GTA 6 versus Zelda is the wrong fight

Greg Posner opened the first episode of Never Entertained with a question the rest of the industry is not asking. Everyone wants to know which game wins the holiday. He wanted to know which game still has your attention after the controller gets put down. Over the next hour, three completely separate stories (Nintendo stocking a Target shelf, Wolverine landing soft, and Netflix reaching for movie theaters) turned out to be the same story: distribution is cheap now, and the only thing that still compounds is whether someone feels anything about your brand when they are not playing, watching, or buying.

First, what Never Entertained is

Never Entertained is the weekly Player Driven show, live Fridays at 10:00am ET. It takes over the slot Player Driven Live held, and it lives in the same archive, so everything before this episode is still right where it was.

What changed is the room. Instead of one or two people talking through the week, it is a standing panel of four who look at the same news from angles that do not usually share a table. Greg hosts. Simon Pulman brings the IP and media view as a partner at a New York law firm working where Hollywood and games meet. Justin Ruiss brings advertising and business as an SVP of media research. Colan Neese brings the news and the numbers as SVP of gaming at Screen Engine/ASI and the author of the Patch Notes newsletter.

It started as a group chat between people in the same industry who kept disagreeing with each other, and the format is just that argument with the door left open. The point is not consensus. On this episode the panel split on physical media, on whether Wolverine is a disaster, and on whether Netflix has a plan, and none of those got resolved. The chat is part of it too: several of the best turns in this episode came from viewers in the room.

Nintendo is buying shelf space while everyone else goes digital

Colan Neese opened on the thing nobody expected from the Zelda Direct. Not the game, which everyone assumed would look great and contend for game of the year. The surprise was a foil limited edition, a box, a cartridge, and a booklet, at a moment when the rest of the industry is walking the other way. Sony has said in a blog post and on an earnings call that its future is digital. Xbox has offered to let you digitize the discs you already own. Nintendo's answer was to take the shelf everyone else is vacating.

His framing for why is the part worth stealing. Sell someone a game and you sell a seventy dollar digital download. Sell someone a brand and the basket looks completely different, in his example running into four figures once toys, cards, and the rest of the aisle are in it. Nintendo does not keep all of that, and Target takes its cut, but the company is monetizing a household instead of a transaction.

Simon Pulman stacked the calendar on top of it. The game lands in November. The Legend of Zelda film follows, and he put it roughly six months later, prefacing the date with a caveat that it was from memory. Then a streaming window after that. That is potentially half a year of continuous Zelda presence in physical retail, each event feeding the next. He also made the point that Nintendo's near obsessive brand control, the thing people criticise, is probably what protects the movie.

Justin Ruiss added the wrinkle that matters most for the holiday. Premium console install bases are fairly saturated and hard to find in stock. If a parent cannot get a PlayStation for Grand Theft Auto, the Switch 2 sitting on the shelf is an off ramp, and it is the one device the whole family can use. Neese's own estimates put the Switch 2 install base somewhere around twenty two to twenty five million, with the new Zelda doing seven to ten million units in its first year and climbing toward the series' usual numbers as the console base grows. Those are his figures, not published ones.

Sony's real risk is becoming a machine

Neese put a frame on the whole console conversation that does more work than any of the individual numbers. Call it the barbell. On one end are aggregators: Steam, PlayStation, Xbox, the iOS store. Their business is to be the place transactions happen and to tax them. On the other end are IP owners, where the intellectual property is so specific that people will follow it onto whatever hardware it lands on. Nintendo happens to own a device, but its business is the IP, and it will meet you wherever you already are. Watch the Pokemon show and never touch a game, that is fine. Watch a Mario movie and buy a plush, also fine.

The dangerous place is the middle, and Simon Pulman reached for Nike to explain why. Push hard into direct and digital and you lose the customer who wanted the physical thing, and you lose your retail partners' enthusiasm at the same time, because why would a retailer promote a brand that is trying to go around them.

Then Pulman said the quiet part. He and Ruiss are both long time Sony buyers, and he does not know who Sony is aiming at any more, and does not think Sony knows either. Neese landed the conclusion.

That is the operator lesson in the episode, and it has nothing to do with consoles. A brand people feel something about survives a bad year. A spec sheet gets compared to a PC and loses on price.

The audience made the case better than any of the panelists did. One viewer described buying an Audi because it smelled like his father's car. Another said he is buying his kid a cartridge specifically so the kid gets the object, the booklet, the thing. Then Neese told a story about his son's baseball trainer, who does not work in games, cornering him at practice about the Zelda news. Years ago that man and his brother were stuck on the Water Temple. A stranger overheard them talking about it in a Costco and drew the solution on a napkin. He does not own a Switch 2. He is buying one.

A game designed for everybody is designed for nobody

The panel had pre-registered their Wolverine guesses before review day: Greg at 78, Pulman between 84 and 86, Ruiss at 85. What actually arrived was a game with four or five perfect scores in the mix, per Pulman, and a discourse that had nothing to do with the score.

The complaint is a design default. Go looking for an optional collectible and the game draws a line to it, then opens a radar on top of the line. It is on by default, and the reviews that went viral, SkillUp's in particular, hung on exactly that. Neese's comparison was the sharpest one available: he had just played Lego Batman co-op with his son, a game actually made for children, and it offered no line, no hints, and no hand holding. His son had to work the puzzles out. Wolverine is rated mature.

Pulman's position is the strongest version of the argument, and it is about audience rather than difficulty. He wants discovery and mastery, the two things he plays games for, and a guidance system that removes both takes the joy with it. He also pointed out what gets lost downstream. Secrets used to build culture. The clerk at the store told you something. Someone wrote it on a napkin at Costco. There will be no napkin for Wolverine, because there is nothing under it to find.

He was careful about the other side of it, and worth quoting fairly here: there is a real portion of the audience that needs those affordances, and studios put them in because their data says so. His objection is to the default, and to the idea that every game owes itself to everybody. His own summary of the consultant pitch that produces this: you have ninety four percent of the market that has not played your game, imagine if they all bought it. Almost nobody ever converts that ninety four percent, and the attempt alienates the people already paying.

The practical fix, from Pulman, is a first-launch prompt. Ask once whether the player wants assistance on or off, and the people who hate it never see it. That is a five minute conversation in a design review, and it is the difference between a shipped default and a shipped position.

Insomniac just spent a strike

Nobody on the panel thinks this game fails commercially. Neese's own tracking has it pacing ahead of Miles Morales, which sold twelve million, and he expects roughly six million, with a reported six million first-year trigger mentioned by Pulman. Those numbers are his and should be read as his. Brand recognition alone moves the units. Somebody is going to walk into a store, see Wolverine, and buy it without reading a single review.

The cost lands later. Neese's framing is that everyone gets one strike, and this was Insomniac's. The next announcement, whether it turns out to be Venom or an X-Men game, now opens with the studio having to explain what it changed. That is a much harder sell than a trailer, and it is the actual price of a mediocre reception: not this quarter's revenue, next project's trust.

Pulman added the structural problem underneath it. A six to seven year development cycle is not survivable, partly because it sets the number of copies you must sell too high, and partly because the culture moves while you are building. The ironic, quippy, mid-2010s register that this game was presumably designed in has since been thoroughly rejected. You cannot course correct a seven year build against a taste shift you did not see coming. Ruiss put it plainly: listen to the people who already buy your games, because they will tell you sooner than any research will.

Netflix wants theaters because it does not have enough things people love

The last beat was Netflix reportedly weighing theatrical distribution and reporting box office numbers for the first time, across six upcoming titles. Ruiss, who had just run a forum on it, said industry sentiment was overwhelmingly positive, mostly because it is the first real data anyone would get out of the company, and because it suggests the theatrical ecosystem is healthier than people had priced in.

Pulman gave three reasons it is happening, and they build on each other. The expensive originals meant to become franchises did not become franchises. Streaming prices keep rising, so new revenue has to come from somewhere. And talent has stopped accepting a big cheque in place of a theatrical release, because in the audience's head a streaming movie is a Friday night throwaway and a real movie is an event. He has personally been told no on theatrical commitments and back-end participation many times. That answer just changed. He also noted the cost of reporting numbers: once you publish box office, you publish the misses too, and no studio in history has a perfect record.

Neese was blunter. Netflix reads to him like a company in a midlife crisis, grabbing at games, at live experiences, at anything. And his actual complaint is more damning than the strategy critique. He still subscribes, and he has no idea what is on there, because nothing gets marketed to him. That is the whole problem in one sentence: reach without attachment.

Which brought the hour back to where it started. Pulman's point was that to do games, or live events, or merchandise, you need brands people care about emotionally, and by his count Netflix has roughly one. Ruiss and Neese then closed the loop on the creator side, where Netflix has been buying talent and shows.

Neese knows this pattern from his time at Twitch, where the standard move was to offer a marquee streamer a truck of money to switch platforms. His read then and now is that it does not matter, because there is an infinite supply of people who want to be famous, and next person up. Pulman's version is the legal one: you can license a creator's show, but you cannot own the creator, and a decade of streaming strategy was built on owning everything. Ruiss called YouTube the feeder that Netflix then premiumises, which is the friendliest possible framing of being downstream of somebody else's audience.

Which is the argument Player Driven keeps making in a different accent. An audience you own is not the same as attention you rent, and every one of these three stories was somebody discovering which of the two they actually had.

Keep going

Catch the replay and the next Friday drop on Never Entertained.

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