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Gaming In Sweden Bigger Than Football and Hockey

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the second-only-to-bikini-teaming dept.

An anonymous reader writes "SIFO (a major Swedish survey company) has conducted a gaming survey right before the launch of Dreamhack Winter. One of the results is that gaming is bigger than football and hockey combined."

2 of 252 comments (clear)

  1. Why is this surprising? by hey! · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Museums, it turns out, have much higher attendance in aggregate than professional sports. They have a much greater net economic impact than professional sports as well. A single headliner museum in a city can bring in a quarter of a billion dollars annually; the Boston Museum of Fine Arts (an absolutely amazing place) was shown to bring in 369 million annually to the Boston area in a recent study. This is actually comparable to the annual revenue of the Red Sox; the net impact of the Red Sox on regional economy might be somewhat more, but there are a lot more comparable cultural institutions in Boston than there are comparable sports teams. You can walk across the street from the MFA to the Gardner, a smaller but equally culturally significant art museum. Boston is a famous sports town, but it is stuffed to the gills with cultural institutions that have heavy attendance every day (except possibly Mondays) year round.

    I think one of the reasons for the outsize impact of cultural institutions is that they have a mission to have an impact. They're supposed to maximize bodies in the doors, eyeballs on the exhibits. Sports franchises aren't run that way. They're run to maximize profit.

    Gaming's higher impact is likewise related to the fact you can do it every day. However it isn't going to have the same economic impact as having strong cultural institutions.

    --
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  2. Re:Seen it coming by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    For the record, soccer got its name from an abbreviation of one of the two football leagues created back in the split between football and rugby. Specifically, rugby was called League Football, and soccer was called Association Football. Association got shortened to Assoc., which then got bastardized to soccer.