They'd just rather play Fortnite. Which shows that there must be something to Fortnite.
I don't actually completely agree with this. The social aspect of Fortnite cannot be denied, of course, but there's more to the domination of Fortnite, Minecraft, and Roblox. I'm not sure if the kids truly actually would rather play Fortnite or if they simply aren't aware that other things exist.
The fact of the matter is that most people need to be shown things to even consider them at all since they don't know where to look or what is interesting and the current internet is not financially incentivized to show people things that they might actually like versus simply funnelling them to the thing that is a safe bet to make money as fast as possible. This happens all the time across all media now because of how current recommendation algorithms work. On Youtube, for example, the algorithm now massively favours time watched and clickthroughs, so if a kid looks up video games on Youtube, they're most likely going to run into Fortnite, Roblox, and Minecraft since videos about those games have had an unbreakable foothold on the platform for many years now and are heavily favoured by the algorithm since it knows they will generate more traffic and ad revenue than most other video game related content. The chance of these kids running into anything else is extremely low now unless they specifically go out of their way to look for it, and most people won't do that. Other games also have no chance of breaking this dominance in search priority either so now games like Fortnite, Roblox, and Minecraft have a huge built-in advantage. Even if kids do try to go out of their way to find new or interesting things, the algorithm will fight against this and try to push them back towards the mean since it still is the most likely way for the platform to make money (I had this happen recently. I was watching videos on reverse engineering software, a niche area of cybersecurity. Youtube decided that meant I wanted programming videos so it filled my feed with aggressively generic web development videos, since that's the most popular area of programming. No matter how much I tell Youtube I'm not interested in web development, it keeps trying to push me to watch web development videos. This is the perfect example of why modern Youtube is broken. It no longer is designed to give you videos or information relevant to you. It now gives you videos it thinks will drive you to click on more videos trying to find something relevant and in doing so you will watch more ads).
It's no different with music. You can see it every time some song goes viral on TikTok. Most of the songs that go viral, especially older ones, are always extremely obvious, well known tracks for the artist in terms of popularity that anyone who had listened to music before the current reliance on algorithms for music playlists would have probably run into before. However, because the current way most people listen to music, Spotify, by default pushes people to listen to largely the same specific sets of artists, users have to go out of their way to train their recommendation system to give them other music to listen to. Even with me, despite it having years of listening habits and dozens and dozens of playlists, once in a while Spotify still tries to get me to listen to top 40 pop music and whatever Sabrina Carpenter is. It's because of this that suddenly the kids think it's a hot or unique take to say that Fleetwood Mac, Kate Bush, Paramore, or other well-known-to-the-olds-but-not-pushed-to-young-people-by-the-algorithm musicians are good artists. The algorithm ferries them all towards the same generic stuff so they have to rely on others outside of it (be it movies, shows, their friends, parents, etc.) to expose them to new cool things. It's a failing of the platform that huge swaths of the population are entirely unfamiliar with artists and music that used to be otherwise considered mainstream and had widespread appeal for a reason. The platforms have no interest in helping people find their tastes but instead push them all to have the same taste since that is easier to market to and the safest bet to drive whatever metric they think is best at the time.
Of course, the counterargument is "but all of that other media is out there, you just have to look for it" but that's easier said than done. Modern internet search is essentially useless for this type of thing now, and everything else for that matter. If you try to look up information or a list of interesting games/songs/shows to try, chances are you are not actually going to find that list or anything else relevant unless you already specifically know where to look. The first few pages of the google results will be either aggressively generic listicles telling you the most obvious info possible, recommendations to watch clickbait Youtube videos, or machine-generated garbage crammed full of ads. Google, Bing, etc., no longer incentivize their search tools to provide useful searches, but instead to maximize the number of clickthroughs and searches so that they can make more ad money (See Ed Zitron recently unearthing some internal communications from a Google anti-trust trial that showed an ad exec essentially pressuring the search team to sacrifice search result quality if it could boost ad revenue, then taking over the search team and making things much, much worse). The fact that all these companies are making AI tools to parse search results tells on them because it shows they know that their search products are so bad that they're unfit for human consumption now.
The next counterargument is "But the monoculture has existed for decades so this is nothing new" but there's a huge difference now that makes this argument also irrelevant. When you went to a video rental store, music store, or wherever back in the day, outside of specific obvious promotions like the new releases, every item on the shelf had a chance of being looked at and it was up to the item to present itself in a way that would catch the eye of the consumer. I ended up renting dozens and dozens of niche games from the Family Video that I never would have tried otherwise simply because they looked neat to me. This scenario allows people's personal tastes to factor in heavily, and allows people who don't know what they like to experiment until they find something that works for them. This type of experience doesn't really exist anymore with modern digital storefronts. There's simply too much stuff and none of it is organized in a way that's useful to humans. All of the digital storefronts are so full of junk that unless you know specifically what you are looking for, you can't just browse them now and instead have to rely on curated lists. This pushes everyone to using the same products and services and severely limits the chance of people to find anything different. The storefronts push what they think will make them the most money and this drowns out anything smaller from being noticed.
I don't blame the kids for all playing the same small sets of games. They don't know any better. It's the fault of the platforms and publishers. They've chased the easy money for so long that they've forgot that there needs to be diversity in an industry for it to flourish. For there to be a next big thing there need to be people making it, and right now the games industry is chasing out all of the people who could make those big things in favour of concentrating everything around the few golden geese they currently have. The entire media industry is set up this way right now and it seems like it's not going to last. The indie scenes in all forms of media are the only things actually keeping things going right now.
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