Buy-Curious, or, Being a Good Video Game Consumer in the Age of Influencers

Last week, there was a short post on Aftermath calling out coverage of a video game industry analyst speculating about the sales of the new game Saros. The title of the post is “Nobody Needs To Know What An Analyst Thinks About A Singleplayer Video Game’s Sales. Nobody!” and yeah, I absolutely agree with the sentiment. I agreed so much that I’d assumed it was so straightforward as to be unarguable: thinking about sales numbers or the business side of art is a lousy way to think about art. But there was a surprising amount of push-back in the responses. Variants of “um actually, I want to know more about the industry, thank you very much.” And I’ve been resisting my natural impulse to be a smart-ass about it, because I think it is a perfect example of a frogs-in-boiling-water situation. I know that I’m not immune to propaganda. Decades if not centuries of blurring the lines between art and commerce have a subtle influence on us that we might not have fully noticed. But on the other…