@trilogy: That makes Phil Fish look lucid. Good fucking riddance.

This is what I'm trying to tell you. These men in suits who have graphs and numbers don't know what they're talking about. I worked in "brand management" for a publication. this meant I had to talk to advertisers and convince them that they should associate with out publication. One car company really wanted all of it's advertisements to target.. ugh... "entreperenials"... like a rich millennial, I guess. So they wanted ads for their large shitty SUV to be associated with things like brunch. The idea being if we had an article where to get the best brunch and some rich young person sees their advertisement would thus want to buy an SUV to go get brunch. That makes no sense but people are convinced that's how things work.

These are the same people who spent millions of dollars trying to find the best colours for the Doritos logo.

Look up some of the Sony leaked emails where execs talked about how no one wants to see a black action hero or see a story about a married couple flirting with each other. None of this is based on anything but "conventional wisdom." And conventional wisdom quickly goes down the toilet once something is a success that shouldn't be.

So why did Bioshock Infinite sell less? I have no idea and I bet neither does anyone else. But it seems that showing generic brooding action guy, in a sea of cover art with similar looking brooding action guys, didn't really make the significant impact Ken Levine was convinced it made.

Public funding is essentially a mechanism to distribute money from businesses/groups/people with the worst lobbyists to businesses/groups/people with the best lobbyists.

Video games are highly visible and even have their own enthusiast press. So they always seem to do well when it comes to government subsidies.

But basically the money is coming from less-favored businesses, including almost everyone who creates non-entertainment software. I really don't see the point of favoring games companies over, say, spreadsheet companies.

I've got a feeling that we're not going to get government funding for video game studios for a long time after 38 Studios poisoned the well and left the state of Rhode Island on the hook for millions of dollars.

Christ, these guys had more luck than most people who dream of making games will ever come close to having. They even had a successful Kickstarter to keep going when the government decided to pull out! Everything they've said and posted on Twitter since the studio's closure just reads like a couple hooligans up their own asses about their education level, both of whom severely lack any level of introspection or self-analysis.

There's a legit debate to be had about who gets, how groups distribute, or if there even should be government funding for the arts. But as far as I can tell, these guys only get mentioned because they made a few critical darlings. There's nothing exceptional about them other than their catastrophic meltdown, and they shouldn't be used as evidence for an argument suggesting there's a decline in government fund supply for the arts.

@rockhardmeattitanlord: There are plenty of commercially successful artists. Helping them get better is neither doomed to failure nor inherently financially irresponsible.

Winner.

Bravo! Very well written article Austin, and addresses some sorely ignored aspects of the video game industry that directly affect video game lovers around the world.

I'm facing a similar type of lack of mutual understanding and respect problem working in the music industry. Let's bridge the gap as best we can :)