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Game Industry Not Bigger Than Hollywood
The Grumpy Gamer has a counterpoint to the oft mentioned argument that the games industry is bigger business than the movie industry. From the article: "The domestic US box office is estimated to be around $9B for 2004, and this is where the myth starts to take life. The problem is the movie industry is a lot bigger then just the U.S. box office. DVD sales and rentals for 2003 topped $16B. VHS sales and rentals for 2003 was $6.4B. VHS sales are declining fast, but most of that will just shift over to DVDs, which brings the grand total for non-box office movie sales to over $20B, twice the figure for the entire game industry."
Maybe they'll hit $25B if the keep getting torrent and eMule trackers taken down. They need the money.
Which sells more theater tickets?
Well, this one I think I can answer for you.
Forget all those minor details. When you add in the fact that pirates blatantly take $4.7 bazillion-gazillion out of the wallets of the gaming companies, you see that the gaming biz by any reasonable measure is the larger of the two.
Of course, by that logic, the music biz represents a $843 googazillion industry, based on theoretical revenue from online file sharing.
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And both are dwarfed by the porn industry. If you were to inclube porn in with movies though then well the videogame industry does not come even close. I would look up the stats on porn but I am at work and would rather not get fired today. I do recall porn being bigger than all of major league sports at the minimum.
Tinfoil hat? Naa, I long since replaced it with a reinforced titanium alloy.
Unlike movies, which only exist in the U.S.
Are we going to compare industries in WallMarts now?
I.e:
the movie industry: 0.1 WM
the game industry: 0.05 WM (tiny!)
Microsoft: 0.2 WM (ha!)
GDP of Greece: 0.9 WM