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A comment on The writer who made me love comics taught me to hate them (2016). Parent comment

Re:The writer who made me love comics taught me to hate them... by pessimizer on Monday January 17, 2022 @03:34PM (#29971410)
The problem is how expensive these products (especially the specific cases of books, AAA games and movies) are to produce, and monopolies on distribution. The messages that they communicate are the closest thing to actual direct mega-corporate speech that exists. The institutions who produce these things are the bad guys. Their primary messages are optimistic happy consumption to defy death, or cynical world-weathered resignation to unavoidable consumption.

All of this speech comes from like 10 world-spanning companies and everyone is on everyone else's board.

Books and indie games usually aren't much different, because they are imitative of the dominant content owners. A world of fanfic. And of course, in the case of books, the world has about 4 publishers that sell 80% of them.

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Re:The writer who made me love comics taught me to hate them... by philipkglass on Monday January 17, 2022 @05:07PM (#29972221)
The problem is how expensive these products (especially the specific cases of books, AAA games and movies) are to produce, and monopolies on distribution.

Books aren't expensive to publish like theatrically released movies and AAA games. According to the 2019 Publishers Weekly ranking of global publishers, Penguin Random House issues 15,000 titles a year with revenues of 3434 million Euros (2018). That puts cost-per-title well under $0.25 million whereas AAA games start at tens of millions per title. I don't know if ROI is similar but initial cost to bring a new work to market is much lower for a book.

https://www.publishersweekly.com/binary-data/Global502019.pd...

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Re:The writer who made me love comics taught me to hate them... by dsr_ on Monday January 17, 2022 @05:29PM (#29972415)
Not to mention that, despite the terrible ways they manipulate it, Amazon's self-publishing programs are genuinely cheap and reasonably easy to use. And if you don't need to make money from your art, you can host it at any number of sites for free or your own for more time than money.
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