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I’ve sometimes heard that the left wing takeover of corporate America is a hollow one - they don’t REALLY cars about minorities, just look at umm their Middle East twitter accounts! They care about $$$ and aren’t true believers
I found an interesting counter point recently.
https://upstreamreviews.substack.com/p/high-republic-low-sales
This is what a corporation that has no idea what their audience is about, but does in fact know clearly what it’s ideology is about.
I’ll summarize the link but you really should read it for yourself, it’s astounding how bad Disney gets the Star Wars franchise: for instance, the books need to be (in addition to all the old touchstones of diversity etc) ANTI WAR. And then there’s the characters, who are somehow all androgynous.
The sales figures reflect an enormous lack of interest of enthusiasm. But it doesn’t matter for Disney - they get to spread the Good Word of gender ideology and anti fascism/anti traditionalism.
You know, the idiocy of Disney's "The Force is Female" push doesn't take a genius to figure out. I was talking to my wife about it, and I just asked:
"When we were kids, how many little boys did you know who liked Star Wars?"
"Tons."
"Did you know a single girl who liked Star Wars?"
"No."
It's the absolute height of fart huffing retardation to literally jettison your entire built in audience for an IP, and try to replace it with an audience that never cared about it one iota. Like I get the typical neoliberal line of "They're just trying to expand their market". Except now the experiment has been run, and they've wound up appealing to less people than before.
It was literally inconceivable to me, if you'd asked me 10 years ago, that I could stop loving Star Wars. I dragged my poor not-yet-wife to a midnight screen of The Force Awakens, well past her bed time. And she went with me because she knew how much it meant to me, god bless her.
And yet here I am. I fucking hate Star Wars now.
The ways they've seemingly purposely spit in the eye of every fan of the original Trilogy and EU is insane. Between turning all the legacy characters into beaten down pieces of shit, killing them off ignominiously and denying fans the reunions they desperately wanted. Putting aside all the glaring technical issues with the craftsmanship of the films, like poor writing, poor characterization, completely nonsensical plot contortions, etc. I forget where I heard it, but someone joked that all new Lucas Films are made for an audience of one, Kathleen Kennedy. Every film has to be about a stand in for how Kathleen Kennedy views herself, replacing a character that is a stand in for how Kathleen Kennedy views George Lucas. Once I heard that, suddenly it all made sense.
God I hope Disney sells it all back to Lucas at half the price.
I know people who used to work in video game marketing. The general idea was the fans will buy anything with halo (or whatever) on the box; So marketing to girls will only have upside.
Why try to make the star wars fan happy? They're going to wait in line to buy a ticket/product anyway. Trying to appeal to a new demographic can only increase sales.
What's funny to me is that; When the sales didn't increase, they blamed the fans.
Object lesson: blizzard entertainment.
“You guys have phones, right?”
... context?
A couple years back, Blizzard teased that they'd be announcing a new diablo game at Blizzcon, something like a decade after the release of diablo III. Fans were extremely excited, slavering for a new entry in the series. So they get up on stage and announce a new diablo game... for phones. It's a mobile game. One of the fans comes up to the microphone and asks if this is actually an april fool's joke or something. The Devs start laughing sorta nervously, and one of them asks the audience "you guys have phones, right?", as though that's the problem people are having.
It did not go over well.
Has Diablo Immortal ended as profitable product?
They made an absolutely absurd amount of money off it, billions at least. I'd say they also "damaged their brand", but people are still buying diablo IV, and honestly Immortal probably will make more money in any case. If your question is "was this a bad decision, in a strictly monetary sense", almost certainly not.
"Billions" seemed implausible to me, but looking it up, I see numbers from 300M to 750M. Absolutely insane.
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