As I said this guy is clearly going to be at least somewhat self-serving so take what he says with a grain of salt, but I think a lot of people who play traditional games also play Fortnite or some equivalent (he is clear he is not talking about Fortnite specifically but also games like Call of Duty Warzone or Apex Legends or Overwatch 2 etc...) And the underperformance issue isn't specific to Final Fantasy, though that's the franchise he's talking about. Everything seems to be underperforming unless it's a megahit.
Since diversifying from the Bombcast, one of my favorite gaming podcast quickly became How Did This Get Played, eventually rebranded to Get Played. Heather Ann Cambell is one of the hosts, and she is a fighting game/character action savant. She dissects fighting games with supreme specificity and is drawn to FromSoft games primarily because they, as she likes to joke, pretend to be challenging. She is a gamer ass gamer. They've had a recurring segment in which she pulls out some random peripheral from the '90s SEGA days and tries to explain why she owns it for at least a couple years now. She gives me a lot of Jeff vibes, to be honest.
She's also a writer for a handful of huge animated and live action comedy shows, so she isn't purely focused on games.
...So. A couple years ago they also did a month-long gimmick where each host forced the other to play a game they thought the others might not like. Her week was Fortnite. She loved how absurd it was. She kept playing afterward. She developed a Discord crowd within their fanbase to keep a regular squad going. She has had a Fortnite Minute segment on the podcast for at least a year now. They cover the latest games, she gets enamored by what many of them do...and within an episode or two admits as much as she wants to keep playing some other game, she's gotta log in to Fortnite.
Listening to her journey with that game has been particularly illuminating. I did get sucked into it in some ways with MLB the Show's Diamond Dynasty, but I always played the offline mode. I obsessively played the first three season of Apex Legends, but I wasn't hooked in the end. I finally gave Fortnite a fair shot when they had some Witcher 3 cosmetics timed to the Unreal Engine update, but I couldn't figure out the economy. I just recently gave a couple days off to EAFC24 thanks to PS+ and I could see the hooks, I just failed to grasp the bait.
But again, you listen to her enough and she is deep, deep into gaming in a way I'm not, even if she has less time for it than I do. And because that's her experience, she'll have weirdly (personal) reasons for loving the hell out of FF15 but struggle to commit 3 hours to a newer release because she's gotta thank her bus driver. It's been a truly illuminating journey, because you like to imagine it's casual people that get dunked by these live services.But sometimes it's people who were forced to play something their best friends expected them to hate for the sake of podcast content, only to realize it's all they ever wanted from a video game.
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