Game Industry Bigger Than Hollywood

Ant writes "This SF Gate story says stacks of new releases for hungry video game enthusiasts mean it's boom time for an industry now even bigger than Hollywood. The $10 billion video game industry, which generates more revenue than Hollywood, has never released so many highly anticipated blockbuster titles in a single season. It started in August with the game title Doom 3, followed by The Sims 2 in September, Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas in October, then Halo 2, Metroid Prime 2: Echoes and Half-Life 2 last month. In November, sales of video games rose to $849 million, an 11 percent increase from the same month last year and up 77 percent from October, according to the industry research firm NPD Funworld. The industry set a milestone last month when Microsoft's Halo 2 -- a sequel to a futuristic game with an elaborate plot that pits humans against invading aliens -- surpassed Hollywood's opening-weekend movie box office record in just one day of sales."

Comments

Drop Like a Rock

[sammykrupa]

This will reach a peek and then drop like a rock.

Re:All sequels

[tomstdenis]

Yeah the 9 dozen mario games are all "better than the last" or the 33 MK games...Many video game sequels are cheap plays on name or simply un-original.

Back in the day "Spears of Destiny" [for instance] was cool because there wasn't that many other games to play in the 3d genre.

Personally I prefer games which really add new elements not only for their series but for the industry. Games with more interaction in the environment for example are cool. Nothing like the "walk around the 3ft cliff" in Ghost Recon to make me wonder why the people who wrote the game thought that was a good idea...

As for Doom3 I guess I'm the only one who isn't that impressed. The game is slow [re: inefficient] and at "playable/economic" setups it doesn't look that great. Add in some crappy gameplay [e.g. dark room, shoot shoot, die die, etc...] and we have a "disappointment". I actually play 1980s NES games and Mario64DS about a dozen times more often than UT2K4 or Doom3 [though I like UT2K4 way more than D3].

Tom

Re:Three worlds

[Doc Ruby]

Er, Japan is *not* "in" Asia, the same way Britain is not "in" Europe: they're "near" their continents, which was a differentiator in the age of conquest with their own respective resonances today. Japan was part of the "Old World", generally considered part of "Cathay", so when it was subjugated by the latter techniques of "colonialism", global trade, it became as "Third World" as West Africa, until it was reconstructed by America following WWII, as the "Three Worlds" system we're discussing finally became a bad model of geopolitics. BTW, being a colonial state, or Third World, doesn't disqualify one from either brutality (of course), or being a colonizer: look at Colombia in Panama, Indonesia in East Timor, or the USA on Earth.