> How does that differ from movie and music press? It's pretty much the same situation - you have big blockbusters which are polished and ground down to be as widely appealing and as mildly offensive as possible. These blockbusters then get ridicoulous marketing spending which shoves them down the throat of as many average people as possible.
Limited personal experience, but: the music journalists I've known really loved music. Many were in their own bands. There was a certain amount of indie one-upmanship, there was also a deep appreciation and respect for the medium in general, even when faced with genres they didn't get on with. They also spent a hell of a lot of time on music, even when not on the clock. I don't get that sense from video game journalism at all; if anything several of them seem to wish they were movie critics. The depth of detailed technical knowledge just isn't there - music and film journalists throw light both on the techniques used to make music and film, and the process of production itself, in a way that video game reporting doesn't.
How does that differ from movie and music press? It's pretty much the same situation - you have big blockbusters which are polished and ground down to be as widely appealing and as mildly offensive as possible. These blockbusters then get ridicoulous marketing spending which shoves them down the throat of as many average people as possible.
But studios like Telltale have no hope of even coming close to competing for that attention - they have nowhere near the marketing budget of Ubisoft, EA, Activision. They need to appeal to smaller niche audiences to not get just eaten by large publishers doing the same thing better and with more pomp.