Here [1] are the sales figures for various Call of Duty titles overtime. Sales have been plummeting. In my opinion this is not because of the promise:reality di

Here [1] are the sales figures for various Call of Duty titles overtime. Sales have been plummeting. In my opinion this is not because of the promise:reality dissonance but it's clear evidence that people do respond to changing conditions, even in mass market entertainment. The reason this is obfuscated is because let's say sales drop from 30 million to 20 million. That's a critical decline, yet from a consumer perspective it's still 20 million people buying a video game. That's a really big number, and so from our perspective (lots of people buying a product, lots of advertising for it, so forth and so on) things stay mostly the same. As an aside the exact same is true in the movie industry. Ticket sales have been on a sharp decline since about 2002. [2] This is masked by similar effects as above, but there's also another one in the movie industry. They focus on "gross receipts" instead of ticket sales. Gross receipts = tickets_sold x price_per_ticket. Far fewer tickets are being sold, but their costs have gone up. So the whole dissonance about Hollywood releasing increasingly rubbish films because this is what people want is clearly untrue. To be clear this was also not just a clever rebalancing of price:demand. Their inflation adjusted revenues also peaked in 2002. Hollywood's in decline, overhyped games are in decline. It's only our perception that's lagging behind. [1] - https://www.statista.com/statistics/321374/global-all-time-unit-sales-call-of-duty-games/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/321374/global-all-time-u... [2] - https://www.the-numbers.com/market/ https://www.the-numbers.com/market/