The Business: Corporate IP Owners Have To Admit That They Don't Own What They Think They Do

When the fans love a company's products, they invest emotionally into them, and for some this turns into a creative outlet. Like Luetin here with this new video.

But when the company doesn't reciprocate that investment by giving that audience what it invested in, you end up with clusterfucks like Blizzard has with its properties. (And for those watching, this can include Games Workshop.) Rurikhan is, like me, a disenchanted World of Warcraft player that went over to Final Fantasy XIV. (By the way, that Heavensward review is coming.) He has a tendency to ramble, so I recommend playing this at 2x Speed if you can handle it,

In short, this is the result of the original team not moving on from Making Shit Up We Thought Was Fun into properly cleaning up their creation to maintain internal consistency coupled with the half-assed and incompetent implementation of a transmedia brand strategy (that itself isn't actually any good inherently). The result is exactly what Rurikhan expresses: "This was never in the game, so it doesn't make sense."

Blizzard got away with it for a long time. That's over. Remember the posts I did on FF14 recently? What are they most known for? Their astounding use of narrative. What does FF14 do? Go out of the way to ensure that you need only play the game as intended to get the whole of the story. Haven't just finished Heavensward, I can give witness testimony that this is indeed the case, and they do an outstanding job of it; those awards are wholly deserved and the love expressed by the audience is wholly merited.

There is no transmedia strategy for FF14's narrative. You want the story? Play the game, and just play the Main Scenario Quest to its conclusion. Simple as, and we now see which strategy is the superior one, because 14 respects and appreciates its audience while WOW does not. If that disrespect goes on, but there is no clear alternative, then you begin to see disengagement and dissociation, which brings me back Luetin and his cohort of 40K lore channels.

Games Workshop is no less than Blizzard in being a company founded by a bunch of guys who thought what they made up was fun and failed to move on from that point when circumsances required it. The result is a corporate culture of obsessive-compulsive control freaks trying to use external constraits on a hobby inherently resistant to them, ala Muh Officialdum. Must use GW figures, paints, butt wipes, diapers, complaint forms, etc. or No Tournament For You.

The result is an astounding "Oh fuck off."

The increasing spread of clearly recreated official GW scuplts as 3D models, both to print at home and to use online in programs like Tabletop Simulator, as well as the presence of 30K--a game variant focused on the Horus Heresy--shows that the audience isn't going to meekly bend the knee. They'll flat-out lie about it if asked for tournament purposes too; Games Workshop earned that contempt as it gave it without mercy to its audience.

Corporate IP owners are finding out the hard way that they don't own what they think they do, and that passionate audiences don't need their permission to create and recreate and otherwise engage with it as they will- down to outright rejecting "official" offerings that don't meet audience expectations. (This, of course, is why they try to fire noncompliant audiences and choose another, which has never worked.)

Corporate shares ownership with the audience. The business relationship cannot be sustained otherwise. As much as the Death Cult thinks--not without reason--that they can funnel Pop Cultists without worry into their ranks, they are finding it more difficult than they expect; resistance is happening, and the rank-and-file Death Cultists are too stupid to figure out how to defeat it (something their masters are not incompetent at doing, but are too few to do themselves). This is why persistent fan resistence exists, and is now making itself felt in ways that the Death Cultists don't care about but nonetheless have to contend with because they have to deal with allies that do care about it: the Mammon Mob.

Yes, this is "Bad vs. Evil" conflict.

The pressure for the current converged corporate media to stop shitting the bed is mounting, but it's coming from the Mob and not the fans directly. Where the Mob has no power, the Cult cannot care less and give no fucks. In the Corporate sphere, this is not the case; the Mob has power and will use it to protect its interests when the Cult threatens them and Cult convergence inevitably does.

For my part, what I advise has not changed: disengage from converged properties and create your own or move to clean alternatives and keep them such as best you can. The Mob is not your friend just because they are not the Death Cult.