Please don't misunderstand, WWE. People aren't canceling their WWE subscriptions because Roman Reigns won the Royal Rumble. They're not canceling because Daniel Bryan lost, either. That would be pretty stupid. People are canceling their subscriptions because they're tired of your shit.
Your show is trash, WWE. Raw is trash. Smackdown is trash. NXT is cool. Your pay-per-views are trash. And have been for quite sometime.
I quit watching WWE in 2007 or so, because your shows started crapping out. They were not worth my time. They were not entertaining. And WWE was not missed. The Royal Rumble and Wrestlemania came to Atlanta during that time, but I didn't care. I wasn't watching, and I didn't, until 2011, because I heard about CM Punk and the "pipebomb" promo. And once I saw that things hadn't changed at all, I quit watching again. But I wanted to watch wrestling, so I watched TNA instead. At the time, TNA still qualified as "wrestling."
I'd check in from time to time with WWE after that, right up until the present day, and it was never getting any better. Boring angles, uninteresting wrestlers, the endless three-hour death march known as "Monday Night Raw." Like, they named a guy "Bad News Barrett," in the tradition of "Bad News Allen/Brown," who was named such because, if you got into it with him, it was bad news for you. The updated version of this gimmick? He literally came out and gave people bad news.
We went from a tough guy to a guy whose gimmick was to say, "I've got some bad news. Your city sucks," or whatever he said that week. This is the level of creativity we're dealing with here.
And all the while, ticket prices are rising and pay-per-views are getting astronomical in price. Wrestlemania had reached $60. The average price was $45, and there was at least one every month. And you're getting Bad News Barrett for your money?
So then, WWE introduces the WWE Network in 2014, and for $10 a month, you can watch all of their pay-per-views, WCW's pay-per-views, ECW's pay-per-views, and all kinds of old shows and content. Not only that, you can watch the new pay-per-views live each month, for no extra money. It's a great deal, and eventually, I signed up for that. Not to watch the new shit, mind you, because it's dogshit. I signed up to watch the old shit. But if you're gonna throw in that month's show for free, I'll check it out. And that's what I started doing back in November.
And the three pay-per-views I've watched haven't been worth the ten bucks. Just some of the shittiest damn wrestling shows I've ever seen.
Now, I know how disappointed I was, and I had just started watching again. I can only imagine how folks feel when they've been watching the entire time. Before the network, when you had to pay full price for these shows. When you were paying all this money in ticket prices. When you were watching their shows every week. And the shows are just awful, but the people running the show don't care. You're still coming, you're still watching, so why change?
But WWE has invested a lot in this network, and they want it to take off. It's been struggling to get subscribers, even at that low price. They can't afford to lose the subscribers they have. That's their weak spot. They could ignore you when they were just on TV or on pay-per-view, because there are other entities involved that are providing money to the company. Ratings had been dropping since 2002. They didn't care. They had advertisers and such to keep giving them money. But this network is all on them. And these numbers come to them in real time. So frustrated viewers can make their voices heard. By canceling.
Enough was enough, and when you can't do any better for one of your big four shows than what we got last night (and Survivor Series before it), well, I don't blame folks for canceling. I don't know where this idea comes from that people can't dislike the shows that they watch, and they can't complain when something that was good isn't good anymore. Some people enjoyed the Royal Rumble, but a lot people didn't. And that's not because Roman Reigns won and Daniel Bryan didn't. It's because it was a shit show, and along the way, they seemed to take special care to keep people from enjoying the guys they like. If you gave Daniel Bryan fans (or Dolph Ziggler or Cesaro or Dean Ambrose) a good showing before he lost, people might not have reacted the way they did.
It wasn't worth $45 for PPV, or whatever people paid for tickets, or even the three hours it took to watch it. Here's hoping that WWE finally starts to understand that.
No comments:
Post a Comment