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Washington Redskins to change their name

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  • The Washington Geno’s.
  • Missed It said:
    Missed It said:
    limeygent said:
    Snyder is a crap owner and Fedex Field is a crap stadium. When I first came to the Washington area there was a ten-year wait for season tickets, and the only way to go to a game was to get lucky by being offered some spares.  Leaving aside the issues of "The Offended Industry" that we have over here, the NFL is becoming more and more irrelevant and are desperate to keep "bums in seats", as half-empty stadiums don't make good television, and as with the Prem, that is what's most important.
    https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/dc-sports-bog/wp/2015/12/18/how-u-s-marshals-used-redskins-tickets-to-bust-fugitives-in-1985-sting/

    The NFL is heading down the "Get woke, go broke" route.  There are tons of blue collar football fans who are sick of the disrespect to the national anthem shown by millionaire players.  People see it for the tiresome virtue signalling it really is.  Nobody ever acts to make real changes that address disparities and inequality.  The NFL still has a pitifully small number of black head coaches, less than 10% when 70% of players are black.
    I'm interested in this phrase. Are there any examples of this actually being a thing other than just wishful hatred from a vocal minority? I've seen it in a few places but I've never been able to find an example of a company actually going out of business because they took into account people's feelings. I remember I read it a lot when The Last of Us 2 was about to come out because that game had a gay female protagonist and a trans character, but it's also broken various sales records in its first few weeks of being released. The Redskins has been forced to 'go woke' to avoid going broke, as they would have lost their biggest sponsor if they hadn't. Has anyone actually gone broke by going woke?

    When it comes to The Last of Us 2 you neglect to mention that it only broke previous sales records by a very small margin and then second week sales dropped by 85%.  Games stores were refusing to take returns and in the Far East they were reports of stores throwing the game in with 'buy two games and get the Last of Us 2 free' deals just to shift the stock that nobody wanted.  I think the major issue with LoU2 was not making the characters gay, Ellie was shown to be gay in the extra DLC of the original Last of Us and nobody minded.  Ellie was a popular, much loved character.  The backlash is largely against the treatment of another much loved character Joel, and the fact that you are forced to play as the character that smashed him to death with a golf club just a couple of hours in to the game.  People may moan about trans characters being forced in to the game but what really ruined it is the horrible writing, unsympathetic characters and the relentless slog of murdering that players have to endure. 

    Are business actually taking other people's feelings in to account?  Woke marketing was supposed to make them money, or at least stop them being boycotted by screeching twitter activists.  Gillette thought it would be a good idea to lecture men on how they should be better in a 90 second ad that smashed a whole in their brand index, turnover and share price.  The famous 'gender pay gap cafe' in Australia thought charging men 20% extra to compensate for the 'pay gap' was a good idea and then went out of business.  What sort of business model is primarily concerned with virtue signalling and alienates and antagonizes 50% of potential customers from the outset?  Entertainment is infested with it. Marvel comics are absolutely unreadable these days thanks to the idiot social activist writers they employ these days and I wouldn't be surprised if they were shut down within the next 18 months.   

    I'm waffling on but the NFL is treading a dodgy path.  Football is still a blue collar sport with a lot of blue collar fans.  There's a backlash coming against the wave of woke social justice and cancel culture that America is facing.  

    Personally, I think the Redskins nickname is not clever and it should have been dealt with calmly and sensibly years ago. 
       
      
    OK, thank you for responding. I've looked at the Gillette thing and I think there's a difference between this idea of 'go woke, go broke' and attempting to do something that could be seen as virtue signalling and getting it wrong. Gillette completely missed the mark; they tried to make a point, got it completely wrong and ended up coming across as preachy and insulting. That I get. I don't think that it fits the narrative of go woke, go broke though because they basically just produced some shit advertising that talked down to its audience. That's an example of terrible marketing more than it's an example of the idea that any attempt to create something socially progressive will kill a company, which I believe is the intention of the phrase. Their brand is still worth $16.6 billion so I guess they've survived it ok. The Australian cafe also got it badly, badly wrong. They announced their silly gender pay gap policy in 2017, and then closed in April 2019. Given that they were a vegan cafe called Handsome Her I doubt that their primary market were hugely alienated by the idea and it looks like they got more internet backlash than anything else. Certainly I wouldn't say that a cafe closing down two years after a stupid sales idea implies the wokeness completely crippled them.
    I think the thing about TLOU2 is slightly disingenuous as well. It doesn't really matter how narrowly it broke the margin by, it still broke the sales record! That's a hugely successful result for a game. I also looked at sales drops and it appears that the game TLOU2 beat for the record, Uncharted 4 saw its sales drop 78% in its second week, and it's gone on to be the second best-selling PS4 game of all time. Was that one woke? I've actually played TLOU2 and it's a very good game. I'm in two minds as to whether the people on the internet getting upset about the game are using the so called bad writing as a socially acceptable cover for their hatred or if it's just another instance, like with the caterwauling over Star Wars, of things happening with characters or plot lines that some players didn't want to happen and calling it bad writing rather than 'not what I wanted to happen'. 'Bad writing' seems to be another one of those phrases that has been completely mangled by entitlement. It's not bad writing just because it's not what you wanted to happen. Bad writing is terrible dialogue or events that don't fit in with the story's intentions and themes.
    I love TLOU. It's probably my favourite game and Joel is probably my favourite video game character. I loved playing as him, but I thought it made sense when they killed him. The second game is all about the cycle of revenge. The first game ends with Joel, a mostly unrepentant murderer, murdering a whole hospital of people who are working on a cure for an apocalyptic disease, including Abby's father. There have to be consequences for that. Abby takes revenge, Ellie seeks revenge for the revenge and the cycle goes on forever until someone breaks it. You see Joel killed in graphic detail so you feel that same level of hate Ellie does, then you play as Abby so she's humanised and you see her side of things, culminating in an ending where you've slogged through constant killing and see the characters are reduced to near-death still fighting each other. Ellie decides to let go, loses her connection to Joel through the loss of her fingers and finally moves on and leaves her guilt behind. That's not bad writing, it's a perfectly coherent story arc. People might not like it, but it works within the confines of its intentions. I don't think the game was perfect; hitting a point where you're having flashbacks within a character switch was probably a level too deep but the reactions - often people getting upset that Abby is 'too muscular for the apocalypse' or calling it the worst game ever made - are ridiculous. It's an excellent game writing and gameplay-wise. People don't have to like it, but it isn't bad. That's all besides the point though - the developers have hardly gone broke off the back of this, they've made a game that's already the 10th best-selling PS4 game of all time. That's a winner.
    I also looked at Marvel; In 2019 (there's not much data around on 2020 yet) Marvel dominated the market share for periodicals with a 44.72%-30.74% lead over DC in unit share and a 40.2% to 29.29% lead in dollar share in the direct market. Apparently the comic book publishing market is worth $1.05 billion, so I think they'll be ok. I think this is the point; you've said Marvel Comics are unreadable, but that's just you. Evidently it's still a big market and Marvel are pulling in the majority of it. So, it doesn't actually look like 'go woke, go broke' is a thing so much as wishful thinking on the part of some internet denizens who don't like the thing they engage with being changed. Interesting to know.
  • Missed It said:
    Missed It said:
    limeygent said:
    Snyder is a crap owner and Fedex Field is a crap stadium. When I first came to the Washington area there was a ten-year wait for season tickets, and the only way to go to a game was to get lucky by being offered some spares.  Leaving aside the issues of "The Offended Industry" that we have over here, the NFL is becoming more and more irrelevant and are desperate to keep "bums in seats", as half-empty stadiums don't make good television, and as with the Prem, that is what's most important.
    https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/dc-sports-bog/wp/2015/12/18/how-u-s-marshals-used-redskins-tickets-to-bust-fugitives-in-1985-sting/

    The NFL is heading down the "Get woke, go broke" route.  There are tons of blue collar football fans who are sick of the disrespect to the national anthem shown by millionaire players.  People see it for the tiresome virtue signalling it really is.  Nobody ever acts to make real changes that address disparities and inequality.  The NFL still has a pitifully small number of black head coaches, less than 10% when 70% of players are black.
    I'm interested in this phrase. Are there any examples of this actually being a thing other than just wishful hatred from a vocal minority? I've seen it in a few places but I've never been able to find an example of a company actually going out of business because they took into account people's feelings. I remember I read it a lot when The Last of Us 2 was about to come out because that game had a gay female protagonist and a trans character, but it's also broken various sales records in its first few weeks of being released. The Redskins has been forced to 'go woke' to avoid going broke, as they would have lost their biggest sponsor if they hadn't. Has anyone actually gone broke by going woke?

    When it comes to The Last of Us 2 you neglect to mention that it only broke previous sales records by a very small margin and then second week sales dropped by 85%.  Games stores were refusing to take returns and in the Far East they were reports of stores throwing the game in with 'buy two games and get the Last of Us 2 free' deals just to shift the stock that nobody wanted.  I think the major issue with LoU2 was not making the characters gay, Ellie was shown to be gay in the extra DLC of the original Last of Us and nobody minded.  Ellie was a popular, much loved character.  The backlash is largely against the treatment of another much loved character Joel, and the fact that you are forced to play as the character that smashed him to death with a golf club just a couple of hours in to the game.  People may moan about trans characters being forced in to the game but what really ruined it is the horrible writing, unsympathetic characters and the relentless slog of murdering that players have to endure. 

    Are business actually taking other people's feelings in to account?  Woke marketing was supposed to make them money, or at least stop them being boycotted by screeching twitter activists.  Gillette thought it would be a good idea to lecture men on how they should be better in a 90 second ad that smashed a whole in their brand index, turnover and share price.  The famous 'gender pay gap cafe' in Australia thought charging men 20% extra to compensate for the 'pay gap' was a good idea and then went out of business.  What sort of business model is primarily concerned with virtue signalling and alienates and antagonizes 50% of potential customers from the outset?  Entertainment is infested with it. Marvel comics are absolutely unreadable these days thanks to the idiot social activist writers they employ these days and I wouldn't be surprised if they were shut down within the next 18 months.   

    I'm waffling on but the NFL is treading a dodgy path.  Football is still a blue collar sport with a lot of blue collar fans.  There's a backlash coming against the wave of woke social justice and cancel culture that America is facing.  

    Personally, I think the Redskins nickname is not clever and it should have been dealt with calmly and sensibly years ago. 
       
      
    OK, thank you for responding. I've looked at the Gillette thing and I think there's a difference between this idea of 'go woke, go broke' and attempting to do something that could be seen as virtue signalling and getting it wrong. Gillette completely missed the mark; they tried to make a point, got it completely wrong and ended up coming across as preachy and insulting. That I get. I don't think that it fits the narrative of go woke, go broke though because they basically just produced some shit advertising that talked down to its audience. That's an example of terrible marketing more than it's an example of the idea that any attempt to create something socially progressive will kill a company, which I believe is the intention of the phrase. Their brand is still worth $16.6 billion so I guess they've survived it ok. The Australian cafe also got it badly, badly wrong. They announced their silly gender pay gap policy in 2017, and then closed in April 2019. Given that they were a vegan cafe called Handsome Her I doubt that their primary market were hugely alienated by the idea and it looks like they got more internet backlash than anything else. Certainly I wouldn't say that a cafe closing down two years after a stupid sales idea implies the wokeness completely crippled them.
    I think the thing about TLOU2 is slightly disingenuous as well. It doesn't really matter how narrowly it broke the margin by, it still broke the sales record! That's a hugely successful result for a game. I also looked at sales drops and it appears that the game TLOU2 beat for the record, Uncharted 4 saw its sales drop 78% in its second week, and it's gone on to be the second best-selling PS4 game of all time. Was that one woke? I've actually played TLOU2 and it's a very good game. I'm in two minds as to whether the people on the internet getting upset about the game are using the so called bad writing as a socially acceptable cover for their hatred or if it's just another instance, like with the caterwauling over Star Wars, of things happening with characters or plot lines that some players didn't want to happen and calling it bad writing rather than 'not what I wanted to happen'. 'Bad writing' seems to be another one of those phrases that has been completely mangled by entitlement. It's not bad writing just because it's not what you wanted to happen. Bad writing is terrible dialogue or events that don't fit in with the story's intentions and themes.
    I love TLOU. It's probably my favourite game and Joel is probably my favourite video game character. I loved playing as him, but I thought it made sense when they killed him. The second game is all about the cycle of revenge. The first game ends with Joel, a mostly unrepentant murderer, murdering a whole hospital of people who are working on a cure for an apocalyptic disease, including Abby's father. There have to be consequences for that. Abby takes revenge, Ellie seeks revenge for the revenge and the cycle goes on forever until someone breaks it. You see Joel killed in graphic detail so you feel that same level of hate Ellie does, then you play as Abby so she's humanised and you see her side of things, culminating in an ending where you've slogged through constant killing and see the characters are reduced to near-death still fighting each other. Ellie decides to let go, loses her connection to Joel through the loss of her fingers and finally moves on and leaves her guilt behind. That's not bad writing, it's a perfectly coherent story arc. People might not like it, but it works within the confines of its intentions. I don't think the game was perfect; hitting a point where you're having flashbacks within a character switch was probably a level too deep but the reactions - often people getting upset that Abby is 'too muscular for the apocalypse' or calling it the worst game ever made - are ridiculous. It's an excellent game writing and gameplay-wise. People don't have to like it, but it isn't bad. That's all besides the point though - the developers have hardly gone broke off the back of this, they've made a game that's already the 10th best-selling PS4 game of all time. That's a winner.
    I also looked at Marvel; In 2019 (there's not much data around on 2020 yet) Marvel dominated the market share for periodicals with a 44.72%-30.74% lead over DC in unit share and a 40.2% to 29.29% lead in dollar share in the direct market. Apparently the comic book publishing market is worth $1.05 billion, so I think they'll be ok. I think this is the point; you've said Marvel Comics are unreadable, but that's just you. Evidently it's still a big market and Marvel are pulling in the majority of it. So, it doesn't actually look like 'go woke, go broke' is a thing so much as wishful thinking on the part of some internet denizens who don't like the thing they engage with being changed. Interesting to know.

    Well, you were the one that brought up The Last of Us 2, if anything I was saying it wasn't doing as well as expected because it wasn't very good, not because it was woke.  You've mounted an interesting defence of the storyline, although I wouldn't agree with it.  In any case, TLOU2 is now getting it's arse kicked in the charts by Ghosts of Tsushima and can't outsell Animal Crossing which has been out for months.  

    I appreciate that you've done a bit of research on Marvel, but it's clear you don't read their comics and so have no idea how bad they've become.  I also don't think you've dug deep enough to understand the problems in the comics industry and why the big billion dollar number looks good in headlines but it hides the fact that it doesn't truly reflect sales of books to actual readers.  These numbers are sales to comic retailers, which are inflated by deliberate overshipments and variant covers, ie books that shops didn't order and multiple copies of the same book that have different covers that prey on the nerd collector instinct of comic book readers and forces retailer to order more copies in order to get the variant covers (eg 50 regular copies gets you a variant you can sell at a higher price, 100 copies gets you one more etc etc)  What is the real killer is that the sole direct distributor of comics, Diamond, does not accept returns so those books 'sold' aren't actually sold to readers, they're sold to shops who are stuck with the stock that won't sell.  If they don't sell that month, the vast majority of that stock becomes essentially worthless.  The only money in back issues is for comics from back in the day when they were actually good and still have some demand from collectors.  Predatory publishing practices and books nobody wants to read is what hides behind that billion dollar number.  If the industry was so healthy, why are comic book stores dropping like flies?  I think Orbital in London is the latest its close its doors.

    Marvel are owned by Disney, who are looking at severe financial difficulties following the shutdown of everything that they rely on to make money, theme parks and cinemas.  Disney is only really interested in the intellectual property of Marvel.  The movies, lunchboxes and action figures make far more money for them than the comics by a huge margin and the Marvel superhero movies have proved to to be no help at all to the comic book sales.  I still believe that Disney will close down Marvel as a publishing operation and simply license out the production of comic books to third party companies.  This is the Disney publishing model, they've been producing Disney comics for donkey's years this way.  They do the same with their games, licensing properties to outside developers.  Disney closed Lucasarts, a games studio with a huge reputation and spectacular catalogue of games, because it didn't suit their business model.  If Lucasarts weren't safe, why should Marvel be?

    As far as I can see, with Disney bleeding money everywhere, cutting Marvel as a publishing company is a quick and simple overhead saving (and gets rid of all the poisonous twitter drama that Marvel employees and creators seem unable to stop themselves from instigating).  They just pass the whole collection of Marvel intellectual properties to their licensing department who let somebody else take on the risk and expense and Disney just count the money generated by license agreements and royalties.  

    I admit I was waffling in my previous post and plucking examples off the top of my head, but when I thought about it, the most glaring example that I'd overlooked was Doctor Who, which has gone from average 8 million average audiences and being one of the BBC's biggest cash cows to an absolute disaster with ratings slashed in half.  The latest series has been a total road accident of terrible writing and woke virtual signalling, showing total disrespect of the show's history and longstanding fans and has seen a resultant collapse in ratings and an associated collapse in merchandise sales and licensing revenue.  If the show was on a commercial network it would have been cancelled but because it's so on the nose in peddling the BBC's agenda they'll keep flogging the dead horse and telling the fans what terrible people they are for not liking it. 

  • Inspired choice

    "Washington Football Team"
    Some on Twitter have suggested the interim name should be Washington Team Football, as shouting out WTF is something their fans can get behind.
  • Missed It said:
    Missed It said:
    Missed It said:
    limeygent said:
    Snyder is a crap owner and Fedex Field is a crap stadium. When I first came to the Washington area there was a ten-year wait for season tickets, and the only way to go to a game was to get lucky by being offered some spares.  Leaving aside the issues of "The Offended Industry" that we have over here, the NFL is becoming more and more irrelevant and are desperate to keep "bums in seats", as half-empty stadiums don't make good television, and as with the Prem, that is what's most important.
    https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/dc-sports-bog/wp/2015/12/18/how-u-s-marshals-used-redskins-tickets-to-bust-fugitives-in-1985-sting/

    The NFL is heading down the "Get woke, go broke" route.  There are tons of blue collar football fans who are sick of the disrespect to the national anthem shown by millionaire players.  People see it for the tiresome virtue signalling it really is.  Nobody ever acts to make real changes that address disparities and inequality.  The NFL still has a pitifully small number of black head coaches, less than 10% when 70% of players are black.
    I'm interested in this phrase. Are there any examples of this actually being a thing other than just wishful hatred from a vocal minority? I've seen it in a few places but I've never been able to find an example of a company actually going out of business because they took into account people's feelings. I remember I read it a lot when The Last of Us 2 was about to come out because that game had a gay female protagonist and a trans character, but it's also broken various sales records in its first few weeks of being released. The Redskins has been forced to 'go woke' to avoid going broke, as they would have lost their biggest sponsor if they hadn't. Has anyone actually gone broke by going woke?

    When it comes to The Last of Us 2 you neglect to mention that it only broke previous sales records by a very small margin and then second week sales dropped by 85%.  Games stores were refusing to take returns and in the Far East they were reports of stores throwing the game in with 'buy two games and get the Last of Us 2 free' deals just to shift the stock that nobody wanted.  I think the major issue with LoU2 was not making the characters gay, Ellie was shown to be gay in the extra DLC of the original Last of Us and nobody minded.  Ellie was a popular, much loved character.  The backlash is largely against the treatment of another much loved character Joel, and the fact that you are forced to play as the character that smashed him to death with a golf club just a couple of hours in to the game.  People may moan about trans characters being forced in to the game but what really ruined it is the horrible writing, unsympathetic characters and the relentless slog of murdering that players have to endure. 

    Are business actually taking other people's feelings in to account?  Woke marketing was supposed to make them money, or at least stop them being boycotted by screeching twitter activists.  Gillette thought it would be a good idea to lecture men on how they should be better in a 90 second ad that smashed a whole in their brand index, turnover and share price.  The famous 'gender pay gap cafe' in Australia thought charging men 20% extra to compensate for the 'pay gap' was a good idea and then went out of business.  What sort of business model is primarily concerned with virtue signalling and alienates and antagonizes 50% of potential customers from the outset?  Entertainment is infested with it. Marvel comics are absolutely unreadable these days thanks to the idiot social activist writers they employ these days and I wouldn't be surprised if they were shut down within the next 18 months.   

    I'm waffling on but the NFL is treading a dodgy path.  Football is still a blue collar sport with a lot of blue collar fans.  There's a backlash coming against the wave of woke social justice and cancel culture that America is facing.  

    Personally, I think the Redskins nickname is not clever and it should have been dealt with calmly and sensibly years ago. 
       
      
    OK, thank you for responding. I've looked at the Gillette thing and I think there's a difference between this idea of 'go woke, go broke' and attempting to do something that could be seen as virtue signalling and getting it wrong. Gillette completely missed the mark; they tried to make a point, got it completely wrong and ended up coming across as preachy and insulting. That I get. I don't think that it fits the narrative of go woke, go broke though because they basically just produced some shit advertising that talked down to its audience. That's an example of terrible marketing more than it's an example of the idea that any attempt to create something socially progressive will kill a company, which I believe is the intention of the phrase. Their brand is still worth $16.6 billion so I guess they've survived it ok. The Australian cafe also got it badly, badly wrong. They announced their silly gender pay gap policy in 2017, and then closed in April 2019. Given that they were a vegan cafe called Handsome Her I doubt that their primary market were hugely alienated by the idea and it looks like they got more internet backlash than anything else. Certainly I wouldn't say that a cafe closing down two years after a stupid sales idea implies the wokeness completely crippled them.
    I think the thing about TLOU2 is slightly disingenuous as well. It doesn't really matter how narrowly it broke the margin by, it still broke the sales record! That's a hugely successful result for a game. I also looked at sales drops and it appears that the game TLOU2 beat for the record, Uncharted 4 saw its sales drop 78% in its second week, and it's gone on to be the second best-selling PS4 game of all time. Was that one woke? I've actually played TLOU2 and it's a very good game. I'm in two minds as to whether the people on the internet getting upset about the game are using the so called bad writing as a socially acceptable cover for their hatred or if it's just another instance, like with the caterwauling over Star Wars, of things happening with characters or plot lines that some players didn't want to happen and calling it bad writing rather than 'not what I wanted to happen'. 'Bad writing' seems to be another one of those phrases that has been completely mangled by entitlement. It's not bad writing just because it's not what you wanted to happen. Bad writing is terrible dialogue or events that don't fit in with the story's intentions and themes.
    I love TLOU. It's probably my favourite game and Joel is probably my favourite video game character. I loved playing as him, but I thought it made sense when they killed him. The second game is all about the cycle of revenge. The first game ends with Joel, a mostly unrepentant murderer, murdering a whole hospital of people who are working on a cure for an apocalyptic disease, including Abby's father. There have to be consequences for that. Abby takes revenge, Ellie seeks revenge for the revenge and the cycle goes on forever until someone breaks it. You see Joel killed in graphic detail so you feel that same level of hate Ellie does, then you play as Abby so she's humanised and you see her side of things, culminating in an ending where you've slogged through constant killing and see the characters are reduced to near-death still fighting each other. Ellie decides to let go, loses her connection to Joel through the loss of her fingers and finally moves on and leaves her guilt behind. That's not bad writing, it's a perfectly coherent story arc. People might not like it, but it works within the confines of its intentions. I don't think the game was perfect; hitting a point where you're having flashbacks within a character switch was probably a level too deep but the reactions - often people getting upset that Abby is 'too muscular for the apocalypse' or calling it the worst game ever made - are ridiculous. It's an excellent game writing and gameplay-wise. People don't have to like it, but it isn't bad. That's all besides the point though - the developers have hardly gone broke off the back of this, they've made a game that's already the 10th best-selling PS4 game of all time. That's a winner.
    I also looked at Marvel; In 2019 (there's not much data around on 2020 yet) Marvel dominated the market share for periodicals with a 44.72%-30.74% lead over DC in unit share and a 40.2% to 29.29% lead in dollar share in the direct market. Apparently the comic book publishing market is worth $1.05 billion, so I think they'll be ok. I think this is the point; you've said Marvel Comics are unreadable, but that's just you. Evidently it's still a big market and Marvel are pulling in the majority of it. So, it doesn't actually look like 'go woke, go broke' is a thing so much as wishful thinking on the part of some internet denizens who don't like the thing they engage with being changed. Interesting to know.

    Well, you were the one that brought up The Last of Us 2, if anything I was saying it wasn't doing as well as expected because it wasn't very good, not because it was woke.  You've mounted an interesting defence of the storyline, although I wouldn't agree with it.  In any case, TLOU2 is now getting it's arse kicked in the charts by Ghosts of Tsushima and can't outsell Animal Crossing which has been out for months.  

    I appreciate that you've done a bit of research on Marvel, but it's clear you don't read their comics and so have no idea how bad they've become.  I also don't think you've dug deep enough to understand the problems in the comics industry and why the big billion dollar number looks good in headlines but it hides the fact that it doesn't truly reflect sales of books to actual readers.  These numbers are sales to comic retailers, which are inflated by deliberate overshipments and variant covers, ie books that shops didn't order and multiple copies of the same book that have different covers that prey on the nerd collector instinct of comic book readers and forces retailer to order more copies in order to get the variant covers (eg 50 regular copies gets you a variant you can sell at a higher price, 100 copies gets you one more etc etc)  What is the real killer is that the sole direct distributor of comics, Diamond, does not accept returns so those books 'sold' aren't actually sold to readers, they're sold to shops who are stuck with the stock that won't sell.  If they don't sell that month, the vast majority of that stock becomes essentially worthless.  The only money in back issues is for comics from back in the day when they were actually good and still have some demand from collectors.  Predatory publishing practices and books nobody wants to read is what hides behind that billion dollar number.  If the industry was so healthy, why are comic book stores dropping like flies?  I think Orbital in London is the latest its close its doors.

    Marvel are owned by Disney, who are looking at severe financial difficulties following the shutdown of everything that they rely on to make money, theme parks and cinemas.  Disney is only really interested in the intellectual property of Marvel.  The movies, lunchboxes and action figures make far more money for them than the comics by a huge margin and the Marvel superhero movies have proved to to be no help at all to the comic book sales.  I still believe that Disney will close down Marvel as a publishing operation and simply license out the production of comic books to third party companies.  This is the Disney publishing model, they've been producing Disney comics for donkey's years this way.  They do the same with their games, licensing properties to outside developers.  Disney closed Lucasarts, a games studio with a huge reputation and spectacular catalogue of games, because it didn't suit their business model.  If Lucasarts weren't safe, why should Marvel be?

    As far as I can see, with Disney bleeding money everywhere, cutting Marvel as a publishing company is a quick and simple overhead saving (and gets rid of all the poisonous twitter drama that Marvel employees and creators seem unable to stop themselves from instigating).  They just pass the whole collection of Marvel intellectual properties to their licensing department who let somebody else take on the risk and expense and Disney just count the money generated by license agreements and royalties.  

    I admit I was waffling in my previous post and plucking examples off the top of my head, but when I thought about it, the most glaring example that I'd overlooked was Doctor Who, which has gone from average 8 million average audiences and being one of the BBC's biggest cash cows to an absolute disaster with ratings slashed in half.  The latest series has been a total road accident of terrible writing and woke virtual signalling, showing total disrespect of the show's history and longstanding fans and has seen a resultant collapse in ratings and an associated collapse in merchandise sales and licensing revenue.  If the show was on a commercial network it would have been cancelled but because it's so on the nose in peddling the BBC's agenda they'll keep flogging the dead horse and telling the fans what terrible people they are for not liking it. 

    Let's not kid ourselves here: TLOU2 is a) very good and has been b) very, very successful. Again, it's set a record for first week sales. It's not actually getting its arse kicked by Ghost of Tsushima. That game currently has 2.4 million sales, which is excellent. TLOU2 had 4 million in its first week. If we're going to compare, we should compare equivalents. Even if Tsushima overtakes TLOU2, it's still a ridiculously successful release. Animal Crossing has done brilliantly, which is great, but it came out at the perfect time and is an IP that has been around since 2001 so I'm not shocked at its success. Doesn't make TLOU2 unsuccessful either.
    Regarding Marvel, I have a Marvel Unlimited subscription, so I'd say I have a fair idea of what's currently going on with the comics. I'm probably contributing to the decline of comics book sales with that but it's great value. There's been plenty of good stuff released recently, including House/Powers of X which were excellent and completely rejuvenated a whole area of Marvel comics. I think this is another instances of you taking your valid opinion on something and extrapolating it to to cover the entire industry. It also sold extremely well. There's also a lot of releases that haven't been as good recently but that's always the case with comics. For every Infinity War there's Iron Man's suit falling in love with him. It's always been a mixed bag and the development of new characters has been slow but is starting to see some success; just look at how popular Miles Morales and Kamala Khan are. Both are now going to major characters in new video games and one was the start of a movie that made $375.5m. Don't get that without establishing and developing the characters in comics first. I would be surprised if Disney cut Marvel's publishing, but then with the COVID shutdown who knows what the future will bring. Ultimately though they're not going broke anytime soon, wokeness or not.
    I've never watched Doctor Who so I can't really comment on why its ratings have dropped. Looks like it still pulls in 5-7 million viewers per episode though and still gets good reviews overall so considering it's aimed at children and families I can see why they don't want to cancel it.

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Roland Out Forever!