The media industry has always made occasional quality gaffes. Lack of continuity happens, rare bugs creep into games, etc. What’s taking place now, though, few have noticed, but for me, it defies belief.Gaming tabletsandstreaming boxowners, loyal fans of hit shows and familiar gaming franchises, did you know that the content on one store rarely matches another?
Before playing the blame game and taking a wild swipe at those thought to be responsible for this mess, let’s see what’s causing this phenomenon. After all, we deserve to know why our content doesn’t match across entertainment platforms.
Video game inconsistencies are a dime a dozen
Have you ever played the Steam version of Octopath Traveler only to discover itsbugs are causing assets to flicker? Did you know the game’s issues are absent in Microsoft’s PC version? Did you even know that these two stores carry two different versions? If the answer is no, I wouldn’t blame you; there’s no way to tell beyond buying and testing both games to see.
Issues like this are everywhere once you dig beneath the surface. Then you have games that are released broken, like Cities Skylines II when it was released as an unoptimized mess, one that required a beefy GPU to keep the framerate at an acceptable level. Of course, city-building gamers can head over to aSteamcommunity board to find tips on how to disable a few settings to get better performance, but that’s not the point, nor is waiting for a patch to come out weeks or months later. Straight out of the gate, a game should have been optimized, and framerate problems should have been picked up while it was still in testing. In the end, consumers lose paying for and playing an unoptimized mess.
Adventures in converting the written form often fails
Unless you’ve been paying close attention, quality control headaches have existed in e-books since day one. While bookworms may seem like a quiet and retiring group, nothing stirs them to action more than badly formatted literature. From jumbled sentences to entirely missing content, even when reading on thebest e-readers.
Irregularities that don’t exist on aKoboor Apple Books version can exist in the Kindle version and vice versa. Unlike games, most e-book storefronts do tell you which version you are buying, so you’re able to compare version numbers before you buy to ensure you’re using the latest. But once you dip into proprietary formats from Kindle and Kobo, good luck tracking anything. Quirks can include extra lines before a line break or weird margin spacing problems. Missing covers are especially frustrating. It’s as if the e-reader gods are playing a cruel game, teasing you with the promise of a great read only to deliver a poorly formatted mess that is completely inconsistent with what you may find on a competing store.
Worst of all, nobody’s talking about these oversights when they should be shouting to the high heavens about every typo and missing page!
TV shows are still the Wild Wild West
Then there’s the issue of missing bonus content, missing seasons, especially the earlier seasons of shows, and strange editing decisions. For example, some jokes and current affairs references might make it onto Fox’s airing of The Masked Singer, but theHuluairing can cut those jokes. Does anyone know why or even notice? You pay for the service, so you shouldn’t have to play hide-and-seek with the content that you’ve paid for, month after month, right? There are also shows updated for HD that crop content, like Seinfeld and Frasier, sometimes cropping actual jokes. Not cool.
And this is just part of the problem. If you do purchase your digital content outright instead of subscribing to a streaming service, each store maintains its TV show seasons differently. Here’show IMDB lists all of the seasons for No Reservations, nine as expected. Here’s how Google sells the show,offering seventeen seasons. Where did the extra eight seasons come from? Well, they must be on Amazon causeAmazon Prime only sells eight seasons. And yet IMDB and Wikipedia say nine aired, so what’s up? And this is just one example; there is zero consistency when it comes to digital TV shows.
Wrangling order from media chaos
Perhaps the streaming powers that be are too busy throwing shade at one another to focus on quality and consistency. Perhaps digtal stores we shop at see the current situation as acceptable, expecting you to pay full price for the honor of viewing and playing media that’s filled with bugs and inconsistencies. It is, after all, a bizarro time to be a media consumer.
Back on planet Earth, beyond hitting a Reddit forum to complain, consumers have few options and fewer protective mechanisms when it comes to subpar content. It’s almost as if media outlets are drowning out your voice, taking advantage of a disenfranchised market to push even more mediocre media. Sure, there are good ideas out there, but they’re buried, poorly executed, and generally lack attention to detail.
It’s disheartening to see great concepts squandered by lazy development and rushed release schedules, to see streaming sites and gaming developers and e-book providers cop out like this when they could do so much better. Accountability is needed, but it feels childish to hope for any despite how glaringly obvious quality has fallen in the move to digital.
