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Videogame Spending May Soon Outweigh Music Spending Globally
Ars Technica reports that, for the first time, spending on videogames is in a position to overtake spending on music worldwide. An analyst report from PricewaterhouseCoopers discussing growth in media shows this being the first year that's a possibility. "The information not only reflects the gaming industry's strong trajectory but also serves as a painful reminder that the music industry continues to suffer. ... The rising penetration of broadband combined with consoles with online capabilities, wireless phones capable of downloading games, and technologically advanced consoles are credited with driving the video game industry's strong growth. PwC says that the gaming industry will see a compound annual growth rate of 9.1 percent between 2007 and 2011, resulting in a $48.9 billion global video game market in 2011, up from $37.5 billion this year."
Hey, I did testing for Ocean, Data East and Lord knows what other shovelware companies back in the late 80s. Back then we got paid for it, too.
I won't say the quality's gone up, but it hasn't gotten worse.
Hell, I remember one time, after extensive diplomatic negotiations, I got patched through directly to the lead programmer on a basketball game, to explain to him what constituted 'offsides'. And this was a week from mastering.
It's no secret that copyright violation is always going to be a thorn in the side of all forms of media. The earnings losses will always be exaggerated (and based on the false assumption that every download is equivilant to one lost sale), and media execs who are trying to defend their jobs will gladly roll out the piracy card, but it's been eating away at profits for some time.
The difference is the dvd and video game industries are ramping up. They suffer just as heavily, if not worse, from piracy due to much of their target audience having access to digital copies. On the other hand, the vast majority of general music buyers and movie theater audiences still do not have the bandwidth or the meager technical skill to actually obtain music and movies in any quantity. Regardless, while the most heavily pirated (relative to sales) industries are succeeding by a great margin, the older media formats (music cds and theater releases) are failing, no matter what the causes.
It's very simple. The individuals running the music industry are, on the whole, not incredibly competent. They continue raising the price of music in order to fund increasingly expensive and expansive advertising and marketing targetted at teens and young adults (a major slice of the market), but increasingly ignore the rest of the market. One result of this is that "Independant" labels have begun to surge through the market, being smaller and tighter, and far more efficient. Have you noticed how it's only the largest media corporations who seriously complain about piracy, while the smaller operations (who's music is just as heavily pirated, relatively speaking) are less concerned?
There are two reasons for this: One is that the existing "big business" model of music production has reached a plateau and can only maintain itself through the aggressive marketing of short-lived quickly-produced consumer music - music that you'd play at a party, but lose interest in towards your mid 20's (right around the time you actually have money to spend). The natural inclination of the stockholders involved is to require the executives to adapt and continue growth, or replace them with fresh blood. Since the current batch of executives cannot produce any serious growth, only slowly dwindling profit, they are forced to cover themselves by finding a scapegoat - an actual but minor threat that they can blow out of proportion.
The other reason is that there are new ways to distribute music, and that major marketing campaigns are losing their power, relative to more meager methods available to small production houses and individual artists. Good quality studio equipment is now readily available to any individual, as are means of exposure. They can also sell their work via Amazon and a variety of other channels. The only audience they can't reach easily are those who are not very computer literate - and that audience is shrinking at a rate that frankly scares the music executives who rely on them. Again, music industry executives do not want to publicize that, even though it's not a secret anymore. Thus, as before, they need a scapegoat.
Compounding this, in order to compensate for increasing difficulty generating a profit, they continue to raise the price of music. I used to buy cd's regularly, but once the price of a cd came to mach the price of a dvd, the music simply lost out to the movies.
With theatrical movies, it's much simpler. I own a fairly large hi-def tv (1080i 52" rear-projection) with a good surround sound system - and with a little effort I was able to afford that on an average income. I can get almost any movie I want - I just have to wait until it hits dvd. When I go to see a movie at a theater, I'm doing it almost entirely to go out with friends, as the big screen just isn't so impressive anymore. This appears to be common with many people out there. Compounding that is the increasing expense of operating a movie theater, the trend (due to pressure) of creating larger and large
Do not confuse "Freedom of Choice" with "Free Will".
Fresh out of a Civ4:Warlords game, I'd have to disagree. That expansion pack improved Civ4 wars immensely. The upcoming Beyond the Sword expansion looks like it will similarly improve the late game, much more than the typical expansion pack. And Civ4 is the best Civ sequel by leaps and bounds. It's the 12th most highly rated game on metacritic for PC. It's definitely just about the best turn-based strategy game ever.
Other games that have improved upon their predecessors: Morrowind for its story and gameplay, Oblivion for its environment and voice acting. Combined, the two games are the best real-time RPG-ish games ever. Counterstrike: Source took an old game and modernized it. The most popular FPS. In the same genre, BF2 is huge right now. ET: Quake Wars, releasing very soon, will likely be the standard bearer in FPS for a while. Again, much improved upon the ET, RTCW, Wolfenstein, and Quake predecessors. A huge FPS fan, I'll probably be dropping all the other games I mention here to play that one for a few months.
I recently played a good norwegian adventure game (for its story), called Dreamfall: The Longest Journey. The story, characters , dialog and voice actors, and environment is probably the best I've seen in a game. Again, it is much, much better than TLJ that I went back to try. TLJ is much closer to the roots of adventure point-and-click games like King's Quest, while Dreamfall is 3-D WASD movement and a much better game because of it.
While not my favorite genre, WoW and Guild Wars have got to be the best MMORPGs ever created. I have little interest in them, but judging by the subscriber numbers and the huge variety of people they've sucked into an online game, they've got to be the best in that genre.
Heck, I even recently picked up the Tomb Raider: Legends and Tomb Raider: Anniversary games and the controls, graphics, and even story are much richer than the old games.
Basically every genre of PC games has a huge blockbuster recently released or about to be released. I'm more into trying out different types of games than I've ever been. Perhaps gaming on a next gen console is boring right now with limited numbers of "franchise-pushing sequels", but definitely not PC gaming. Future classics are being created every year. Every game I've mentioned here has a lot more to offer than older games, and have really gotten me back into gaming. I can't wait to see what comes out next, personally.