T/F: 'If a fan can do this, then [insert company] has no excuse'

[DokiDokiTsuna]

Really looking forward to discussing this one~.

It's a little vague, so I'll explain: the viewpoint expressed is that when fan works (in this case, really good-looking 3D fan animations) are regularly achieved in high quality and show true love and care put into them, it shows that canon-producing companies with big $$$ and thousands of employees could be doing better but choose not to.

• True
• False

Show results

Now, believe it or not, I actually stumbled upon this argument by first seeing the counter-argument: one such fan artist (someone I follow~) wanted to impress upon their fans that the reason Hasbro/Game Freak/etc. can't do the kind of work they do is due to deadlines and other restraints that fan artists don't have to deal with, so it isn't really fair to compare them.

HOWEVER, I disagree. I think the MONUMENTAL, GIGANTIC disparity in resources MORE than makes up for the restraints.

Like, who decides that industry professionals only get a year to turn out a game, or a couple years to make an anime?? Who decides that they just 'can't find' people with the skills and passion to make great products?

These are not natural laws...the companies, the people with the money, they decide on purpose that the trade-off between cost and quality, or time and quality, is worth it. If they can get 'okay' in a year, they don't want to spend more time or hire more people to get 'great', and that's something they fully deserve to be called out for.

I'm all for defending the individual artists who have to do what they're told when they're told to do it, but my sympathy is reserved only for them, NOT the company as a whole. At some point, the buck has to stop...someone, somewhere on the production pipeline has authority over what each project's priorities will be, and they have to own it, regardless of what the industry 'standards' are.

Oh, and before anyone tries to explain this to me like I'm an idiot: I understand things like being economical with the level of detail (when you're trying to make a full-length game, for instance, do you really want to sink millions into Pixar-level model quality when there's more important stuff to worry about...?) but honestly, good work doesn't always have to be HQ. People can tell the difference between something that was just worked on a lot and something that was worked on with care.

Lots of good animation and enjoyable games have already been made (gasp) without bankrupting the giant companies that fund them; we're not asking for something that's impossible. We're just asking for higher industry standards and more consistent quality, even if it means (double gasp) paying the artists more and giving them more time to be creative and actually do their jobs to the best of their ability.

[joannekwan]

I think the main difference is that with corporate, there is input from a LOT more people (all the different creative departments under creative leads, investors, varying levels of management within the individual studio(s) and working together with the publisher/producer. And with corporate, it's just capitalism isn't it. What can make the most amount of money by spending the least amount. Billions of dollars are often at stake, so they often just stick with the tried and true methods of production and prefer not to make many gambles.

Unlike for some indie venture, where you have a team of like 5 or even just a one-person show, their standards are their own. They're willing to put in 80 hour work weeks for their own vision because it's their passion project. And while a few indie projects have become benchmarks of objective excellence as far as quality, monetary success, and fan reach goes (like Undertale or Hazbin Hotel), there are countless of others that don't make the news and fail/dissolve/never make any waves.

Ultimately consumers vote with their wallets. EA's doing fine pushing out the same version of Madden each year because their fans eat that shit up and aren't calling for innovations or higher quality. So long as big companies are making even a bit of profit, they have little incentive to excel their product.

[Rhonder]

As someone who has taken place in a lot of the debates surrounding the game freak/pokemon example... my poll answer is "false, with a caveat". xD

If we're talking hypotheticals and perfect world scenarios, then of course companies with huge amounts of money can afford to sponsor a better quality game than what we get every year or 2 on a game like pokemon. Fans jump in to how how they can make better models as a single person in a few hours, point out how the same assets have been reused for years, complain about the length and quality of game and story content and point to fan projects that do it better, and etc. etc.

And like, I objectively agree with most of those points? I still play the franchise but mostly just as a vehicle to engage with the competitive PvP post-game aspects which has remained serviceable amidst their many many other questionable decisions over the years. I haven't truly enjoyed Pokemon as a single player RPG since.. like... middle school?

So that sounds like a "True" answer but... the false with a caveat is that there's just not much incentive for these companies to spend more time and effort when their product is already performing well. They're a company, not some ideological artist striving to create a master work. They have bills and employees to pay and income to make otherwise.

So so many people bitch and moan about how they want Pokemon style Zelda Breath of the Wild and while I agree that idea is awesome... like man what's the motivation to do that? It would take a much larger developer roster and much more time and realistically probably not sell that many more copies. As mediocre as Sword and Shield were (I actually thought they were okay... contrasting a bunch of other people I didn't really feel that they were much or any worse than the last few games tbh) it still sold millions of copies. And this time at a higher price point than before too ($60 USD vs. $40).

So like, yeah the excuse is money lol

[DasIstWunderblyat]

Perhaps for them: "If a fan can do this, then I don't need to do shit like this anymore. Thank you fans for inderectly hyping up our upcoming current release! No it won't contain things you want so bad you made a fan-content of it, but you will still buy it anyway because you're a fan."

[NickRowler]

I say false.

You are comparing someone doing a personal passion project over a long period of time to a company hired to create something in a short period of time.

If you have no passion for what you are hired to create, you might end up just doing the bare minimum. I met someone who worked in the gaming industry, and he said when he was given projects like Barbie video game and that type of stuff, he only put in enough effort to just get it done. He said he preferred working on action fantasy games, so he tended to put more time and effort into those.

You should also take into account that a lot of people who work for AAA gaming companies are often very over worked, sometimes putting in 60hr work weeks or even more. These companies want to get games out quickly, usually to hit a deadline (like Christmas season). I had a professor who used to work for EA but left because he hardly saw his family and felt like his kids were growing up without him. There has been some changes in recent years to help make working environments more ethical, but I think there is still a long ways to go.

[TAMAnnoying]

Yeah Disney’s Mulan is pretty shit.

[ble]

I guess is something similar to pokemon fan-made games, having a better plot than your regular pokemon lol

I remember some people in youtube made a fan dragon ball Z live-action video, and everyone said it looked way better than that awful dragon ball evolution movie. Some say the same about cosplayers doing better work with their costumes for superheroes than what Hollywood does most of the time.

Maybe some explanation, is that companies just see some project as a quick cash grab, most of the time, without knowing the source material as well as the fans do. Or the companies thinking they "know what's better for the fans".

[Lovetina]

I think for a company, there are a lot of things to juggle. For example, cost, audience reception, and limitations of old systems.

For example, if a fan were to say, draw fanart of Spongebob, the heavy lifting design work is done. But say, if an animator was told to redraw Spongebob's promo art in a night since the merch company last minute say they cannot mold him the previous pose, that promo art won't be "as good," despite the $$$ in production. So much of production $ goes into things that won't see the light of day.

[AmysGames]

You are comparing someone doing a personal passion project over a long period of time to a company hired to create something in a short period of time.

^ This. The thing with fan projects is that they're being made solely out of a love of the franchise, so of course they're going to make it as high quality as they can make it. Whereas companies like Game Freak are full of employees who have executives breathing down their necks about deadlines, are probably heavily overworked, and just want to get it done as soon as possible.

In an ideal world, yeah, it wouldn't be that difficult for a big company to put together projects with the same love and attention to detail as fan projects. I'd even argue that it has happened—I've heard a lot of good things about the Crash Bandicoot remasters, for example. But unfortunately, due to time crunch and executive meddling and whatnot, that just doesn't always happen.

[rajillustration]

Deffo false, it's very different to make one single asset for a game, and having to rig that asset without it breaking, animate all the pieces so that it matches the rig, voice act all of the things to go with it, and then make it work within the game itself without breaking everything else. Usually these people who are like "look how easy it is" have only done one single thing. Maybe they've made maybe a couple of seconds of animation. They haven't actually had to put that animation in a whole episode, and then have that episode dubbed in several different languages, and then have it be cohesive with the rest of a season, and have it match all the standards of TV in multiple countries.

What looks really easy to is, is only easy because we're drawing the outside surface facets. There's way more that goes into this stuff than art.

[Legendofgenii]

Here’s my experience:

I know all creative companies aren’t like this (hopefully!), but I worked for a large greeting card company once - I was so excited (Borat: so excite!) but even on my first day I got the vibe of how absolutely miserable all of the artists were - I’d go as far as to say they were broken actually.

You’d have to finish a project pitched to you in the morning by the end of the day, and you’d be expected to stay till it was done, so sometimes corner cutting had to be done if you wanted to go home.

They’d hand you a rival companies greeting card and tell you to make a copy - no sugar coating it.

Our ‘Creative director’ would stand behind you and micromanage every click of your mouse (he had no design experience, art training and couldn’t use a computer - he was just a friend of the company director). If you did what he said the company director usually hated it and the creative director then openly blamed the designers. If you just did your own thing and it was (usually) a success - he took all of the credit - and they’d even go out for a fancy lunch to celebrate.

We were not allowed to listen to music, chat (other than on our break), personalise our desks or drink tea (omg not sure how I survived!).

I made a lot of friends, but left after a few years because it was SO frustrating and taught me absolutely nothing (other than opening my eyes to corruption, sexism and plagiarism in an industry I wasn’t expecting to find that, but meh I was naive).

All the illustrators and designers I met were amazing (their own stuff) compared to what they were told to make at work, so it was definitely the company (and probably the consumer’s a little too).

If you are creating content out of love it just gives it that extra something doesn’t it.

[skelton_porter]

This is getting a bit outside the lines of what you are talking about, but I used to work for a statue/figure/model kit company. There were some fans who would buy our statues and repaint them (or have them repainted by very talented people). Often on forums, other fans would say it looks so much better... but even the artists who did the repaints would often admit that while theirs might look better, there's no way they would even want to try doing that quality of a paint job on a full manufacturing run of 5000 (or more), much less try to get it done within the terms of production run deadlines and contract stipulations. It's a bit of a different beast than producing games, animated series, comics, etc, but maybe an interesting side tangent that's not quite a parallel comparison.

[darthmongoose]

I would say it falls in-between true and false. It's a tricky one.

On the one hand, yes, sometimes you do see things like say fan comics, or fan art and think... "why on earth doesn't this company just hire this person officially?" and sometimes they actually do, but often they don't, and there's no particularly good reason in many cases other than, "the producer liked the person they picked better" or, "the company doesn't like fan creators and doesn't want to encourage derivative works by rewarding them with real jobs" or "while fans love that fan content, the company feels it's too off-brand and off-market" etc. etc.

But on the other hand, people sometimes vastly overestimate the resources a company might actually have while underestimating how much work goes into a fan project.

I've worked on both works commissioned by big companies (like a Doctor Who book that did get published called "Women Who Lived" and an advertising campaign for Dragon Quest IX, but also cancelled stuff like a cancelled Snoopy mobile game. I also was on one of the teams that pitched to make Dream Daddy, though we didn't get the job because we were vastly less experienced than the team that got the gig haha!) AND of course, a huge fan project, Let's Read Homestuck. I can tell you, based on the sort of budgets I've seen, that there is no way in hell that Let's Read Homestuck could ever have been a proper licensed project in terms of how much it'd cost and how long it'd take to how much money it'd make if all of us got paid industry rates. We once did the maths, because sometimes people ask if having a Patreon would get episodes out faster, and even just to pay our editors alone to work full time would be a few thousand dollars a month. Then to pay the voice actors for their lines would be a few more thousand per episode. Even with the Homestuck game Kickstarter having made over a million dollars, I wouldn't feel confident in expecting an officially-made dubbed version of Homestuck. It'd be just such a huge expense and need coordination of such a huge team over such a long and arduous work.
Let's Read Homestuck literally only exists because we have fun making it, we don't have to worry about a time limit, and Hussie has VERY graciously chosen to ignore us these past ten years rather than shutting us down, even though he knows we're a thing, and we're very grateful to him for that.
That said, Hussie DID commission fan creators to do official stuff. The music team started out as fan creators, the artists who did the art on the music albums, merch and even later parts of the comic were originally fans, including the animator who made the ending cinematic etc. So it's not like he's not open to it, our production is just not feasible.

With many fanworks, the other thing is that the ones that are truly pro quality are often very short, and doing an animatic for that one scene you love from a musical is a whole different ballgame from making an animated adaptation of an entire musical as part of a team with a budget on a timeframe of 3 months. Some fan creators don't work well as a team, or they're just not interested in working on something for the long haul, and fans often aren't aware of that because they don't see behind the scenes. Going back to Homestuck, we were VERY lucky to get Octopimp to voice Eridan in LRHS, and we often get comments like "Why didn't you get him to voice ALL the characters he's famous for!?" and it's like... peeps, he's doing us a favour just continuing to voice Eridan, he's a pro VA now and has pretty much retired from ALL Homestuck stuff (he even announced as much publicly on his Tumblr years ago) except occasional cameos in our thing! He doesn't want to!