The Convergence of Games and Film

Gamasutra has a piece on the ever-increasing convergence of games and films. The final chapter meeting of the IGDA's San Francisco chapter this year had an event focusing on, in particular, the preponderance of Star Wars games. From the article: "The convergence of film and game production has been predicted for years, but progress has been slow... cultural, logistical, financial, and computational barriers have kept the two worlds apart. Everybody sees convergence, most want it, but few know what it really means and fewer still have actually tried it."

Comments

Gaming: more revenue than movie tickets

[ianscot]

Gamers are a pretty small subset of movie goers.

True in terms of the number of people, okay.

Since 1996, though, video games have collected more revenue than is made on ticket sales for movie theaters. However, movies sell a lot of ancillary stuff like TV broadcast rights and DVDs, and as an industry the movie studios still take in more money.

Basically this story's one more drip in the "games as an offshoot of movie sales" bucket. I guess my reaction is that the tie-in games are a pretty serious source of revenue that's underdeveloped. Mediocre shooters that get released along with movies aren't the blockbusters in the game world. You need to do more than drop some new textures into a Quake engine to make a decent game. Hey, my kids loved "The Incredibles" but haven't said anything about the games.