The REAL Reason Fans Are Cheering The Fall Of The Entertainment Industry

In a recently deleted tweet on XTwitter, Ubisoft’s monetization director (covered by Bounding Into Comics) showed his disgust at fans celebrating the failures of their recent Star Wars: Outlaws game, a buggy mess with an odd story and yet another unattractive female protagonist, and the fallout of Assassin’s Creed: Shadows and the recently buried Concord. His ire was pointed towards fans (frankly I could stop the sentence there) who are happy to see Ubisoft in financial trouble and possibly being forced to go private with Chinese (government) gaming group Tencent just to stay afloat. Rocksteady has had similar issues after their Suicide Squad game, which continues to disappoint with every new DLC..for the handful of people still playing it.

Then of course there are the various box office and streaming failings of the Disney acquired Marvel and Star Wars properties falling apart. I’ve heard other commentators, whose opinion I’m usually in alignment with, make the same decree of disappointment, and all of them blaming fan commentators like The Critical Drinker or Gary and the team at Nerdrotic for the failures, calling them out for celebrating the layoffs and firings in the entertainment industry at large. Those two specifically have been named due to breaking out of YouTube commentary and appearing on a couple of Fox News’ broadcasts. Put them on Gutfield! or one of the other main channel shows and I’ll be impressed.

However, the reasons given for their cheering by the critics of Drinker and Nerdrotic comes from the usual talking points of blaming racism, bigotry, and misogyny. “They’re horrible people” the naysayers insist “because they want to see us unemployed and cheer us on!” As someone who actually watches their videos and occasionally their livestreams, I can tell you the actual reason for these and other YouTube commentators laughing at the failing entertainment industries. Have a seat and let Uncle Tronix explain, because the problem isn’t on the side of the drunken Scotsman or guy who used to own a comic store and did a spell in prison. It’s the quality of what’s coming out of the entertainment industry.

We all know the economy is bad in late 2024. We see the prices for everything, we know even the corporations are hurting and looking for every possible way to save money and stay afloat. Nobody is calling for these people to die in a gutter, though the same people complaining about the cheering of their job losses are the same people who do try to get the people they don’t like fired from their jobs, even when those jobs have nothing to do with their internet life, or get their videos demonetized and deplatformed, essentially trying to get THEM to die in a gutter for daring to be negative about their work, or even not buying their work.

It should also be noted that the people most responsible for the company’s failings are usually not the ones being let go to save costs. It’s the lower tier workers, not the managers, creators, and consultants responsible for everything else I’m about to talk about. Those same managers, creators, and consultants are actually worried about their own jobs or those in the company they see as allies or are trying to be allied with on social/political matters. I’ll dive into that later, but let’s look at the other failures for those you who want to get away from the culture war for a moment.

Everything I’m about to discuss goes to the biggest problem right now: quality, or the lack thereof. The Acolyte cost over $200 million to make, but critics can’t see where the money went to by the results. Concord reviews speak to technical and story issues along the same vein as Outlaws, though the Star Wars game has bugs so laughable that you wonder why anyone is trying to play the game even with the announced patches because the studio was in too impatient to get a game out without taking time to fix the issues. The following clip has swearing, but shows highlights of the game’s bugs.

The article I linked to early, in a bit of commentary, points out that the monetization director is also at fault. Microtransactions just to get the game working with decent gear or overpriced skins with a different outfit, equally overpriced DLC that costs as much as the full game used to, plus the price of the full game to begin with has also got players upset, and that’s just for starters. Streaming services are charging more and more while pushing back against password sharing, even with family members off to college or traveling from home for business or vacation. The addition of ad-sponsored subscription tiers have failed to net these services money as those prices go up along with the ad-free ones. Only the free ad-sponsored services where subscription only offers saving features and limited DVR use (Sling Freestream gives you 10 hours between all profiles on the one account) seem to be benefitting, and even some of the channels made for those services aren’t doing as well as hoped since that bubble is fighting bursting.

The writing issues have affected every part of storytelling media, from comics, shows, movies, and games. Novels seem to be the only balanced media format out there at the moment as both the left and right seem to share in the neutral, the extremist, and all points in-between. Otherwise, political decisions affect what characters say and do. Characters not originally gay or trans are suddenly being made into those, usually converted into pure stereotypes rather than remaining the same characters they were, or replaced by female (girl and woman) or other race alternate characters because someone believes the brand or mantle will carry them through and don’t have the guts to push a new character and wait the same amount of decades for their character to be as popular as an existing one. Those same stereotypes ruin new characters even among the racial and gender groups they claim to be attempting to champion, meaning they’ll side more with Nerdrotic than Ubisoft.

Adaptation of other properties and adherence to existing lore in continuation of properties has also been a big complaint. The Rings Of Power get a lot of flack for that, attempting to be more like George R.R. Martin than J.R.R. Tolkien plus the stuff in the last paragraph. Critics also condemn it for a poor understanding of time and distance. The big joke now is their version of Galadriel, who went from wise sage to Xena: Warrior Princess (and also making very dumb mistakes), falling from a very, very high cliff only to have a sword womb be what endangers her life. Which is still one up on The Acolyte having characters survive a lightsaber to the gut. You know, the contained shaft of plasma energy that forms a deadly beam of light. Both shows have introduced powers not seen previously in the franchise because the plot requires it, as if a rewrite before recording was not allowed. Then again, Disney has no qualms about reshooting almost the whole movie, as reports from Falcon’s Captain America movie seem to indicate. There may be enough footage to make multiple movies at this point.

I know, but it’s still being talked about.

Even history is being adapted wrong. I’ve gone over how Assassin’s Creed: Shadows is getting every gamer in Japan up in arms for its insistence to focus on the one black man in feudal Japan by exaggerating his worth to the Emperor and taking time away from the actual Japanese character, a female ninja, people want to play as. Since my last article on it, due to the history of character treatment, worries are that the follow-up of the highly successful Ghost Of Tsushima game, a game from a Western developer that Japanese fans praised for historical accuracy and a great story and gameplay, is following the trend of replacing male leads with female ones due to how everyone else approaches history and hero replacement. Another streaming studio making Cleopatra black because the showrunner’s grandmother insisted she was in spite of historical records on the Egyptian historical figure ran into the same issue with Egypt. One of King Henry the 8th’s wives was race colored as was Isaac Newton (who is also gay or bi now along with the new Doctor) on Doctor Who.

Making villains into heroes or at least sympathetic, from Skeletor to Sauron, from Joker to Carmen Sandiego, isn’t helping matters. I recently saw headlines from Variety with celebrities crying about the Menendez brothers, who killed their parents and went on a spending spree before getting caught, being unjustly arrested because the brothers claim their parents abused them, as shown in an upcoming biopic on the boys. Speaking of which The Boys goes after corporations (while being produced by one) in a story based on an original comic that involved deconstructing and trashing the superhero genre without a rebuild to fix the flaws.

Finally, there are all the gimmicks. DC and Marvel are obsessed with events (we call that “eventitis” around here) and variant covers, forced pandering via stereotypes, and things like a new “Ultimate Universe” that keeps Peter and Mary Jane together (plus the first time they’ve had sons instead of daughters) or this “Absolute Universe” somehow run by Darkseid or something because he wants a world without hope. Fitting since killing hope seems to be another issue, but I’m planning a separate article on that. Video games are doing weird crossovers with each other, which usually amounts to a Transformers skin on your battleship or Sonic as a Minecraft outfit or something. Which Doctor do we send into the world of Fortnight? How about the one who always says she hates guns but will let giant spiders smother and ruin a hotel with their corpse stench.

The Joker’s proper origin, and that’s not what this panel comes from, would save on buying make-up.

With all that said, let’s clarify what the critics are actually calling for with the layoffs and why they’re celebrating them. It’s not that they want people to suffer, including people who would be more than happy to see the critics suffers and outright call for it on social media. It’s that they don’t want to see the franchises they love suffer. The elitists of the “everything for meeeeeeeeeee” crowd take beloved properties and turn them into what “they” want, thus draining what fans already enjoyed out of it, and then hypocritically tell those fans “this wasn’t made for you”. So the fans who don’t want to be labeled as “toxic” simply for wanting their properties to remain their properties are hoping these layoffs and financial flops send a message to the money guys at the corporations who don’t understand the creative properties they’re in charge of: hire people who care about putting out good stories and games. Insult the fans and of course they want you gone, or replaced by someone who doesn’t clearly look down on them and hate them. Since this mostly happens with geek properties (you don’t see Danielle Steele fans suffer this, and sports only has the culture war to deal with), it’s very high school. The jocks, elitists, and snobs continue to look down on the geeks and nerds…until they need their smartphone to operate their dishwasher. Otherwise they’ll gladly take their lunch money media for themselves if it’s popular. The cool kids are the only ones allowed to have the popular thing. The geeks should be happy with Revenge Of The Nerds or The Big Bang Theory and like it, and don’t you dare find an audience outside of your group! Isn’t that “othering” someone?

Fans would rather see Star Wars and the like go away rather than be further desecrated. If it means replacing it with something new that recaptures what they loved of the old properties (though those same money guys are too chicken to attempt a new property, which is one of the reasons the creators change existing properties) they’re okay with that. If it means giving a beloved property time to rest until creators who at least care about doing a property right come along, that’s even better. You don’t have to be a fan (I’d even point out that the wrong fan would probably make the mistake of telling a story only for fans, thus losing the casual audience), just someone who respects the work of creators that came before and make that thing the fans enjoyed while also entertaining the casual audience. Maybe some of those casuals will even become die-hard fans, which is great because fans are the ones who buy the merchandise, the actual moneymaker of a movie, show, comic, or even game. Normies aren’t buying the Wolverine popcorn bucket or the anime statuettes for their living room. Yeah, there’s the localizer issue, but that’s also an article on its own.

It’s not that the fans are happy to see these businesses fail as a “gotcha” or “I told you so”, though they will gladly point to evidence that they’re right and vindicated, that you can’t find enough cool kids for a property and keep it popular with an audience who never or no longer cares about that property you dropped a few billion buck to take over without understanding it. It’s that they want to see what they love rise from the ashes like the phoenix of myth, the bird who dies in flames and rises with a new life cycle. They want what they love to return to being what they love. They can’t do that with the current uncaring and hateful creative teams.