I’ve been working at a major shopping network since December, but only recently have I been moved to a department where I get to sit in on meetings and listen to people talk sales numbers. Due to the nature of shopping networks, I don’t actually know what they’re all talking about. Brand names for shoes and handbags jump all over the place, and all I know is the over-priced product sewn together by penny slaves in China are being bought (or not bought) by middle-aged women with plenty of disposable income.

As I sat there, listening to a bunch of sales people determine what items they should push more, what items they should drop or purchase less stock of, so on and so forth, my mind shifted. I suddenly thought of a similar room with a similar set of sales numbers at Activision or EA, or perhaps at Warner Bros. or Fox Films, or maybe even Virgin Records.

Video gamers, and media fans in general, tend to speak with derision about the big money suits making decisions with no respect for the art or understanding of the medium. That they have such a large disconnection to the actual consumers. Yet it had never been hammered home enough for me until I was in that meeting, listening to a group of people deliberate on the sales of regular, physical product.

It was a rather depressing, and eye-opening, moment. A creative medium is being influenced by people who are simply choosing what to fund based on empirical data. This is like someone leading a Church, something founded on faith, based on scientific findings.

Okay, not quite that different, but similar.

It’s an attempt to determine what people like with a bulleted list of ideas. For example, consider the upcoming film Battleship. A bunch of people (not necessarily old white men in suits, though it is certainly likely) saw that films based on pre-existing franchises and properties are doing well. In particular, Transformers has been making a metric crap ton of cash at the box office. So these executives decide to buy a bunch of rights to similar properties. Battleship comes up. Well, films about naval warfare haven’t been doing so well in the past decade, especially compared to Transformers, so let’s shove some transforming alien robots in there as well.

The last step would be to look at a list of actors that are in the top money-making films that year and try to grab them. Hence, Liam Neeson being in a movie that is well beneath his talents.

The entire process is creatively bankrupt. In fact, creativity never entered the minds of the men making the film (theoretically: I wasn’t actually there when someone decided to make Battleship into a sci-fi about giant robots). All they saw was a bunch of numbers, and decided to try and go with what they saw made money.

With luck, this Battleship will fail. Yet I can’t really tell what the populace will say or do when it comes to entertainment. These folks will scoff at Dungeons and Dragons while gluing their eyes to Jersey Shore.

Yet even if it does fail, it likely won’t change the system. Not unless the only discernible pattern, the only empirical evidence presented before these men, is that interesting, creative ideas with good stories and good writing, can be profitable.

Which is where things get really depressing. For a moment I wanted to consider video games as a place where, sure, Bobby Kotick is all over the place trying to turn video games into perishable packages of Macaroni and Cheese, but there’s room for creativity and art, too.

One of the examples I had planned on presenting was Resident Evil: Revelations, a recent 3DS title that I’ve been playing the Hell out of. It’s much better than Resident Evil 5, focusing more on horror and exploration than being an action game loaded with cheesy quick-time events. Sure, it still doesn’t have the puzzles that I loved from the first game, but it’s much closer to the origin of the franchise than ever.

But the game was released on the 3DS, a smaller and cheaper platform, for a reason. The real money is hunting down Call of Duty players, with the triple-A titles looking to steal their cash. That article is specifically about Operation Raccoon City, but the announcement trailer of Resident Evil 6 doesn’t alleviate fears much. Chris Redfield, one of the titular characters of the franchise, can be seen dashing and sliding into cover and shooting from behind a chest high wall.

In other words, Capcom decided Gears of War sold a lot of copies and had chest high walls with cover shooting, and thus Resident Evil needed these things as well in order to sell the same high numbers.

What saddens me most is that they’re not completely wrong. Even before the “bro gamer” took over consoles with their Call of Duty based faux-athleticism, many of my gaming friends focused primarily on competitive first-person shooters. The only difference is that they went from Unreal Tournament and Counter-Strike on the PC to Gears of War and Call of Duty on console. For over a decade, Western publishers have been trying to fit online multiplayer into games in order to make them sell.

Now, Western developers have over-taken the once varied and imaginative world of console games. I mean, let’s be honest, by the end of the 90’s the PC basically had three major genres. First-Person shooter was the most prominent, followed by Real-Time Strategy and role-playing games. All of which were filled with companies seeking nothing more than to imitate each other in some way, shape or form. While there was plenty of imitation with consoles as well, it was dominated by a Japanese market, a very different culture with different priorities and ideas.

Things have changed, though, and while genres are sort of mixing in a lot of ways, there’s a singular focus on what sells the most. To many, what sells the most is an online first-person shooter, and that is what publishers want.

This is why I actually credit EA and Ubisoft for what little things they do. EA funded risky projects like Mirror’s Edge, Brutal Legend and Dead Space. Sadly, two of those projects were failures. Ubisoft has brought story oriented games like Assassin’s Creed into the scene, but has been adopting an annual release schedule much like Activision has with Call of Duty. It’s hard for me to be excited for Assassin’s Creed III when I still haven’t played through Brotherhood.

Sitting at the table of that meeting, hearing people discuss the sales numbers of purses and shoe brands, it suddenly just made it plain as day how business is done. It has also made me pretty depressed about the future.

Though that won’t be stopping me from buying and playing games. As I said, I’ve been having a blast with Revelations. At least the big publishers get it right once in a while.