Exterminas said:
Do any of you guys know Sherlock Holmes?
Of course you do.
He stems from a series of short stories by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Do you know that Sherlock Holmes died once, because Doyle had lost interest in the absurdly popular character and wanted to move on? Holmes fell down some freaking huge waterfalls.
Doyle wrote another book in which he retconned that stuff, several years later, since he admittedly wanted to make money. (They have documents to prove that was his intention) So Doyle changed his Art to cash in on some more Holmes stories.
The point of this little story is that art changes in demand of fans since there is art. The whole idea of independent art, of different streams is all centered around the demand of the consumers.
Granted, most of the time you don't see movements to change a given piece of art that has already been finished.
But in most artistic projects, that seek to turn a profit, the interests of the consumers come up during the production. To the point where it very well might compromise the artistic vision (whatever that might be).
TL;DR:
If we want lots of art of high quality, we need commercialized industries to produce art. For these industries to be profitable, they have to listen to their consumers. So while it might not be desireable to compromise artistic vision in favor of fan demands, it is a neccesary evil to maintain this level of quality.
I don't think one example justifies another. Just because say Dickens edited Great Expectations because his first reader said the ending was too bleak, or Han/Greedo shooting first, or a recut/reshoot of a movie that got a poor test audience doesn't make that a rule or a justification. Each artist gets to make their own choice. I'm sure there's hundreds of times where an artist has told their editor or test audience that it's going out this way, and it worked out best for the artist.
And there's situations where it backfired. Bethesda altered their admittedly terrible ending to Fallout 3, to a slightly different but still just as terrible ending to justify adding the Broken Steel DLC. A lot of Bethesda fans lost their minds, mostly because the only change to their terrible illogical ending was to wedge in DLC. A lot of people didn't buy it. I haven't bought a Bethesda product since. In this case, it didn't work as expected.
More importantly, I don't think an artist should cater to the whims of the public in order to create popular art. That's actually, against the point of really good art, which is to present new perspectives and new ideas and challenge the consumer. If artists cater to the masses too much, they'll end up creating art that only caters to the lowest common denominator, since that will appeal to the most people. Do you really want all your games to be a string of mediocre thoughtless sequels, like so many VH1 Reality Shows, Stephanie Meyer novels, SumBlink18241 records and Modern Warfare games?