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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.
Do these figures take into account game rentals?
Mercy was given to me by Christ...I must give the same to others.
So...
Which sells more merchandising?
Which sells more novel versions?
Which sells more subscriptions?
Which employs more people?
Which sells more disk media?
Which sells more theater tickets?
Here-in lies the problem with comparing any two industries.
no
At the same time, $10B is a lot of dough, no matter what you are comparing it to. The movie industry is "only" twice as big? Yeah, well, they have had over a hundred years to build that up. How long has it taken for the game industry to reach the halfway mark? At that rate, how long before it passes the $20B mark? It is impressive no matter how you look at it.
With the crap that coming out the theatres, I won't be long until other industries top them.
AC comments get piped to
Called entertainment.
Take a look behind the curtain.
Many video games are movie tie-ins.
Many movies are video game tie-ins.
Who chalks up the bucks for "The Incredibles" for XBox? The video game industry? The movie industry?
What about the revenue for the Doom movie? Video game industry? Movie industry?
What about the revenue for the endless talk tv drivel about the Doom game and movie?
My point is, the money ends up in the same pockets, for the most part.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
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.
...that a lot of people associated with the games industry have this fascination with comparing themselves to the movie industry. We make just as much/more than the movie industry. We self-regulate our ratings system just like the movie industry. Our games are so incredibly cinematic in nature, they're like miniature movies! We make all kinds of games based on movies, and movies are made based off our games, we're equals!
It's odd to me that something that for so many years was the "alternative" form of entertainment is now so obsessed with making itself just look and feel just like the movie and or television industry. The gaming industry as a whole needs to collectively take a look at itself and decide if this is what we really want. Creativity is the only limiting factor in gaming, we can't afford to lose that ingredient, or gaming as a fresh, exciting entertainment media is dead.
You can already see this happening: What are the big games right now? Half Life 2. Halo 2. Sims 2. Gran Turismo 4. Everquest 2. Final Fantasy 11. Grand Theft Auto San Andreas (essentially GTA6). Metroid Prime 2. Metal Gear Solid 3. Madden for the 15th straight year. Doom 3. Burnout 3. Prince of Persia 2. Spiderman 2. Pikmin 2. Paper Mario 2. Need for Speed Underground 2. The list goes on and on.
The fact is, you'll be hard pressed to find a video game these days that isn't a straight sequel, the latest title in a long line, or based on a universe established in other games (World of Warcraft). People were having a cow this summer when it was all sequels, where's the outcry over this practice in video games?
It's a compelling article, although there's a huge amount of number fudging.
(1) If you count DVD sales and rentals, aren't you double counting sales to the big rental chains? And of course, studios don't see the money from rentals any more than a game developer sees money from blockbuster renting a game, so why should that be counted?
(2) Does the $10B figure for the game industry include game rentals? Or is it possible that perhaps the rentals of games at, say, Blockbuster, got grouped into the movie rental business, since they do so much game renting?
(3) How does resale figure into this? There's a huge market for "pre-owned" games AND movies, including a lot of trade-in credits. Personally, I'd expect movies to be rented more but traded in less (at least as a percentage of their sales revenue).
(4) How do you account for cross-licensed stuff? It seems silly to count the Spider-Man 2 game as a purely "video game industry" thing, as it wouldn't even exist without the movie. And when Doom comes out in theatres, how does one account for that? Clearly, the brand names generated in each industry create value and that value is hard to measure solely off sales in one genre or another.
(5) What about subscriptions? There's obviously plenty of license money being thrown around by HBO when they get movies, and likewise, on the Video Games side, how much are all those MMO subscriptions worth?
One could even go into an in-depth review of piracy. How does piracy in each segment compare and effect revenues? What sort of margins do big hits have, and what sort of margins does the industry overall have? And what sort of residuals? It's a lot harder to squeeze more life out of an old game than an old movie. Old movies show up on TV and such, but old games just end up getting cracked.
And they give examples of bestsellers, but they don't look at the breadth of titles. How many video games came out vs how many movies?
And certainly International Box Office is absolutely colossal for big movies. How does gaming compare? A lot of major Hollywood movies take in 65%+ of their gross overseas. How do localized versions of Video Games compare?
I think what we can all agree on is that Video Games comprise an ever-increasing portion of the GDP and probably of the entertainment dollar that we spend, and as such, it's a lot harder to predict where they will go. Most video game players can imagine a *long* way into the future for video games in terms of technology, to the point where I could see people paying thousands of dollars for holodeck-type video game vacations that last a week; it's hard to see where movies go from here for sure, whereas Video Games have shown a seemingly endless appetite for more advanced technology.
Just to put things into perspective, WalMart does about $250 billion in sales annually. That's a single company taking in 10X the annual revenue of two entire industries combined. Now that's impressive.
Read this article to find out why there is such a big difference in the figures (it's a little old, but informative).