Entertainment Industry Lacks Innovation

One Person's View on the Struggles Faced by Music, Movie and Video Game Industries

Commerce can be detrimental to the entertainment industry. Creative minds want to produce something innovative and imaginitive. Meanwhile, the business side of the entertainment world wants a "sure thing". This leads Investors to shy away from innovation in an attempt to constantly re-create last year's success stories. This risk management results in a flood of similar music, movies and video games. While these three entertainment related industries are very different from each other in many ways, they all suffer from a common problem: fear of innovation.

In the video game industry, there are hundreds upon hundreds of near identical games in every genre. While some titles offer a bit of innovation, they are usually variations of existing games. Sports games are among the worst offenders, where sometimes a nearly exact copy of the same game is realeased year after year, the only difference being the names of the athletes, and a few graphical improvements. I'm looking at you, Madden NFL series. Other genres are guilty of this lack of innovation as well. World war 2 shooters have been flooding the gaming market for about half of a decade now, and consumers are becoming less and less responsive to this variety of game because of it. This is the youngest of these three industries, and possibly the most innovative.

Box office sales have been suffering for some time now, and while the industry can point fingers in an attempt to place blame for this occurence, surely innovation can be considered among the culprits. Remakes of old movies, and films based on TV shows seem to be more common than ever. This could be viewed as Hollywood attempting to recapture it's former glory by capitalizing on formerly successful franchises. Meanwhile, many big budget movies of our time rely more heavily on special effects and big name actors than they do on plots and dialogue. This industry is by far the least innovative, as their products are the most expensive to produce, thus there is less willingness to take risks on unique products.