> Movies, games, and most other modern forms of mass art are incredibly expensive to produce. Meh. Work expands to consume the available resources. There's not

> Movies, games, and most other modern forms of mass art are incredibly expensive to produce. Meh. Work expands to consume the available resources. There's nothing special about "modern forms of mass art": it just sits at a local optimum of available capital, risk, labour and technology costs, projected returns, etc. (optimised by the market). Change those factors (e.g. with a labour strike, or an improvement in CGI tools) and the balance comes out differently, and so do the movies. > If the content creators can't recoup their expenses, they produce less of the content. Or they reduce the expense. In general, I would rather have 10 movies made for $1,000,000 each than a single movie with a $10,000,000 budget. It's really easy to throw money at graphics, special effects, technology, etc. which are mostly superficial. Good storytelling, interesting game mechanics, etc. are much cheaper, and have been around for thousands of years. Consider Pixar, for example: they've managed to funnel hollywood money into fundamental computer graphics research (a very neat trick!). They do this under the premise that it's needed for their movies, which could have actually been executed very well as traditional cartoons.