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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
Is someone who plays a game more of a "mindless zombie" than someone who watches TV?
I'm not saying either activity is probably very healthy if overdone- but surely, playing games where you think and interact is less "mindless zombie" than watching TV where you don't interact at all.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
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.
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Watching RPG's gettting rebranded MMO's in the 90's to stick drm server lock into them and charge a subscription was annoying,
Which is exactly why I avoided the MMOs and stuck with the games that weren't (and still do).
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.
And, I've resisted that too. I do use steam now because there is very little choice- so I guess I don't own my games- but I held out as long as I could until there really wasn't any games left that you didn't need steam for. I still won't buy any denuvo games because I don't want to have to be online to play (I don't have the option to be online all the time- my ISP is spectrum so I only have internet connection about 80% of the time).
Too this day- I have never bought any "in app purchase". I've bought a couple of DLCs- but only when the cost seemed justified- where the product actually changed the game play and was a significant amount of work involved.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
It's not as bleak as you put it. First of all, RPGs still exist, despite MMOs. Mostly because, despite the name, they're two very different kinds of games. Yes, you play a character in both of them. But that's where the similarities end. In a single player RPG, your exploits matter. The world can be shaped by your deeds and misdeeds, something that is completely impossible in an MMO. If what you did mattered in the world there, the next player couldn't experience the same game. If in your RPG you slayed the dragon of eternal destruction and got that sword of ultimate awesomeness, the dragon is dead and the sword is claimed, and townspeople will sing praises for you. In an MMO, the dragon respawns a few minutes later and drops another ultimate sword. And nobody talks about it because MMO worlds are static. They cannot change based on the actions of a single person because, well, how should anyone else play them if they did?
Instead it's mostly a matter of cooperative collection of loot.
But that aside, microtransactions have become a pest in games, but only because we let them. There is actually a very, very simple way to not participate in them: Don't buy games that have them. Yes, believe it or not, such games do exist.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
"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.
Citation needed. 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? 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.
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It probably depends on the game. A lot of them these days are slightly more complex and pretty Skinner Box designed to get you to spend additional money on in-app purchases, loot crates, or whatever other scheme the pimps have come up with.
It might not be for mindless zombies, but it may be trying to turn you into one.
Difference is, there's plenty of small AA/A class studios(Paradox, CDProjekt, 4A, Larian) out there to pick from, who all have passed the bar the AAA studios once had. And unlike say TV or movies, there hasn't been a mass convergence of video game companies, especially since anyone with time and patience can sit down learn unity or unreal and start working on a game with provided assets. Hell there's a booming business in games just surrounding RPGMaker.
The funny thing that you mentioned with FIFA 19, RDR2, and CoD is that the number of AAA studios has declined because the profitability has dried up over the last decade, and people are buying fewer titles. It also hasn't helped those AAA studios that they've gone down the path of attacking their audience, or shoveling social justice, politically correct crap, or censoring their games. See the mass drop-off in western companies that did localization for Japanese and Korean games, and the studios moving them either in-house, or in-country for localization. Fire Emblem is a good example of the absolute gutting of both core content and features to avoid 'offending' loud mouthed SJW's.
Om, nomnomnom...
mindless zombies
Is someone who plays a game more of a "mindless zombie" than someone who watches TV?
I'm not saying either activity is probably very healthy if overdone- but surely, playing games where you think and interact is less "mindless zombie" than watching TV where you don't interact at all.
Depends.
Shooting zombies or catching cupcakes or whatever might be a little less intellectually stimulating than a Sherlock Holmes movie or a serialization of The Brothers Karamazov.
The biggest difference is highlighted by this story. As the market expanded and more people played computer games, the actual computer gamer, the one everyone actually thinks of, become the minority market and the rube noobs became the majority market. This hugely altered the nature of games. From games that had to win over players, to games that simply had to con players, where advertising counted more than game code ie rake in as much money as fast as you can until the rubes wise up and stop buying, then you release the next reskinned game.
Really crappy stuff happens, like Paradox screwing with the base game of stellaris basically breaking as it conquest game on an update to force it into an economic game, in order to sell an overpriced poorly coded economic based DLC, really scummy stuff. Or shoving in mircotransations post release as in EA. Gamers wont put up with this shite but the rube noobs will and they will also pay to win, for them cheating is winning, they don't care.
Gamers of course loathe pay to win because basically the companies make the game as grindingly boring as possible so that you will pay to not play it, insane as that is because of course you could simply not play the game at all for free, why pay to play and then pay more to not play, the idea is totally insane, ahh, the psychopaths in the gaming industry, they know their rube noob market well.
By the why, when they talk about whales buying pay to win microtransactions, they are not talking about the size of their wallet but the size of their ego, their ego forces them to buy pay to win because they can not accept losing but are super comfortable with cheating, as long as they are doing the cheating and not being cheated. For gamers cheating to win is lame and pointless, as is being a target for legally licensed cheats and as for the insanity of buying a game and paying more to not play it, well that is plain fucking stupid and only for the rube noobs (beware psycho game execs the rubes will simply stop playing computer games or just buy very few games and boom there goes you market and they are firing your ass) and I do have a mobile phone but I never play games on it (I also play path of exile instead of diablo).
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen