Feels like this has been the case for over a decade, but it just clicked in my head:
The woke left see successful IP's as the Post Office. It's job is not to make money by producing a good product, but rather provide a service... a well-paying, creativity-focused, air-conditioned office job for everyone who wants one. Who cares if it loses millions? It HAS millions!
At some point a company with a best-selling franchise transforms into the She-Hulk Writer's Room.
One day, you have a gathering of dedicated, hard-working individuals determined to make the best product possible... and then just like that, you have a corporate HQ filled with these people who don't care if they cost the company millions and destroy a beloved franchise that's lasted decades, so long as they themselves got Mental Health Days, the meeting room was air-conditioned, and wine was on-tap.
When a small company works to the grindstone and creates something original and incredible and becomes a multi-million dollar IP franchise... it happens:
"Jobs available at [Successful Company]! You don't have to produce anything... just be creative! Come up with ideas! Even if they're bad ideas that harm the company and harm the product's short and long term success... it doesn't matter! Your only deliverable is Ideas From A Different Perspective™. The only KPI is your mental health! Support Animals welcome!"
And then the franchise tanks, something magical is lost, the company downsizes drastically and/or goes bankrupt, and these people just get another job at another successful company and the cycle repeats.
Has anyone else noticed this?
For example: Star Wars has literally become a government welfare program.
Instead of producing a fantastic Star Wars product that's focused on telling the best story possible and striving for success by producing a product that sells millions of movie tickets/toys/games/etc... it's just a welfare program where people sign up, do a bad job, get paid, see the product fail, and shrug and say "yeah, well, it has millions to lose, so who cares?"
Blizzard is another example.
https://i.imgur.com/PT9kzow.png
A video game company made BY gamers FOR gamers. The game devs were making a video game that they wanted to play. They wanted to tell a specific story that had one KPI: it it cool? And when they weren't developing the game, they were playing it themselves.
Now? It's a massive billion-dollar game company where 80% of the jobs serve no purpose other than giving people a comfy job. That's it. Every HR person's sole mission is to award comfy jobs to people they believe deserve it. Did that person deliver a bad product? Who cares? All that matters is they were paid well and enjoyed their time being creative! Again; who cares if the company lost millions? It HAS millions!
Every IP, wether it's movies or TV shows or comic books (Marvel/DC comics are literally non-profits now). Am I wrong?
One moment Doctor Who is making the BBC millions by being a popular show, and when you point out it's lost 90% of it's viewers and is COSTING millions?
https://i.imgur.com/RxWMQCS.png
"Yeah, so what? It's supposed to lose millions! Who cares if we make a bad product? The BBC's purpose is to pay me to be creative, not to make a 'good' product!"
Sorry for the rant, but it just makes sense. It's all about perspective.
Woke leftists truly, honestly believe the moment a company/franchise become successful, it transforms into The Post Office; it's not a business anymore, it's a service that only exists to employ people for as long as it can before it collapses.
Honestly that's how leftists see any successful private company - another island of wealth from which to start the communist revolution protected from the consequences of their actions. It's the same psychology you see in the pampered children of the bourgeoisie who plan to be the thinkers and artists in the new society.
That's why they are so insistent on wanting everybody to be in a union. Because all a union does under people like that is parasitize a healthy industry to the benefit of the people running the union.
Union leaders are about as accountable and in touch with regular workers as politicians. You see these bitches living it up, send their kids to private school if they're a public education union leader. It puts them, ironically, in a different hierarchy. If you come in, you can be the bottom of the corporate ladder and the bottom of the union ladder. In many cases, they've been willing to fuck over newer workers to keep the long time benefits.
Ultimate form of this: the trust fund kid who obtains a coastal city job paying dirt-eating wages, but he can live off the trust fund while maintaining social prestige.
For instance (can't remember where I read this but), book editors for major New York publishing houses are paid like crap, but a lot of them are children of captains-of-industry types.
Right, because it gives them power. The type obsessed with money ignore such roles and have no power. The type obsessed with power hop on in and get to reshape society. Been that way in the anglosphere since the early 1900s at the latest. I remember reading a quote from the late 1800s from a bishop or pastor what have you from Britain about how men were avoiding roles such as teacher or priest or social servant for more well paying gigs allowing feminine men and women to seize control of society.
Edit: This was roughly around the time the effeminate, possibly deviant preacher trope became big in novels and other media of the era. Before that the priest was viewed as a capable authority figure and intelligent man. The industrial revolution led to some great short terms gains but it's long term social effects may very well kill off the west.
And how they view nations too.
Failure to gatekeep. It's really that simple. A small organization can fly under the radar but success is blood in the water for entryists. At that point if you aren't gatekeeping you're doomed to get infected.
It all comes down to this.
As others have said, this isn’t limited to entertainment companies / franchises. I work for a company whose founders built it up from an idea into being worth many billions of dollars. I joined on about halfway through that journey, and it was probably a year or two before the vultures descended on my company to start leeching the value out of it. At this point, 20% of our company is actually doing valuable work, and the remaining 80 percent are either gen z retards doing fake email jobs and larping like they’re doing real shit and then old asshole corporate politicians whose only competency is kissing the right people’s asses.
Obviously we added a DEI function along the way.
The moment the original creators are gone, it becomes a welfare program.
The moment the original creators buy into ANY levels of DEI, it becomes a welfare program.
The moment the original creators start focusing on things outside the scope of running the business firsthand, it becomes a welfare program.
The reason for this is obvious: People are infinitely generous with other peoples' money, but often much more tight-fisted with their own. The moment someone else is calling the shots for you, that person has no TRUE interest in your long-term success, only their own.
See also, funds management. The reason I don't work in finance is because I turned down a Franklin Templeton invite to what I'm 90% sure was a ritual/orgy/drug party following an interview.
Fuck those finance vampires.
Successful companies only usually last as long as the original owners. Once they leave, it is a crap shoot whether the new leadership maintains the corporate culture that make the company successful. The list of formerly leading edge companies that fell off to utter mediocrity and ultimately bankruptcy is very, very long. Hewlett Packard, for example, was one upon a time virtually synonymous with computer printing. Then management changed, priorities shifted, quality and innovation went to shit, and now the place is slowly going bankrupt trying to extort users of their products into subscription services for their ink, and having their lunch money taken by smaller upstarts like Brother.
There is, and always will be, only one way to prevent this: gate keeping by people with the vision of the original founder to prevent entryism.
With the left HR is where it usually starts, and HR departments should be aggressively groomed to catch leftist tendencies, and ruthlessly weeded; any outward signs of leftist tendencies should be an automatic pink slip.
HR departments should probably be downsized as much as possible as well, and maybe dividing HR into employees to be subordinate to each department head (i.e. HR employee's boss is Art Director or something instead of Bigger HR Person) might break up its power. Ultimately HR is just helping employees do paperwork so who cares.
Companies are successful because of the drive of their founders and with a little luck their hand picked successors. Once you’ve got an MBA in there (or an egotistical weatherman) who had no part in founding the company, doesn’t care about the product it produces but cares only about how to keep cutting the company budget to show a profit - then that company is effectively dead. See Apple after Jobs was deposed and then when Jobs came back… How does Intel fall? IBM? Microsoft? Same reasons.
I assume the people who make the successful thing get paid and slowly transition onto other things, while leftist parasites come in as they see a new platform to spout the message (TM). Add in support by media and the financial institutions and you’ve got a nice takeover plan. Of course the skinsuit will always fall apart so they need to move onto the next thing.
You’re sort of describing the labor theory of value. Most people working in AAA game dev are literal communists, which is why that segment of the industry is currently so detached from the market. Indie game development is still a crucible that rewards good games.
To focus purely on the economic factors, it mainly occurs when a franchise starts picking up wider "mainstream" conciousness (ie. various sub-cultures become aware of it and start becoming part of its fan community).
It's here various "thought leaders" can begin making money off talking about it (journalists, youtubers, social influencers etc.) and even new ones start forming specifically around this franchise, heavily influenced by existing creators from other sub-cultures. These "thought leaders" commonly have sizable networks and can influence people to try and become employed to work on the franchise, either directly or indirectly.
Further onwards, economic reasons become hazy as there's a triple-threat of economic, social and political factors that eventually leads to a franchise's eventual capture. Despite all this, franchises, no matter their level of success, can still fall victim to capture by hiring the wrong person in the wrong position.
Fantastic post