they bought YouTube a lot of shenanigans started that hurt the creators trying to use the platform whether as an income source or to, as the tagline used to push, broadcast themselves.

Music has also suffered from sameness to the point that there are videos proving it scientifically. New and experimental creators are turning to YouTube and Soundcloud to find an audience.

This isn’t some anti-corporate rant. I’m pro-capitalism so long as morality isn’t tossed away. (Yes, you can have both.) When it comes to creative pursuits, especially artistic ones, it’s clear that nobody in the corporate world knows what they’re doing. That’s why the easiest path is taken at every opportunity whether it’s the right one or not. The charts are not a good metric for creativity. The marketing guy just wants your butt in the seat even if they end up ruining the actual watching or play experience. The publishers want it out as soon as possible but want it to be done their way as if they know more than the writers and directors. And none of them care about the audience as they chase everybody by making the one ultimate product that will make them the richest in the game. The corporate world needs to handle the money and remind the creators there is only so much available. They need to have the guts to let them create and stop fighting the smaller creators , and the smaller creators have to either avoid assimilation or losing their way as they get bigger. The corporate attitude should benefit the creation, not make it harder to be creative. Until they understand the very business they’re in, it’s only go to get worse, more stale, and more sterile rather than create something good again.