| DarthMetalliCube said: I will never in a million years understand why so many companies continue to seemingly utterly despise the very franchises they're working on as well as a large portion of the fan base, then scratch their heads when said fanbase inevitably leaves them. Nintendo does the same thing these days (just in different ways). |
They don't.
Companies are never making the choice to lose money, because they hate their fans.
Sometimes they're wildly clueless about what their consumer base actually wants. Look at Sony trying to make a dozen live service games. They're not doing that because they hate their fans, they're doing that because they're trying to expand their base and they're not sure what that looks like.
Supposedly Pepsi, when they were recreating their logo, they went through some absolutely insane ideas:
I would not be surprised if company execs are often more clueless than the average person, because they're often not the ones consuming these things. A lot of the PlayStation execs probably don't play very many video games.
Sometimes they think that they'll appeal to more people if they push towards a different demographic. Target didn't set out to lose money because they hated their consumer base. They thought they'd appeal to more average Americans, and that their consumer base generally wouldn't care - at least to the extent they expected to gain more than they lost.
Sometimes it's just really hard to make something new. If a product is declining, there's generally a push to make a new product or do new marketing, and that can be difficult to make a success.
Sometimes their behavior is because they think it'll gain them more long term. Disney used to go out of their way to stop printing movies so that they stay valuable.
