There is a meme I think about whenever people start defending the decisions of a large entertainment company.
A Jedi-like nerd prepares his weapons. The caption reads: “Leave the multibillion dollar company alone.”
People have become strangely protective of Sony, Microsoft, Disney, Netflix, Nintendo, Mattel, or whichever company owns/produces the thing they love. Criticism of a corporate decision gets treated as though someone has insulted an artist, a friend, or a local mom-and-popr store trying its best.
The company already has lawyers, publicists, market researchers, and a communications department. I don’t think its needs ordinary consumers to throw themselves in front of it.
But they do just that anyway.
Part of the reason is obvious. People care about games, films, toys, and television shows. These things become attached to actual parts of a life that we valye. You played a game with your father. Your mother bought you the toys. A console reminds you of being thirteen and having no real responsibilities.
That attachment is meaningful, and I’m certainly not above any of that. So, no sneering here.
Yes, a writer cares about a scene. An animator spends days getting a movement right. A designer thinks about how a space should feel. Actors, directors, programmers, composers, and artists may care deeply about the work. Often they do.
But the work still exists inside a commercial institution.
And that means the company financing it has budgets, market forecasts, executive incentives, growth targets, brand strategies, and shareholders. These pressures do not sit outside the creative process. They help decide which projects exist, how much they cost, whom they are designed to reach, and how much risk they are allowed to take.
For some reason, pointing this out gets treated as cynicism. Suppose a new adaptation of Little House on the Prairie (cough) makes major changes to the source material. Someone, like me pehraps, suggests that the producers probably believe those choices will expand the audience.
The response comes quickly. No, the changes are meant to be challenging. Or inclusive. Or revisionist. Or thought-provoking.
Perhaps they are.
They may also be commercial.
Those motives can coexist quite comfortably, as far as I can tell. A producer can sincerely believe a choice is artistically worthwhile and also believe it will generate press, reach a new demographic, travel better internationally, or attract viewers who would otherwise ignore the property.
Commercial media often works best when the artistic explanation and the business case line up.
Still, people tend to treat the artistic explanation as generous and intelligent, while the commercial explanation sounds cheap and suspicious.
Why? A company does not become less commercial because it sells art. It has simply found a way to turn art, craft, intellectual property, and audience attention into revenue.
The profit motive is not a consumer wish-granting machine
There is another assumption underneath the defence of companies.
A company wants to make money. Consumers give it money. Therefore, the company is incentivized to give consumers what they want.
This is logical up to a point.
If lavender is your best-selling soap, discontinuing the lavender soap would be foolish. The relationship between the decision and the sale is easy to understand.
Entertainment companies rarely operate in such clean conditions. They are trying to predict what millions of people might want several years from now. They manage large budgets, internal politics, acquisitions, technical problems, executive careers, brand portfolios, and pressure for continued growth. All that boring stuff. They also inherit a large body of industry lore about what audiences supposedly need.
Under those conditions, “give people what they want” is just one consideration among many.
Take The Elder Scrolls. Microsoft owns one of the largest properties in games. It should treat it accordingly: support Bethesda, bring in strong technical expertise, improve the underlying tools, and build steadily toward the next major game.
Instead, the property seems to have drifted for years. Only under pressure do we get signs of renewed urgency. This feels irrational if we imagine that a valuable property automatically receives careful stewardship. Large organizations do not work that way, unfortunately.
A company can own an enormously valuable property and still manage it badly. T
Industry lore
Film adaptations produce an even clearer version of the problem. Take Masters of the Universe. The property survives because of committed fans. They buy the toys, follow the franchise, keep track of obscure characters, and sustain it through long periods when the wider public is barely paying attention.
The obvious movie would lean into the thing itself. Make the fantasy film.
Instead, the recurring instinct is to soften it. Put Adam in our world. Make the material self-aware. Few committed fans want this. The thinking, I imagine, is that a direct adaptation might alienate non-fans, while existing fans will come anyway. The film must broaden its appeal, provide an entry point, and translate the property into something executives consider more familiar.
This strategy has an inconsistent record, you’ll notice. But its failures rarely discredit the strategy itself. When a compromised adaptation fails, people blame the marketing, the release date, the property, or bad luck.
When a direct adaptation succeeds, the success gets explained as a special case. The casting was perfect. The director was unusually gifted, etc.
Basically, companies are not always incentivized to give consumers what they want.
In fact, an executive may face more blame for making a faithful He-Man movie that fails than for making a conventional “broaden the audience” version that also fails. The second choice follows accepted practice and it can be defended in familiar language.
Or take a different situation. A director says a historical film uses contemporary American speech because he wants the material to feel immediate and accessible.
That may be completely sincere. Sounds reasonable, right?
“Accessible,” however, can mean emotionally direct. Or it can mean less foreign, less difficult, less likely to deter a mass audience, and consequently, easier to market.
By the time the director gives an interview, the commercial constraint may already have been absorbed into the creative rationale.
The company is not your friend
Leaving aside the choices of the creatives, the most peculiar part of all this is the loyalty.
I understand loving a game, studio, character, or fictional world.
But the company does not know you. I’ll say that again, the company does not know you.
And it doesn’t have your back.
It may value your subscription, your purchasing history, your demographic profile, and your willingness to recommend its products. But that’s it.
Heck, I am not even saying the company should have your back.
That would be a strange expectation. Creators should be able to change direction, take risks, disappoint old audiences, and pursue new challenges. If I made something popular, I would not want to spend the rest of my life following fans around like a puppy, waiting for instructions.
Fans do not own creators.
But companies do not become friends merely because their products matter to us.
The relationship is commercial. We can enjoy it. We can value the work. We can even feel gratitude toward the people who made it. None of that creates a mutual bond with the corporation.
The console wars made this especially obvious. People defended Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo as though they were football clubs or small nations. They mocked rival customers, celebrated sales numbers, explained away bad launches, and treated corporate victories as personal achievements.
Why did we care?
Care about the games, certainly. Care about price, design, preservation, labour conditions, accessibility, repairability, and whether a platform supports the kinds of work you value. Those things affect you.
But batting for a company as a matter of identity makes very little sense. A sports team at least has a place, a history, a supporter culture, and some plausible claim to collective identity. Even that relationship can become exploitative though.
A console manufacturer has less. It sells hardware, licenses software, controls a storefront, and tries to keep you inside its ecosystem.
The fan supplies the romance.
This is why criticism of a company can feel personal.
If someone criticizes Sony, a PlayStation loyalist may hear criticism of their childhood, taste, or judgment. The company has become tangled up with the self.
The same happens with Disney, Nintendo, Mattel, and any company that controls a body of beloved work. People begin defending the owner when what they actually care about is the memory.