Reasons Why Younger Gamers Don't Get Older RPGs?.

[EtcEtcEtc]

if you finish the OC and play them you might get burnt out and end up not playing modules, which would be a real shame - and the expansions are not better then the majority of fan stuff.

I ended up doing that with Goldbox, ran through every D&D one before getting Unlimited Adventures, played one FRUA module that was 100% better then all but three or four goldbox games, and immediately got burnt out because I had played like 100 hours of goldbox games, never went back to FRUA modules again. That time spent playing Secret of the Silver Blades, Dark Queen of Krynn, Savage Frontier, etc, could have been spent on much better fan stuff.

Don't make my mistake

Hmm...which module was that?
Unless you a storyfag, I don't think many FRUA modules are better than the GB games.

Realms modules - in retrospect it was like... 3-4 modules but the first three were super short. Temple of Elemental Evil was far far better than Silver Blades, DQ Of Krynn, or Savage Frontiers. Fantastic dungeon crawl, challenging combat, rest restrictions, etc - loved it.

 

[anvi]

I hope some people can see that old games were better in terms of gameplay, even if there are some bad parts like controls and UI, old graphics etc.

I am playing NWN at the moment and I love some aspects of it, but it's infuriating how fucking terrible the loot is. I really want to physically assault whoever is responsible for it, but it's partly the public's fault for not complaining about it sooner. Every 10 feet I travel a fucking barrel or chest or crate. And each has a few gold coins in. They even have a fucking chest with a trap and then needs lock picking, and inside is 3g. It's the most weird and retarded and insultingly bad thing. I hated it when the game was new but looking back it looks more odd than anything. I would love to know if they thought people would enjoy that or if it was deliberately to waste the players time and add more length to it.

I love the game besides that but it's a big problem.

Sounds like you're playing the OC. That's an OC problem, skip it, it sucks. Play the expansions, from memory they don't have that problem, or modules which are better anyways and definitely don't have that problem.

Ferret was quite a problem with the OC on NWN

CH1 was a shitshow. I am enjoying CH2 though. Gonna finish the campaign then try Swordflight.

p.s. Speedhack is amaaazing for this game.

I need to figure out how to use cheat engine for speed hacks, does it work basically like a speed up on an emulator?

I might have enjoyed the OC more if I had sped the shit out of it. Are you going to play through the expansions? Because on one hand, the expansions are significantly better, but if you finish the OC and play them you might get burnt out and end up not playing modules, which would be a real shame - and the expansions are not better then the majority of fan stuff.

I ended up doing that with Goldbox, ran through every D&D one before getting Unlimited Adventures, played one FRUA module that was 100% better then all but three or four goldbox games, and immediately got burnt out because I had played like 100 hours of goldbox games, never went back to FRUA modules again. That time spent playing Secret of the Silver Blades, Dark Queen of Krynn, Savage Frontier, etc, could have been spent on much better fan stuff.

Don't make my mistake

Yeah it speeds up the entire game, it's amazing, very easy to use too. At first I was just using it to quickly run back to town or whatever but now I leave it on most of the time. It's like playing the game on fast forward, I love it. I just turn it off for big fights.

I am gonna skip the expansions, I played both before and I'd like to see some of those good modules before I get bored.

 

[octavius]

if you finish the OC and play them you might get burnt out and end up not playing modules, which would be a real shame - and the expansions are not better then the majority of fan stuff.

I ended up doing that with Goldbox, ran through every D&D one before getting Unlimited Adventures, played one FRUA module that was 100% better then all but three or four goldbox games, and immediately got burnt out because I had played like 100 hours of goldbox games, never went back to FRUA modules again. That time spent playing Secret of the Silver Blades, Dark Queen of Krynn, Savage Frontier, etc, could have been spent on much better fan stuff.

Don't make my mistake

Hmm...which module was that?
Unless you a storyfag, I don't think many FRUA modules are better than the GB games.

Realms modules - in retrospect it was like... 3-4 modules but the first three were super short. Temple of Elemental Evil was far far better than Silver Blades, DQ Of Krynn, or Savage Frontiers. Fantastic dungeon crawl, challenging combat, rest restrictions, etc - loved it.

I played about 1/3 or half of the Realms modules, but I never got around to ToEE. The best of those I played was Keep on the Borderland, which was very good. But generally speaking I found them not very challenging combatwise.

 

[Higher Animal]

I recently encouraged someone on the techno babble wash known as twitter to play Arx Fatalis even though he was hesitant for a reason I may not understand. I simply encouraged him to do it and he ended up enjoying it for a few days rather than get caught up in the spiritual desolation of our modern age.

What I think we need to do is encourage people who are looking for something without prejudging them. My worst trait is my ability to consume any media related to the criticism of a thing rather than an experience of a thing, so guiding people away from that is good, in my estimation.

Another issue is the technical limitations of video games, and contributing to that in a positive way is important.

 

[TheDeveloperDude]

Old games has the best sound! +grafix


But the UI is horrible and terrible.
It is harder to fight the UI than the dragons.

 

[ResetRPG]

Has it ever crossed your mind that those old games could be bad in general? Original Fallout is practically a visual novel if you don't classify inventory management and that P&C combat as a gameplay.
IE games are better as games, at least there is some versatility to the combat system. But I find the combat encounter design lacking. You just fight hordes of enemies in forgettable encounters.
Can' t blame zoomers here honestly. Even if they can enjoy the writing and the worlds of the games they still need to get through the slog that the combat is. And the lack of eye candy doesn't make it any easier for new people to keep playing the games.

Meh, the Infinity Engine games still hold up fairly well in my opinion.

But I will concede that a lot of the time you end up fighting hordes of *insert mob here*

I definitely think they hold up in terms of roleplaying, exploration, and most important aspects that we judge Roleplaying games by.

 

[Basshead]

After reading much retardation concerning the venerable IE games and how modern gamers "Can't into them" it struck me that there may be a reason(s) beyond decline, lowered IQ, and general spastication.

My main conclusion is this: I doubt modern gamers have read a book in their life. I had an entire collection of books (from pocket money and jobs) when I was a teen. It developed my imagination. So when I played BG, I wasn't playing a RPG with 'barren maps and no feedback' I was playing a game with a character that represented my alter ego in the FR. And a character that I built within it. That character was built around characters I had identified with in the books I read.

Without writing pages...you'd get it if you're my generation or older. And read books as a kid. But younger gamers seem to need that...prior imaginative blueprint. Like flashing images and 1 sentence responses from social media that continuously tell them who their character is.

And without that - they think older games are boring.

Ya man I think this is part of the issue. It has compounded with the younger generation, as when I was young not only did I read and play outside and with my imagination, even when computers came around it was a skill to learn. Even games were a console you plugged in, and you only had the games you had. With smart phones none of this applies. There is unlimited access to content and games. There is no typing. They ruin the development of imagination, attention span, and obviously contribute to maladaptive behavior. My 2 step children are having significant issues socially, behaviorally and academically. They can’t play or entertain themselves, before I was in the picture they just zoned out on tablets all day. They can’t pay attention to even learn the rules of basketball. It’s not fast or attention grabbing enough. In short they are shit kids. My daughter has more imagination and a better demeanor at 18 months old than they do at 10. The step boy and girl will end up in jail and as a harlot most likely. The youths in the school and neighborhood are similar. Unfortunately it fucks up much worse than game taste.

 

[Higher Animal]

Why don’t you go be a good father and stop shitting on them here.

 

[EvilWolf]

Old games has the best sound! +grafix


But the UI is horrible and terrible.
It is harder to fight the UI than the dragons.

For me it's UI, usually lack thereof. At least that ancient game had the courtesy to present options in a navigatable menu. As much as I'm loving the game JA2 is atrocious in this department. You literally have to RTFM to be able to do basic things in the game, everything is bound to a hotkey and hardly anything is selectable in the UI.

 

[Great Deceiver]

After reading much retardation concerning the venerable IE games and how modern gamers "Can't into them" it struck me that there may be a reason(s) beyond decline, lowered IQ, and general spastication.

My main conclusion is this: I doubt modern gamers have read a book in their life. I had an entire collection of books (from pocket money and jobs) when I was a teen. It developed my imagination. So when I played BG, I wasn't playing a RPG with 'barren maps and no feedback' I was playing a game with a character that represented my alter ego in the FR. And a character that I built within it. That character was built around characters I had identified with in the books I read.

Without writing pages...you'd get it if you're my generation or older. And read books as a kid. But younger gamers seem to need that...prior imaginative blueprint. Like flashing images and 1 sentence responses from social media that continuously tell them who their character is.

And without that - they think older games are boring.

Ya man I think this is part of the issue. It has compounded with the younger generation, as when I was young not only did I read and play outside and with my imagination, even when computers came around it was a skill to learn. Even games were a console you plugged in, and you only had the games you had. With smart phones none of this applies. There is unlimited access to content and games. There is no typing. They ruin the development of imagination, attention span, and obviously contribute to maladaptive behavior. My 2 step children are having significant issues socially, behaviorally and academically. They can’t play or entertain themselves, before I was in the picture they just zoned out on tablets all day. They can’t pay attention to even learn the rules of basketball. It’s not fast or attention grabbing enough. In short they are shit kids. My daughter has more imagination and a better demeanor at 18 months old than they do at 10. The step boy and girl will end up in jail and as a harlot most likely. The youths in the school and neighborhood are similar. Unfortunately it fucks up much worse than game taste.

Serious question - why did you marry her?

 

[0sacred]

Why don’t you go be a good father and stop shitting on them here.

that's how you build character

 

[luj1]

ADHD

 

[MLMarkland]

Why don’t you go be a good father and stop shitting on them here.

that's how you build character

Can confirm

 

[EvilWolf]

Why don’t you go be a good father and stop shitting on them here.

If they won't pay attention to learn "ball go in hoop" what the fuck makes you think they're capable of grasping discipline?

 

[Cat Headed Eagle]

They already know the american sports system is rigged to be pay to play and decided to simply ignore it. Based.

 

[holla_cabezas_de_mierda]

That is a reasonable guess, but it doesn’t explain millenials

Millennials grew up with the various DC animated series, X-men series and the early Marvel films like the OG Spiderman. I remember many a lunchbox plastered with that shit in the 90s, I was never into it, but I had cousins and friends who were. Superheroes have never stopped being the "current thing", their popularity waxed and waned in different periods, but they've been ever-present just moving to different mediums. Between the last of the "first gen" of Marvel films and the birth of the MCU is 1 short year and the MCU was made for millennials, not zoomers. The zoomers are just picking up the torch (for about 10 years now).

This is reasonable to me.

It’s still a mystery to my generation. Comic book inspired stuff was nearly non-existent for gen x. I don’t recall it being popular in any format or with any product, during any age or decade.

We were the target audience for every new video game for decades, which might explain the total perceived lack of comic book related IP for a long time. Hollywood and game business weren’t even pretending to try and cooperate when I arrived in SoCal in the Aughts.

I am gen X, I did not really collect comics, read some that were lying around sometimes but knew many kids who did. It was quite popular in the 80's, at least where I lived in the bay area, lots of comic book shops and kids collecting comics like Spider man, Peter parket the spectacular spider man, X-men, Secret Wars, Elf Quest..those are some I remember..they would put them in little plastic bags..my brohter did it for a few years..

 

[MLMarkland]

That is a reasonable guess, but it doesn’t explain millenials

Millennials grew up with the various DC animated series, X-men series and the early Marvel films like the OG Spiderman. I remember many a lunchbox plastered with that shit in the 90s, I was never into it, but I had cousins and friends who were. Superheroes have never stopped being the "current thing", their popularity waxed and waned in different periods, but they've been ever-present just moving to different mediums. Between the last of the "first gen" of Marvel films and the birth of the MCU is 1 short year and the MCU was made for millennials, not zoomers. The zoomers are just picking up the torch (for about 10 years now).

This is reasonable to me.

It’s still a mystery to my generation. Comic book inspired stuff was nearly non-existent for gen x. I don’t recall it being popular in any format or with any product, during any age or decade.

We were the target audience for every new video game for decades, which might explain the total perceived lack of comic book related IP for a long time. Hollywood and game business weren’t even pretending to try and cooperate when I arrived in SoCal in the Aughts.

I am gen X, I did not really collect comics, read some that were lying around sometimes but knew many kids who did. It was quite popular in the 80's, at least where I lived in the bay area, lots of comic book shops and kids collecting comics like Spider man, Peter parket the spectacular spider man, X-men, Secret Wars, Elf Quest..those are some I remember..they would put them in little plastic bags..my brohter did it for a few years..

I’m not saying comics did not exist.

I’m just saying in my peer group in the US, I don’t know anyone who preferred Marvel and DC comics (specifically, not comics generally) in general in the 80s and 90s, that would account for the popularity of the Marvel movies later (Avengers etc.). DC Comics, specifically Batman, I would suggest were definitively more popular in the 80s/90s

But that didn’t make them generally popular in the US compared to Star Wars, video games, GI Joe and so on.

This sub thread started with a question of “how did Marvel movies become so prominent?”

It can’t be Lego Marvel (constructor set 2011, first video game 2013), and it can’t be popularity of Marvel comics in the 80s/90s, this was not an inherited cultural keystone for gen x — there were comic books, but even as you stated, DC and specifically Batman, was more popular than any random Marvel character.

That’s my main curiosity. I saw no evidence Marvel comics would be particularly prominent IP both personally and from a professional POV in the game business (I don’t care about Halloween but I went and got the license, if Marvel showed any obvious reason that it was or would be popular, I would have licensed at least Iron Man or something).

I’m not “above comic books as IP” — Halloween has much less credibility as an IP from an abstract business POV as “comic books generally.”

There was simply nothing from 1980 to 2010 that suggested that Marvel IP specifically, would be more or less prominent than any random thing from the last half century. The only thing I can point to is the overwhelming marketing spend (similar to the SEC football spend) — there’s no particular reason someone would inherently prefer an SEC team other than Alabama from a technical or fundamental analysis, for example.

It’s just an interesting quirk and curiosity of the past 10-15 years. Why did a group suddenly decide Avengers was the thing to go watch, regardless of quality? Well obviously Avengers has a lead against most things but it certainly isn’t in the top 50 most likely to succeed IPs in 2010, it’s not even close to being top 50.

 

[Cat Headed Eagle]

Comic books were pretty big in the 80s, in fact, the decade was marked by a boom of independent and even underground comics popping out all over the place, and mainstream stuff was still doing pretty great. Elfquest was an indie hit and its creators were 100% fanboys (and fangirl) and they retained the copyrights so they could sell it on bookstores on top of just comic stores. So yeah, it was a pretty good decade for comics. Comics only "died" in the late 90s following a long string of extremely retarded decisions taken by Marvel.

 

[Takamori]

No attention to deal with stuff that require reading or trial and error mechanics. See that what pulls most revenue in media are "shorts"(tik tok, youtube shorts).
Game market is pure degeneracy on its profile, devour content and jump to the next new stuff ASAP and given the influx of games being shat on the steam store you got an army of ADHD crackheads.

 

[Dave the Druid]

I’m not saying comics did not exist.

I’m just saying in my peer group in the US, I don’t know anyone who preferred Marvel and DC comics (specifically, not comics generally) in general in the 80s and 90s, that would account for the popularity of the Marvel movies later (Avengers etc.). DC Comics, specifically Batman, I would suggest were definitively more popular in the 80s/90s

But that didn’t make them generally popular in the US compared to Star Wars, video games, GI Joe and so on.

This sub thread started with a question of “how did Marvel movies become so prominent?”

Just to continue derailing this thread, how old were you/where roughly did you live from about 1988-1992? (You don't need to dox yourself, be as vague as you want) Because 91-92 was when the comic book industry peaked sales-wise and they'd been steadily building up to there for years before. Then from about 1993-1997 the whole bottom fell out of the industry and the entire comic book market crashed. It was pretty much already over by the mid-90s. If you were, say, 14 in 1991 then yeah, you and/or your friends might've been into comics but if you were 14 in 95/96 you wouldn't have given a shit about comics because that's how hard and how fast the industry crashed and burned.

That's actually the big reason why Marvel movies became so prominent. It's got little to do with comics being passed on by someone's elders or anything. Marvel nearly went out of business in 1997 and one of the ways they stayed afloat was they sold off the movie rights to nearly all their most popular characters to any film studio willing to pay top dollar for them. So that's how we got Blade in 1998, X-Men in 2000 and, the big one, Spider-Man in 2002. And these were all so successful (especially Spider-Man) that, in addition to sequels to all them, every single other studio immediately green-lit a film project starring whichever Marvel character they'd bought up the rights to. And that's how we got Daredevil, Ang Lee's Hulk, The Punisher, Elektra, Fantastic 4, Ghost Rider and so on.

Trouble is those movies quality-wise are... mixed at best and while Blade 2, X-Men 2 and Spider-Man 2 were fantastic and better than the originals, Blade 3, X-Men 3 and Spider-Man 3 were all kinda shit thanks to either executive meddling or Wesley Snipes loosing his fucking mind. As a result Marvel decided to start making their own films in-house, where they could have control over all of it, using whatever characters they hadn't pawned off. They launched this whole thing with Iron Man in 2008, which was a huge success - mostly a stand-alone movie with a little tease for the Avengers at the end and you probably know the rest from here: Marvel start pumping out movie after movie, fairly early on they get bought up by Disney, it all builds up to the Avengers in 2012 which was a smash hit and Marvel takes over the cinema for about a decade.

But here's the funny thing. It turned out that those movie rights that Marvel had sold off in 1997 were really specifically worded. The actual details aren't public but the simple version is the rights aren't perpetual. If you buy up the rights to, say, Spider-Man then a kind of timer begins. In somewhere between 5-7 years you have to have a Spider-Man movie filmed, edited and basically in the can ready to be released or else the rights revert back to Marvel. And once that Spider-Man movie's been released the timer resets and you have another 5-7 years to get a new Spider-Man movie written, cast, shot, edited, the special effects done and released before the rights revert back to Marvel. As Disney-Marvel became a juggernaut in the early 2010s a lot of studios realized that the rights they owned were going to go back to Marvel unless they put something into production immediately. If you loose the rights you not only loose out on a piece of that lucrative superhero IP market that's taking over cinemas, it'll also go back to a competing studio who'll probably make hundreds of millions dollars off of it. So that's why during the 2010s the market also got flooded by a shit-ton of other, lower-quality Marvel movies, like that Spider-Man reboot or that godawful Fantastic 4 reboot. It's basically just studios panicking and putting something, anything into production in order to secure the rights for another half decade.

In other words: it's mostly just studio politics and contractual disputes that caused Marvel to takeover the fucking world over the last decade and a bit. Well, that and Spider-Man 1 and 2 and a couple of other movies like Iron Man 1 were legit fun, popcorn, blockbuster movies

 

[MLMarkland]

I’m not saying comics did not exist.

I’m just saying in my peer group in the US, I don’t know anyone who preferred Marvel and DC comics (specifically, not comics generally) in general in the 80s and 90s, that would account for the popularity of the Marvel movies later (Avengers etc.). DC Comics, specifically Batman, I would suggest were definitively more popular in the 80s/90s

But that didn’t make them generally popular in the US compared to Star Wars, video games, GI Joe and so on.

This sub thread started with a question of “how did Marvel movies become so prominent?”

Just to continue derailing this thread, how old were you/where roughly did you live from about 1988-1992? (You don't need to dox yourself, be as vague as you want) Because 91-92 was when the comic book industry peaked sales-wise and they'd been steadily building up to there for years before. Then from about 1993-1997 the whole bottom fell out of the industry and the entire comic book market crashed. It was pretty much already over by the mid-90s. If you were, say, 14 in 1991 then yeah, you and/or your friends might've been into comics but if you were 14 in 95/96 you wouldn't have given a shit about comics because that's how hard and how fast the industry crashed and burned.

That's actually the big reason why Marvel movies became so prominent. It's got little to do with comics being passed on by someone's elders or anything. Marvel nearly went out of business in 1997 and one of the ways they stayed afloat was they sold off the movie rights to nearly all their most popular characters to any film studio willing to pay top dollar for them. So that's how we got Blade in 1998, X-Men in 2000 and, the big one, Spider-Man in 2002. And these were all so successful (especially Spider-Man) that, in addition to sequels to all them, every single other studio immediately green-lit a film project starring whichever Marvel character they'd bought up the rights to. And that's how we got Daredevil, Ang Lee's Hulk, The Punisher, Elektra, Fantastic 4, Ghost Rider and so on.

Trouble is those movies quality-wise are... mixed at best and while Blade 2, X-Men 2 and Spider-Man 2 were fantastic and better than the originals, Blade 3, X-Men 3 and Spider-Man 3 were all kinda shit thanks to either executive meddling or Wesley Snipes loosing his fucking mind. As a result Marvel decided to start making their own films in-house, where they could have control over all of it, using whatever characters they hadn't pawned off. They launched this whole thing with Iron Man in 2008, which was a huge success - mostly a stand-alone movie with a little tease for the Avengers at the end and you probably know the rest from here: Marvel start pumping out movie after movie, fairly early on they get bought up by Disney, it all builds up to the Avengers in 2012 which was a smash hit and Marvel takes over the cinema for about a decade.

But here's the funny thing. It turned out that those movie rights that Marvel had sold off in 1997 were really specifically worded. The actual details aren't public but the simple version is the rights aren't perpetual. If you buy up the rights to, say, Spider-Man then a kind of timer begins. In somewhere between 5-7 years you have to have a Spider-Man movie filmed, edited and basically in the can ready to be released or else the rights revert back to Marvel. And once that Spider-Man movie's been released the timer resets and you have another 5-7 years to get a new Spider-Man movie written, cast, shot, edited, the special effects done and released before the rights revert back to Marvel. As Disney-Marvel became a juggernaut in the early 2010s a lot of studios realized that the rights they owned were going to go back to Marvel unless they put something into production immediately. If you loose the rights you not only loose out on a piece of that lucrative superhero IP market that's taking over cinemas, it'll also go back to a competing studio who'll probably make hundreds of millions dollars off of it. So that's why during the 2010s the market also got flooded by a shit-ton of other, lower-quality Marvel movies, like that Spider-Man reboot or that godawful Fantastic 4 reboot. It's basically just studios panicking and putting something, anything into production in order to secure the rights for another half decade.

In other words: it's mostly just studio politics and contractual disputes that caused Marvel to takeover the fucking world over the last decade and a bit. Well, that and Spider-Man 1 and 2 and a couple of other movies like Iron Man 1 were legit fun, popcorn, blockbuster movies

‘78

I went to comic & game stores all the time. There was a ton of comic books generally — but there were dozens of universes and brands that drove the increase in gross revenue. See image below etc.

This is also a slight distortion of my original query, which was, reformulated:

“What caused the initial surge in marvel movie popularity when the relative popularity of comic books had spent 30+ years collapsing?”

I used some but not all examples to illustrate the general question (few if any successful video games etc.). To be more expansive: in the 1950s as a kid, you had a handful of basic choices for entertainment: 1) outside; 2) inside; 3) books & comic books — with TV on the rise.

1960s: 1) outside; 2) inside; 3) books & comic books; 4) TV.

1970s: 1) outside; 2) inside; 3) books & comic books; 4) TV; 5) arcades.

1980s everything from the 1970s + video games, cable TV, the early internet, VHS home movies, an explosion of IP/brands/concepts on every platform/channel.

1990s everything from the 1980s plus a bunch more stuff (internet, email, chat, pagers, cell phones, etc etc etc).

2000s everything from the 1990s plus social media, modern internet, multiplayer gaming, and on and on and on.

The point isn’t so much the gross sales, but rather the amount of time and “mindshare” that comic books occupied for gen X and millennials. Comic books may have pushed forward into peak consumer era (80s - 00s) with a proliferation of options and a larger market.

But they indisputably competed with a huge increase in options for entertainment (so many it’s impossible to list them by the 2000s). Yet despite there being a massive proliferation of heavily consumed entertainment that wasn’t marvel superheros, marvel flooded the market with movies and, while the movies are bad and barely make a profit, they also do inarguably drive most theater audience in the 2010s.

I’ll go into more detail below. I generally agree that licensing agreements combined with disney merger & consolidation can absolutely explain most of the event — but it doesn’t explain the prominence and mindshare increase (the opposite should have happened). International theater markets do help explain some of it as well (way easier to translate “super hero smash” into 30 languages than Bridge on the River Kwai and no one will get offended).

But even with the more solid explanations we are getting to — it still fails to explain a massive shift in the general direction of entertainment markets, to wit, the 2010s saw “convergence of market optionality” in movies. But throughout history, even through today with older technology such as “books and other written material” (even if digital), the general trend for all recorded history is “divergence of market optionality.”

What the hell does that mean?

If you take a snapshot every generation of the number of available options for anything in any market, and compare across recorded history, in almost every instance, the options of vertical domains (books+movies+TV —> books+movies+TV+games) and the options inside vertical domains (count the number of new “books” you have access to online today and compare it with any point in prior human history) both increase & diverge.

Except a few exceptions. Only one of which I can think of off top of head: tentpole movies for broad audience that includes both kids and teenagers and YA (ie the Star Wars, wizard of Oz, superhero movie option). The “tentpole movie” experienced dramatic convergence in the past 15 years, even while games, TV/steaming, all other entertainment options continued to diverge and multiply.

Just looked this up and it’s consistent with my experience.

While comics peaked as a format in terms of gross sales during gen x being kids/young adults, nearly zero of that is due to gen X & marvel.

Millenials, like my younger brother, a generation substantially larger than gen X are buying comics by the 1990s.

Gross sales peaked then because it’s the only time comic book business had both:

1) two generations buying comics, albeit both generations buying comics at a lower rate than their parents; and
2) there were a lot of different brands / worlds, more so than any individual comic, I do remember the insane proliferation of comic brands in the 1980s. It’s cheap to get a comic book distributed.

Marvel crashes in popularity in 90s with DC overtaking for first time, which makes millennial preference for marvel movies very… curious.

At any rate, the commercial activity lapse license explanation makes sense to me. That language is not unique to marvel deals though.

Every license I’ve ever secured and game production deal I’ve ever signed has included a commercial activity reversion clause, it’s a universal clause (different names) for licensing and production (screenplay options also usually have a similar clause, for example).

I do agree that the timing of marvel deals and disney mergers might be unique and cause both what is observable and what you are describing.

The one thing I can say definitively is there was never a fiscal year prior to there being “too many marvel movies” where “marvel characters” ever pinged on the most valuable IP spreadsheets of any exec in the game business.

 

[Dave the Druid]

Just looked this up and it’s consistent with my experience.

I think that data might be a bit misleading since it's market share, it doesn't account for market size. I'm not sure the comic book industry has ever fully recovered from the crash. Yeah it bounced back since the mid-90s but it's still a far smaller market than it used to be. Although I do love how whoever made this just went "fuck knows" during the period between 94-97. That's accurate.

While comics peaked as a format in terms of gross sales during gen x being kids/young adults, nearly zero of that is due to gen X & marvel.

Well there's 2 possible reasons for this: 1. It's possible that you and your friend group were actually productive kids who were going outside and snogging girls and shit (which considering you're on RPGCodex is fairly unlikely but it is possible) because comics were still reasonably popular with kids/teens in the early 90s. Maybe it's just that you and no one in your friend group was into them? And again it also probably depends on where you lived as well.

But the second possible reason is because you're kinda referring to the speculator market that popped up around that time. There's a lot of reasons for the crash but a big one is that at the tail end of the 80s comic books started going up for auction and were making record breaking sales of hundreds of thousands of dollars for mint/near-mint condition issues. Keep in mind that comic books were essentially worthless before then, sold for pennies and then usually thrown away by your mum or treated terribly. Turns out if you had a near-mint copy of Action Comics #1 (the first Superman comic) which you'd bought back in 1938 for 2c you might now be sitting on a fucking fortune. Investor types got wind of this and started buying up new comics on the assumption that 20-40 years from then they could be sitting on a fortune too. They usually concentrated on the stuff that was making bank at auctions so that's number #1 issues, first appearances of new characters, famous character deaths, rare or limited edition variant covers and so on. They'd often buy multiple copies of the same issue too and immediately seal it in a mylar bag to keep it in mint condition forever.

Problem is that the publishers realized that this was making them serious bank and leaned hard into it, especially Marvel, relaunching series with brand new #1 issues, introducing new characters every other month, killing well-known characters every few months, releasing issues with multiple different cover variants (like holofoil and lenticular variants) and so on and on. This briefly lead to higher sales but unfortunately at some point someone must've realized that the reason why Action Comics #1 or Detective Comics #27 (the first Batman) or Amazing Fantasy #15 (first Spider-Man) were worth so much money is that no one ever thought they were going to be worth anything so most of them got binned or lost or were eaten by the fucking dog and they were now incredibly rare. None of these new comics were rare since tons of people had bought them up and many were keeping them in mint condition. As a result you can go on Ebay right now and find copies of #1 or big issues from the 90s and get them for less than the price they were sold for back then. That's how worthless they are.

Or to put it more succinctly:

To be clear that's not the only reason for the crash. There's a ton of others including problems including issues with the direct market, the 'Distributor Wars,' a lot of other dumb shit Marvel did, fuck me I haven't even mentioned Image comics... And the final big problem which is that a lot of the stuff being written during this period was just utter trash. Like, really badly written, edgy to the point of self-parody, faux-gritty nonsense. Which might be another reason why you didn't bother with comics.

At any rate, the commercial activity lapse license explanation makes sense to me. That language is not unique to marvel deals though.

Every license I’ve ever secured and game production deal I’ve ever signed has included a commercial activity reversion clause, it’s a universal clause (different names) for licensing and production (screenplay options also usually have a similar clause, for example).

Sure, I was just trying to explain why for a few years there were multiple Marvel movies competing with each other at the box office, particularly during the early to mid 2010s. You had Amazing Spider-Man 2 (a Marvel character owned by Sony) competing against Fantastic 4 (Marvel characters owned by 20th Century Fox) competing with whatever Marvel proper was putting out at the time. You asked about the proliferation of Marvel movies - competing studios shitting out terrible superhero movies that were rushed into production in order to hold on to the rights is one of the big reasons.

EDIT: Jesus fuck, you re-edited your comment while I wrote this with fucking 563 extra goddamn words. I might reply to that later... if I'm bothered. This is just a reply to everything from that sales chart onwards since that's what you originally wrote and what I was replying to

 

[Dave the Druid]

This is also a slight distortion of my original query, which was, reformulated:

“What caused the initial surge in marvel movie popularity when the relative popularity of comic books had spent 30+ years collapsing?”

I used some but not all examples to illustrate the general question (few if any successful video games etc.). To be more expansive: in the 1950s as a kid, you had a handful of basic choices for entertainment: 1) outside; 2) inside; 3) books & comic books — with TV on the rise.

1960s: 1) outside; 2) inside; 3) books & comic books; 4) TV.

1970s: 1) outside; 2) inside; 3) books & comic books; 4) TV; 5) arcades.

1980s everything from the 1970s + video games, cable TV, the early internet, VHS home movies, an explosion of IP/brands/concepts on every platform/channel.

1990s everything from the 1980s plus a bunch more stuff (internet, email, chat, pagers, cell phones, etc etc etc).

2000s everything from the 1990s plus social media, modern internet, multiplayer gaming, and on and on and on.

The point isn’t so much the gross sales, but rather the amount of time and “mindshare” that comic books occupied for gen X and millennials. Comic books may have pushed forward into peak consumer era (80s - 00s) with a proliferation of options and a larger market.

But they indisputably competed with a huge increase in options for entertainment (so many it’s impossible to list them by the 2000s). Yet despite there being a massive proliferation of heavily consumed entertainment that wasn’t marvel superheros, marvel flooded the market with movies and, while the movies are bad and barely make a profit, they also do inarguably drive most theater audience in the 2010s.

I’ll go into more detail below. I generally agree that licensing agreements combined with disney merger & consolidation can absolutely explain most of the event — but it doesn’t explain the prominence and mindshare increase (the opposite should have happened). International theater markets do help explain some of it as well (way easier to translate “super hero smash” into 30 languages than Bridge on the River Kwai and no one will get offended).

But even with the more solid explanations we are getting to — it still fails to explain a massive shift in the general direction of entertainment markets, to wit, the 2010s saw “convergence of market optionality” in movies. But throughout history, even through today with older technology such as “books and other written material” (even if digital), the general trend for all recorded history is “divergence of market optionality.”

What the hell does that mean?

If you take a snapshot every generation of the number of available options for anything in any market, and compare across recorded history, in almost every instance, the options of vertical domains (books+movies+TV —> books+movies+TV+games) and the options inside vertical domains (count the number of new “books” you have access to online today and compare it with any point in prior human history) both increase & diverge.

Except a few exceptions. Only one of which I can think of off top of head: tentpole movies for broad audience that includes both kids and teenagers and YA (ie the Star Wars, wizard of Oz, superhero movie option). The “tentpole movie” experienced dramatic convergence in the past 15 years, even while games, TV/steaming, all other entertainment options continued to diverge and multiply.

Okay this is all the shit you added in post. I'll try to respond but I think you're asking at least 2 different questions here: 1. "What caused the initial surge in Marvel movie popularity despite comics sales being well on the decline?" To which the answer is mostly Spider-Man 1 and 2 and later Iron Man being good movies. I tried to explain that one with more detail in my first post but maybe I didn't emphasise how the success of those opened the floodgates for Marvel. The more interesting question is about "The convergence of market options in movie theaters," (just to shorten the fuck outta it) which is a trickier question to answer since there's no one reason. You already pointed to Disney's media acquisitions and mergers and international, non-English, audiences as factors but I think you've missed a really important one: the death of the DVD market.

Sometime during the early 2010s the DVD market, and really the entire home video market, completely died and got replaced by streaming services like Netflix. There's a really great interview with Matt Damon somewhere that I'll try to find but in it he talks about how he made a movie where Michael Douglas played Liberace and he played his gay lover. Cost $25 million to make, which is a hefty sum by normal standards but fuck all by Hollywood standards. And when you add up the costs of having Douglas and Damon, a director like Steven Soderbergh, a good cinematographer, a crew, lighting rigs, a catering department and so on, $25 million doesn't seem that excessive.

Problem is by that point the DVD had just died and some Hollywood insider sat Damon down and told him, "You're gonna have to put as much money into P&A (print and advertising) to promote this thing as you put into the budget, so now we're up to $50 million. And we split profits 50/50 with the distributor (the theatre owners) so now we have to make $100 million at the box office. And that's just to break even, anything above that's profit, for some comedy/drama about Liberace's twink." Before that you could afford to not make all your money in the theater, you could wait for the dvd and make money off that. And that's changed what kinds of movies get made now. Just looking into it now, the movie Damon was talking about is called Beyond the Candelabra and despite premiering at Cannes, it ended up being released as a TV movie on HBO.

Anyway, superhero movies were already hot and the MCU was already getting started before the DVD market died, so it doesn't explain the 'initial surge of popularity.' But I think it does help explain why literally every fucking film is a superhero film these days.

 

[quaesta]

After reading much retardation concerning the venerable IE games and how modern gamers "Can't into them" it struck me that there may be a reason(s) beyond decline, lowered IQ, and general spastication.

Nah mate it's not even that. It's just zoomers don't try. I speak as one. It's literally because they don't even try and have no interest in them. Be in my friend's mind for a second: you played Fallout New Vegas, Pillars of Eternity, etc etc. You see your friend play this game

You don't even know what the hell you're looking at. What is the guy at the top? What is going on? Is your friend winning or losing?
See what I mean? Zoomers think these games are too complex and not even that fun, that they wouldn't even try it out themselves. This isn't even about the map system, and how some games you gotta map it out yourself!
Even the few times they did try to play older games, it would end up like this guy https://yewtu.be/watch?v=jwr5DEh4lKQ, in which they get lost and give up after one attempt.
Games went from a one on one battle of you beating a game, to you completing a game and the developers trying to milk you for money

 

[quaesta]

i'm 20. i come from fortnite and skyrim, basically. 2/3 years ago i had no idea what a Crpg was. never heard of it before. curiosity brought me into this world, i was playing skyrim for months and i got bored. found the game too empty, it was lacking something but didn't know what exactly since it was my only reference in this genre.
so i got curious, i googled "skyrim similar games", got into oblivion, hated it, then oblivion took me to morrowind, and morrowind took me to baldur's gate etc etc. all these games looked amazing to me, but at first i couldn't get into those games because it was a chore to make them work on modern systems, besides, most of these were also lacking resolution scaling.

but at some point the attraction got too strong, and i finally got into them. now i can't stop playing crpgs.

the fact that i wasn't playing old rpgs before has nothing to do with the fact that if i read or not, and it also has nothing to do with the fact that you guys think old crpgs are too hard for casuals (they're not by the way, crpgs are not hard at all. never read more than 3 pages of a crpg manual and never had any trouble beating those games. the only challenging crpgs i've played were dungeon rats and AoD), i never played old rpgs before because i've never heard of them. as simple as that.

For me? I just started with Doom and Fallout 1 cause my computer couldn't run anything else, then I got into CRPGs from there. This was the first year I played games younger than 4 years, without going to friend's houses and using their consoles to play

5 pages of old people mumbling, caring so much about what my generation think, begging for answers, and wondering why we don't play their old games like it should be mandatory is somewhat hilarious lol.

anyway, this is pure gold:

If the younger gamer's brain has been wired to the point where we don't even read manuals anymore, then they'll never play a game like PST. And if they lack the mental capacity to play a game like PST.

hi. i'm 20. i played planescape torment when i was 19, it literally was the third crpg i've played, didn't read a single page of the manual (there's no need), and yet, i finished it without breaking a sweat. how is that possible?

see that chippy's comment? this is exactly what i was saying the other day. i have no idea where you old folks got this idea that old crpgs needed some special mental capacities or good gaming skills, you guys are so convinced old crpgs require high IQ it's unbelievable. about PST, as i was playing along, i felt like i was playing some casual jrpg i used to play when i was 9. no joke. there's nothing hard or challenging about PST, and it's not even as well written as any random novel, that game doesn't require anything special. still a good game tho.

i know it hurts, but you'll be fine i guess.

I agree. I'm a bonified fucking moron yet I can play CRPGs and read books just fine. Even my linage, had us being farmers, construction workers or shitty convince store owners. CRPGs aren't high brow, they're just good old adventure fun.