Full disclosure, since videogames are Beau Tanner's beat and not mine: I've told the man to his face that half his games look like homework with a soundtrack. But when Spiked declares it's game over for the woke videogame industry, even the lady who thinks a controller has too many buttons perks up, because this is a story I've watched play out on my own screen for a decade now, just with a different logo on the box.

Spiked's argument is the simple kind, which is why it lands. The studios got taken over by people who care more about lecturing the customer than entertaining him, and the customer, being no fool, stopped showing up. You can only tell your audience they're the problem so many times before they take you up on it and stay home. Concorde, the industry's most expensive cautionary tale, cost a reported fortune and shut down inside two weeks. Two weeks. The Rex Theater in Muskogee ran Howard the Duck longer than that, and everybody in town knew it was a turkey by the second reel.

What happened to games is what happened to my movies, and I've written that column so many times the keys are worn. A generation of creatives came up believing the audience was an obstacle between them and their message. So we got remakes that scolded us for loving the originals, reboots that treated the source material as a list of problems to be corrected, and characters who talked like a press release from a consultants' retreat. Hollywood did it with Snow White and The Little Mermaid, and the game studios did it with their own marquee names, and both industries got the same box office for their trouble.

The part I enjoy, and I'll admit I enjoy it a little too much, is the denial stage. Executives stand in front of investors and blame marketing, blame the weather, blame "unusual circumstances," everything except the product that half the audience could smell from the trailer. Disney's been doing this dance for years. The game publishers picked up the choreography fast. You'd think somewhere in those glass towers somebody would try the radical experiment of making something people actually want to buy, but that would require admitting the last ten years were a mistake, and pride is the one budget item these companies never cut.

The good news, and there is good news, is that the audience never left. People still want stories and heroes and to be swept up in something bigger than a seminar. When a game or a film respects the player, when it trusts him to keep up and doesn't stop the action to deliver a sermon, the money shows up and shows off. It's the same scoreboard I keep for the movies. Respect the audience and you get a hit. Lecture them and you get a write-down and a puzzled press tour.

Spiked's piece is worth your time, and it agrees with me, which never hurts. It lays out the whole rise and fall without flinching, from the consultants to the flops to the quiet course corrections now happening across the industry. Because that's what's coming. The studios won't announce they were wrong; they'll just suddenly discover they always loved fun again, the way a man who loses an election suddenly discovers he always loved the folks back home.

So Beau can have this beat back when I'm done with it. I'll stick to my Westerns, which never once stopped to ask whether John Wayne's horse was adequately represented. The winning formula was on the shelf the whole time. It took the industry ten years and a mountain of dead franchises to walk back over and pick it up.