I believe this is partly because of the rise of digital piracy; if you're trying to sell something, you can't beat "free and easy" (in the mind of the consumer) by cutting prices and still have the producer stay in business. You can read a revealing piece written by a PC game developer destroyed by piracy here.

Note: "Free and easy" is what counts. I'm sure a lot of firearms owners here wouldn't mind the lowered ammunition costs of handloading, if setting up a well-stocked and well-functioning reloading apparatus at home didn't involve a fairly large start-up cost for machinery and componets, and a lot of time spent getting things to work. Once it's up and running it you can assemble your own ammo for a lot less than buying it at retail, but the work involved undoubtedly puts many people off of such a prospect.

Ever since gaming went mainstream people have been less and less willing to pay higher prices for games. Furthermore, as hardware has gone up in capability and complexity, so have development times/difficulty (and the money needed to pay such skilled people) for anything not casual-oriented or meant to be played on limited hardware like phones.

Take a look at Diaspora: Shattered Armistice. It's an excellently made "total conversion" mod for the famous Battlestar Galactica TV show that, in my experience, is the best simulation of combat in a Colonial Viper available. But it took 4 years for the first release (containing only 6 missions) to be finished, and this is even with an older engine that has had both its source code and mod tools released. Yes, if it were a full-time paying job for the developers rather than something they did in their spare time they might get it done faster, but it does highlight just how much work is involved in game development. Work that, by all accounts, is being respected less and less, with people feeling entitled to more and more content for less and less money to the developers and publishers, assuming the consumers aren't outright pirating the content.

There's also the fact that people will, in all likelihood, prefer to pay a lot of money in dribs and drabs rather than all up front. You can see this phenomenon in the success of "microtransaction" games, and you can read an article about how one such monstrously popular title regularly drains its customers dry here.

Damn, that puts a damper on my prospects. And to think that for PC games, screenshot utilities can be had for free, or are built into the software platform (such as Steam). I wouldn't be surprised if some of the game screenshots on this wiki actually came from console games played on PC emulators for that reason.

(I actually heard once that some HD games, such as the best-selling Metal Gear Solid 4, are actually still lower-resolution, just upscaled so as to keep framerates constant. This may change with the now-current PS4 and Xbox 1.)

Anyway, I'm done going off-topic. I made this thread so that users here could petition the mods for mod-privileges-requiring activities like Category creation or redirect-page alteration, but now that I know how to create Category pages without requiring such privileges, the mods here can close this topic or create another "petition the mods here" thread if that's a good idea.

DO NOT go about creating categories willy-nilly. If a director or writer has met the requirements, then proceed, as well with as any necessary "<country> Produced/Filmed" categories. Please consult the admins before creating any genre categories.

I didn't say I would go and do that, did I? Besides, I'd rather stay a "straight shooter" here and have my work remain than risk being blacklisted. If I need to create a new category I'll do as you suggested and make some pages for the mods' scrutiny first.

I believe now it would be a good idea for there to be a sticky thread titled "Message the mods here" about category approval requests and the like that needs to be brought to their attention. It'd be a far more efficient method of contacting the mods than leaving messages on their talk pages (you only contact one mod per talk page message that way and many may not have the time to respond). Perhaps a separate "report spammers" sticky thread would also be warranted.

There have been very few spammers since the new registration system came into play. We've only had to ban seven of them since August 2012. I've thought about a "Ask an admin" page on the main wiki for a while now.

That's a relief. I hope that means the "massive influx of spam" is over.

Still, how about categories for game series with a number of titles in there and possibly movie/TV tie-ins, such as the Hitman series or the Max Payne series? Those already have disambiguation pages listing all of their relevant titles.

Why not just go with a template?

Could you enlighten me as to just what the difference is, aside from the Template putting up links to all the entries in a game/movie series right on a page itself whereas you have to click on the Category: (Something) link to find out the rest of related items? Which one would be better in your view?

I think we should stick with templates for series and reserve categories for exceptionally large series. I don't think we have any hard and fast rules about it though... yet.