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Video Games Now Account For More Than Half of UK Entertainment Market (independent.co.uk)
The video games sector now accounts for more than half of the entertainment market in UK, according to new figures. From a report: The Entertainment Retailers Association (ERA) said the gaming market's value rose to $4.85bn, more than double what it was worth in 2007. It now makes gaming a larger market than video and music combined for the first time. The figures show three games -- Fifa 19, Red Dead Redemption 2 and Call of Duty: Black Ops 4 -- each sold more than one million physical units in the UK across games consoles during 2018. ERA chief executive Kim Bayley said: "The games industry has been incredibly effective in taking advantage of the potential of digital technology to offer new and compelling forms of entertainment. Despite being the youngest of our three sectors, it is now by far the biggest."
mindless zombies
I would say it's because TV and music are all getting very samey and a bit shitty but games are kinda doing that too. I'm pretty sure it's the loot boxes.
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... of course it is, the reality is when you put microtransactions and gambling mechanics inside games.
One of the reasons it's grown so much is because the game playing masses on both PC and phones is fucking tech illiterate. Steam, mmo's, mobile gambling/gacha games could only exist in a world where the average gamer is bum fuck moron.
Watching RPG's gettting rebranded MMO's in the 90's to stick drm server lock into them and charge a subscription was annoying, the fact that the public fell all over themselves to pay money for software they didn't own or control incentivized the entire industry to code games in a way that the public never controls the game. Watching Team fortress 2 going from paid product to f2p microtransaction ridden game was pretty much the death knell for game ownership. Now that even fucking starcraft 2 is in on it.
Sad place where PC gaming and software ownership (aka windows 10 as a service we definitely are in an idiocracy) ended up due to the masses getting internet.
Young and liberty-minded people are rightfully rejecting this nonsense. We can find other ways of "entertaining" ourselves without the government sticking their fingers up our rectums.
And, historically, this is the point where the copyright clowns start rent seeking saying they're losing money to piracy and other bogeymen instead of just losing market and mind share, and that they should be getting a fraction of our incomes to replace what they're losing.
The reality is, people have finite entertainment budgets and disposable income, and growth in one segment might come at the expense of another.
Despite all of the idiocy of "we will grow at 10% per year forever" (which is mathematically impossible and stupid), the reality is is doesn't work that way, and never has.
The companies on the losing end of this, I have no sympathy for them. They're industries who have felt entitled to our dollars for years, but offer less in return for it.
Boo hoo, people are spending money on other things, and you need to compete against things you haven't had to in the past.
I expect more of these 'established' businesses to start discovering the long run of constant revenue is over and that people are moving on to other things. I also expect them to fight tooth and nail to get governments to shore up their revenue stream out of a sense of entitlement.
Fuck 'em.
So TV, film, music, and everything else is less than the 50 of the "entertainment market" (whatever that may be)? I would have thought the millions who watch TV programs outnumber the gamers, not the other way around.
The numbers are bigger, but that makes sense given populations.
2017 (in USD):
* Movie box office - $11 billion
* The gotcha, home viewing (cable and Netflix for example) - $107 billion
* Music - $18.3 billion
* Books, digital and physical (surprising) - $37 billion
* Video Games - $23 billion
So video games beat out the big screen and music in the US. I believe this has been the case for at least a few years.
https://www.selectusa.gov/medi...
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The video games sector now accounts for more than half of the entertainment market in UK, according to new figures. From a report: The Entertainment Retailers Association (ERA) said the gaming market's value rose to $4.85bn,
That's only true if you take a ridiculously narrow definition of the "entertainment market". The English Premier League is unquestionably a form of entertainment and that league alone had revenues of $6.4 billion last year. And that's just one sport in the UK. Add in all the other lower tier leagues, other sports, etc and it's pretty easy to show that video games are just a piece of the overall pie. I'm not even getting into forms of "entertainment" like drinking and other adult recreation which undoubtedly are far larger.
Watching RPG's gettting rebranded MMO's in the 90's to stick drm server lock into them and charge a subscription was annoying,
On the paper, RPG and MMO try to cater to different taste.
- RPG are still single player (think Witcher 3)
- whereas MMO are the multiplayer online cousin thereof.
There is a difference, it's not simply rebranding.
But for the rest (using this as an excuse to lock the players into subscription-based cash-milking scheme) I fully agree.
Nothing technically should prevent you from running your own server and having your own run with your group of friends instead of needing to rent out some "shard" in some publisher's data centre.
But except for Minecraft, very few modern-day popular game actually offer this option.
And even if you try to run some 3rd party re-implementation of the server (as some players did with Ragnarok Online), there's a high chance that the publisher will try to C&D you into oblivion and force you to pay for their servers (see Blizzard)
the fact that the public fell all over themselves to pay money for software they didn't own or control incentivized the entire industry to code games in a way that the public never controls the game. Watching Team fortress 2 going from paid product to f2p microtransaction ridden game was pretty much the death knell for game ownership. Now that even fucking starcraft 2 is in on it.
Sad place where PC gaming and software ownership (aka windows 10 as a service we definitely are in an idiocracy) ended up due to the masses getting internet.
T
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
From 1950 to 1970, the pinball industry made more money than Hollywood. Interactive entertainment has always been more profitable, despite being mostly ignored by the so-called cultural critics.
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From 1950 to 1970, the pinball industry made more money than Hollywood.
Citation needed.
Interactive entertainment has always been more profitable, despite being mostly ignored by the so-called cultural critics.
Define what you mean by interactive entertainment. I realize that sounds obvious but I think it's less obvious than it seems. Professional sports spectating isn't really interactive but it's one of the biggest pieces of the entertainment market - far bigger revenues than the market for actually playing sports. Movies aren't interactive but they are enormous once you include all the revenues and not just the box office. Books aren't interactive but that's a huge industry. Streaming video isn't interactive but is huge. Porn is mostly not interactive and that market is enormous - probably bigger than the above markets combined. So what do you mean exactly by "interactive entertainment"? Video games are indeed a big market but you'll need more than that.
Lost sales... damn pirates.
[($)]
The video games sector now accounts for more than half of the entertainment market in UK,
... the gaming market's value rose to $4.85bn
... Despite being the youngest of our three sectors, it is now by far the biggest."
However, that amount is smaller than the BBC's budget: £5Bn, or $6Bn. So the reality is that the entire gaming market isn't even bigger than a single broadcaster.
The entertainment market must include TV. Just like it must include films, music, print (yes, there is still some left). If you wanted to stretch it you could probably say restaurants, bars and drugs count as "entertainment", too.
This sounds like someone trying to mislead to gain publicity. They might have meant just the online entertainment market. But they should not say simply the "entertainment market".
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
... yet more articles slandering gamers as misogynist, racist, sexist, anything else abhorrent under the sun.
If video games are encroaching on electronic entertainment (ie. music, movies, TV) in general, then it makes sense for the legacy industries lacking innovation to make "gamer" as unpalatable a social group to belong to as possible.
People prefer controlling their own unique narratives and that's why video games will always win. You need some heavy escapism to get away from mass media-prescribed hysteria and tribalism we're all expected to take uncritically.
Also, who said all those sales were based off of microtransactions anyways? They are ways of keeping a game's development going, but TF2 is a terrible example. There are a couple to a few item drops every few hours that you play, which means there is no "play-to-win", even the default weapons are still useful, and you can earn newer weapons through skill achievements (I relatively suck at the game and I've earned at least a dozen of those). Most of the weapons are balanced and tweaked constantly so that there aren't unfair advantages, even whole levels are tweaked and changed to avoid holes in the geometry (aka. "wall hacking").
How much did I *have* to pay for TF2 to get what I want out of it? $3.15. I chose to pay for a few other things, but probably spent less than $30 on the whole. In comparison to Stellaris, a space strategy, their biggest bundle is ~$90. Games can be expensive or cheap, doesn't matter what genre they are, and not every gamer is an idiot with their money.
Cap: economy
I couldn't agree more. In fact, I find it easier to fall asleep at night while watching TV in bed. Without TV my mind is always ticking over thinking about things that keep me awake. Watching TV, I find it easy to mentally switch off and I easily nod off.
Many of us do the same thing reading, so I wouldn't "read" too much into that.
In fact, I'd be careful drawing any conclusions. An hour spent watching PBS is likely to be more intellectually rewarding than the same hour playing . In contrast, an hour spent watching some reality TV show like the Apprentice, Survivor, or Housewives on the other hand probably does more to lobotomize a person than 200 hours spent playing the most mindlessly stupid, gratuitously violent, lame ass video game, while an hour spent playing an educational game might well equal or exceed the value of that same hour spent watching PBS.
"Special When Lit: A Pinball Documentary (2009)" Note the date range (1950-1970). There was no home market for movies at this point, thus box office was the total.
There absolutely was a home market for movies during that era. Granted it wasn't anywhere close to what it is today but it certainly existed. TV syndication was a thing even back then and popular movies were often periodically re-released in theaters. Anyway, you cited a documentary which evidently makes the (seemingly unsupported) claim. That's insufficient evidence. I'm not saying your claim is necessarily false but I'll need more than that to believe it to be factual.
If I offered you all the revenue from Professional golf (advertising, tv rights) or the revenue from recreational golf (equipment sales, green fees, etc), which would you choose?
If I'm running a business the answer is easily pro golf (far better profits which is what really matters - do you really want to try to manage 15000 golf courses?) but I'll admit that's a pretty good rebuttal regarding interactive versus spectating. I think the economy around golf is something in the neighborhood of $70 billion and the PGA is something like $2-3 billion annually. So good example. On the other hand golf is probably an outlier in that regard because it's a rare sport played primarily by adults. Baseball for example has no where near as large an economy at the sub-pro levels. Football (either kind) has huge spectating revenues but almost nobody plays it as an adult. Same with hockey. The only sports I can think of that are heavily played by amateur adults and have a good sized economy to them are tennis, cycling, running, & triathlon. Might be missing a few but most sports see a heavy drop off in participation after high school graduation and thus the economy around them after that is build on spectating.
The NFL (one of the most profitable professional leagues) makes about $8 billion a year. A single sports equipment company (Nike), made $34 billion last year.
Nike is a clothing company that is only incidentally related to any given sport. Only a modest percentage of Nike's revenues come from football merch sales or any other single sport for that matter. Much of Nike's sales have nothing at all to do with any sporting activity - I wore some Nike apparel at work today. If you are going to spread the definition that wide you may as well include Amazon for shipping you the clothing and Apple for telling you the game scores on your phone. I'm exaggerating of course but it comes back to my point that defining the markets for interactive versus non-interactive isn't as easy as it seems at first glance.