Hollywood is a fairly different problem. They are bloated to the extreme. The entertainment industry as a whole is too lucrative for it's own good. The list of who would want to be a movie star is depressingly large, the list of who will actually be a movie star is necessarily small. It's not constrained to a more reasonable comparison as a janitor is. Often there are fewer people wanting to be janitors than there are jobs available, wages go up in order to attract more janitors to fill the roles.
This is never the case with actors or musicians. If there were ever a shortage in a Hollywood film, you couldn't take a shit without finding a replacement. As a result, only the best, or more frequently, the lucky, get to go anywhere. It's not so much that they have to appeal to the broadest audience to make money, it's that if they aren't appealing to the broadest possible audience, they haven't got any audience. The industry is too lucrative, too powerful, too protective of itself. If they got rid of their guilds, the problem would solve itself rather quickly. The starving artists would quickly become starving artists in actuality, and most of them would quit. Unfortunately for us, those pinko commies will die before they scrap their own social structures.
The gaming industry also suffers from bloat, but it isn't a lucrative, socialist industry killing itself with unionization. It's just being run by morons that can't figure out hype doesn't sell as well as stability does. Half-life was really not that good a first person shooter. It had a pretty good story, decent aliens, but omfg did the weapons suck donkey balls. It was slow too, very very slow. It did have something though, a fucking awesome engine. I played Unreal at about the same time. There was no comparison between them, at all. The net code and graphics were just far superior in terms of stability. It wasn't anything near the game that unreal was in terms of atmosphere. The aliens were much cooler, the weapons were universally more interesting from the pistols up. The unit ai that was supposed to be so advanced in half-life really wasn't that great, as you'd have known right after having a skaarg dodge fire and rush your ass. It was an inferior game all around, except for that damned impressive engine that ran on anything and everything and looked better while it did.
Half-life has been outsold by four games, WoW, Starcraft, and The Sims 1 and 2. It sold because it ran on everything, not because it was the best, or had the best graphics. It wasn't very original, it wasn't ground breaking in any way. The graphics were just marginally better than the previous generation, the game play a good deal worse than some, but it would run on an old computer better than the previous generation did. A mediocre title sold eight million copies as a result. When the pc industry figures out that function comes before form, it will do just fine.
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