A Video Game Flopped Harder Than Anything At The Box Office This Year, And The Mainstream Press Barely Noticed
A Video Game Flopped Harder Than Anything At The Box Office This Year, And The Mainstream Press Barely Noticed
Sony's Concord might be the biggest entertainment failure of all time, so why wasn't it news?
Sony's Concord might be the biggest entertainment failure of all time, so why wasn't it news?
You're viewing a single thread.
This rather long article, which uses Concorde as its main hook, doesn't tell us hardly anything about how or why the game flopped. What did critics say about it? What were user reviews like? Was it buggy? Did Sony completely misjudge the market? Etc.
That's because the article is about the lack of coverage of Concord's flop and gaming in general in mainstream news not Concord.
Seems kinda disingenuous when the article discussing a lack of coverage wouldn’t actually do some coverage itself.
Articles tend to cover a single topic in order to keep the writing focused. Kotaku, the website the article is hosted on, is a video game website and blog. It has covered Concord extensively.
https://kotaku.com/search?blogId=9&q=Concord×tamp=1729444691620
Here is one article that covers it flopping a week after launch.
https://kotaku.com/concord-flop-low-player-count-steam-psn-sales-fps-ps5-1851631800
Here is another with users' reacting. edit: typo
https://kotaku.com/concord-shutdown-playstation-offline-delisted-store-1851638956
I don’t really see how mentioning at least some coverage for the sake of context would be “a different topic”.
The point of the article is that Concord's flop not getting coverage is a symptom of a larger problem. Considering it was a $400 million flop after refunds, the lack of coverage is particularly striking. But why Concord flopped isn't relevant to the meta discussion of video games not being covered by the mainstream media in general.
In general terms, the article is about story x not being covered by mainstream media outlets, not story x. The analogy that comes to mind is when someone accuses the mainstream media of not covering a topic (even if the mainstream media actually is covering it). The person making the accusation doesn't typically go into the topic they want covered, because that's not really the topic they are trying to discuss.
The article is about how mainstream media covers video games, or often doesn't. Not video games. Talking in terms of specific video games highlights the problem with examples and makes the article less general. Saying something like story x is quite useful for an internet comment, but would look weird in an internet article. edit: typo
Even in your own reply, you provide some context for what you’re discussing. For it to be lacking in the article is just lazy.
That's because we are having a meta discussion about a meta discussion. To put it another way, we are engaged in a self-referencing discussion. To talk about such a discussion in solely general terms would render the rhetoric useless to anyone outside of academics. We would have to write in completely mathematical terms.
Again, it's not laziness, but off topic. The term in essay writing is paragraph drift, but since it would be off topic for the article as a whole a more accurate term might be article drift.
A hypothetical complaint about cat memes not getting mainstream coverage is a meta discussion about coverage not cat memes.
The point about bringing up Concord's flop is that it in particular is comparable to other media that the mainstream news does report on, such as expensive movie flops, but it still isn't being covered. Why Concord flopped has nothing to do with that and that kind of context wouldn't add anything to the article's central point. The article also uses Joker 2 as an example, but doesn't go into why Joker 2 flopped for the same reason. Why Concord flopped would be as off topic as taking about Concord's game play mechanics, while possibly interesting, they aren't relevant to the discussion either. Just because Concord's flop is relevant to this discussion doesn't mean all things related to Concord are relevant.
These kind of meta discussions about media coverage are important as they are a self-examination of a critical institution. A self-referential discussion is its own kind of genre and has its own rules, or guidelines, for what it is and isn't relevant. So it's definitely important that people understand that and don't mistake this useful kind of journalism as lazy. Trying to placate this misunderstanding would render the article less rhetorically effective on delivering its central point. It's like Paul's analogy in Dune. He shouldn't have to cut his dominate hand off to please his space jihadists. That wouldn't be useful. edit: typo
Discussing the topic isn’t off-topic.
The article is not about Concord's flop. The article is about the mainstream media not covering video games.
Discussing off topic details is off topic. One example being the main example does not make everything related to that example relevant to the discussion. Video games news media outlets have been discussing Concord's flop in detail. The mainstream news media has not. It's not a valid to criticism to point out that the article didn't discuss Concord's flop in the meta discussion about video game coverage. Kotaku isn't being lazy or hypocritical. The author wrote a rhetorically effective article. Everything in the article relates back to their central point. Which again is that mainstream media doesn't take video games seriously.
It's important to drive this home. Relating back to the thesis in a persuasive essay is a core aspect of that genre.
Sony's Concord might be the biggest entertainment failure of all time, so why wasn't it news?
This is the question that the article attempts to answer. Everything in the article should relate back to a thesis that answers this question. The details of Concord's flop do not relate back to the thesis to answer this question in anyway. edit: typos
You put more detail in your extremely verbose comments than the effort put into writing this article.
It’s a lazy, ridiculous article that fails to provide context, while also hypocritically failing to meet any kind of investigative standard that they’re criticizing.
Now, you can write another 500 to 1000 words in a comment, and I’m gonna ignore it because Because nothing you could possibly say will change that. It’s lazy journalism, and that’s that.