Men Spend More on Video Games Than Music

Jakob Paulsen writes "According to research group Nielsen Entertainment, men now spend more money on buying games than on buying music. This adds further credit to the general belief that video games are displacing other forms of media for the attention of young men. Nielsen base their findings on interviews with 1,500 people in January and February."

Comments

Well

[Sebadude]

Duh. For every game I buy I'd have to buy 4 albums to spend an equal amount of money on music.

It's like saying that people spend more money on their house than on their car. It doesn't mean that they'll own more houses than cars in their lifetime, it just means that houses are more expensive.

Re:Well

[Seumas]

Duh. For every game I buy I'd have to buy 4 albums to spend an equal amount of money on music.

Where are all of these $75.96 games you're buying?! Unless you're talking about collector's editions.

Re:Well

[Dash'n'SlashDot]

I think a better question is where you are spending $19 on a CD

God Bless P2P

[FalleStar]

/me laughs at the thought of actually paying for music anymore.

It's just a better value for the money

[Immercenary_2000]

For the most part, games have a lot more entertainment value for the money. If I buy a CD I'm paying $20 for about an hour's worth of music (not to mention that there may only be a few good songs on it). If I buy a game, There should be at least a few hours worth of gameplay before I beat it, and most games have a multiplayer mode which means that i'll get a lot of play out of that $50 I paid for the game before I get bored with it and need a new toy :). It's simple economics really. Why pay $20 for (at best) an hour of entertainment when you could get an insanely large number of hours of fun out of a $50 game?

Re:It's just a better value for the money

[a whoabot]

I think you're only partially right. I am a big music fan though, so...

If you're only getting "at best" an hour of use out of a twenty dollar disc, you're not listening to the right music I'd say.

What's the most replayable games? Something like Grand Theft Auto: Vice City(I'll admit that was pretty damn fun when I played it)? Or something you play with friends a lot, like Super Smash Brothers, or some sports games? Even if you take these highly replayable games, can you still imagine yourself playing them twenty years from now?

Now take any good recording. How could you not still want to listen to it twenty years from now? How could you not want to listen to it, assuming your in the mood, at any time until your very death?

Re:It's just a better value for the money

[Seumas]

Now take any good recording. How could you not still want to listen to it twenty years from now?

Well, you could but, you'd have to pay another $40 (on top of the original $20) for the two replacements as formats became obsolete twice in those two or so decades or the media (such as CDs) failed or degraded from age.

Of course, the same can be said of movies. And, these days, books. The last good science fiction book I bought was $35. I read it in two days. Talk about expensive!

Entertainment is expensive, period. It's hard to justify the costs, but we pay them nonetheless. I guess that's a good thing, because it means that the other necessities in our lives are taken care of. I've cut out the purchase of music and movies, but I still buy games and books.

Re:It's just a better value for the money

[Voxus]

can you still imagine yourself playing them twenty years from now?

What!?

Think emulators, man! Super Metroid, Mega Man, Earthbound, Legend of Mana, Ogre Battle, Castlevania.... Honestly, why would we have emulators if we never wanted to play these games again?

it's not the money it's the units

[generalleoff]

It's not really fair to use money as a basis for this. Games tend to cost 3 to 5 times as much as a music CD so it's no shock guys are spending more money on games as games can make more money while still selling less units.

Re:Nope

[vadim_t]

Eh, don't overgeneralize, please.

I couldn't care less if tomorrow the RIAA goes completely bankrupt, and Britney (or whoever is popular these days, I don't know) is found on the street gathering food from garbage cans. It's not like music will suddenly disappear in that case. There will still be modarchive.com and the Unreal Tournament soundtrack.

On the other hand, I'm very much interested in seeing nice companies like Moonpod prosper and make more nice stuff :-)

You know, the fact people decide to infringe some law doesn't mean they can't be selective. And no, it's not theft, dammit.

I've done this for years

[Mr.Dippy]

I think the total amount of music I bought since 2002 has been about 3 cds. I average about 1 new game every 2 months. I don't buy games when they first come out because 50 dollars is way to much. You can buy a quality game for 20-30 bucks and the entertainment time for any given game is at least 10-15 hours. Unless I really like a cd (which has about an hours worth of music), I usually listen to a cd 3 to 4 times and then put it away in my collection. I'll listen to it maybe a couple of times a year after that. I think entertainment wise videogames give you more bang for the buck.