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

Understandable

[Dash'n'SlashDot]

I think this is more of a product of men being more capable of pirating music than of pirating games as emulation of current consoles is hardly a replacement for the real thing.

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

[FidelCatsro]

Games in the UK are 30-40GBP or close
albums are around 7-12 GBP
so i would say the aproximations is close and yes it is a total rip off.
The RIAA wonder why people download music for free in the EU , Bit hint boys its because your charging us near $20 per CD but i digress.
Yes the main reason is that games are about 4* the price

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.

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.

$35 bongo controllers...

[goodenoughnickname]

Where do all the people who bought Donkey Konga fit into all of this?

Oh wait a minute... nobody bought Donkey Konga.

For me...

[terrisus]

Gender: Male
Time I spend listening to music per week: 0 Seconds
Time I spend playing video games per week: More than 0 Seconds

That was easy.

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.

Principles

[Radius9]

I used to buy something like 3 or 4 CDs a week, back in hayday of Napster, mainly because I was exposed to new artists I hadn't heard before at 0 cost, after which I would buy other CDs of them. After Napster was shutdown, that dropped to about 2 CDs a month, at the most. Once the RIAA started suing individuals, I decided I was not going to buy any CDs any more, and have bought 1 CD direct from the artist in the last 2 years. I have spent WAY more than that on games. I buy more games than I do CDs, just volume wise, not even counting the price differential. Most of my friends also don't buy much as far as CDs are concerned, albeit for most of them its not on principle.