The video games have pretty much universally been having at least two separate volume sliders (one for music, other for SFX, optionally the third one for the dialog) for about 15? 20? years. Maybe in another 20 years the cinema industry will adopt something like it, who knows?
Some games go even further. For example, Uncharted 2 had different dynamic ranges and even a midnight mode. A Naughty Dog audio engineer explained it at the time on the AVS Forum [0]. It's a great post, here's an excerpt:
> Dialog always pans across center, but in movies, most FX generally don't. In games, since much of the action happens up front, even with full-range centers, putting all of the volume in one speaker for all the dialog and FX happening directly in front of you generally doesn't sound as good as spreading the power for the FX around to the front mains.
It says a lot about Naughty Dog that they
wanted players to have the best experience, no matter what setup they had.
Satisfactory went ballistic in the latest update, adding 50 separate volume sliders for every sound effect. Not sure it was necessary, but I did use it for a couple of items I find especially irritating.
In some cases this winds up being an abdication of responsibility, as I've found the default can be mixed quite poorly, with eg music drowning out the dialogue. But it's certainly nice to have that control.
