Game Industry Bigger Than Hollywood 503
Ant writes "This SF Gate story says stacks of new releases for hungry video game enthusiasts mean it's boom time for an industry now even bigger than Hollywood. The $10 billion video game industry, which generates more revenue than Hollywood, has never released so many highly anticipated blockbuster titles in a single season. It started in August with the game title Doom 3, followed by The Sims 2 in September, Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas in October, then Halo 2, Metroid Prime 2: Echoes and Half-Life 2 last month. In November, sales of video games rose to $849 million, an 11 percent increase from the same month last year and up 77 percent from October, according to the industry research firm NPD Funworld. The industry set a milestone last month when Microsoft's Halo 2 -- a sequel to a futuristic game with an elaborate plot that pits humans against invading aliens -- surpassed Hollywood's opening-weekend movie box office record in just one day of sales."
Contrinutions (Score:1, Informative)
Re:Apples and Oranges (Score:1, Informative)
Re:Three worlds (Score:2, Informative)
Biologically there is the new world (the americas) and the old world (eurasia and africa). Old world monkeys vs new world monkeys. Old world Bison vs new world Bison, and so on.
Then there is the economic terms
1st world: Modern Capitalism
2nd world: Modern Communism
3rd world: not developed enough to count as either.
Japan is very much 1st world. China is 2nd world. India is 3rd world (though could also be put in the 1st world bin). The terms are becoming antiquated with the fall of Russian Communism, and changes to world economics since the 1960/70's.
Re:All sequels (Score:2, Informative)
The Japanese Super Mario Brothers 2 was eventually released on Super Mario All-Stars for the SNES as "The Lost Levels".
Nah. It's not bigger. (Score:5, Informative)
By comparison, IBM has revenues of about $80 billion per year.
The Smaller Screen (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Another leveling factor (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Apples and Oranges (Score:3, Informative)
I think the head-count do matter, especially when it is the movie industry vs the game industry. It is much easier to reach a saturation point for games - and since the business is so good, we will probably see a proliferation of titles coming soon, and possibly not enough new hardcore gamers to play them.
Another related factor on why head-count matters is that movies occupy a much shorter attention time that a game - after 3 hours max you're done with the movie, but game can take days or weeks. Revenue for movies can grow by encouraging people to go to the cinemas more often, but this will be harder for games since a game already will take up much of your time - unless completion times are shortened and the games made more stupid so that most can whizz through it in a day.
Re:Contrinutions (Score:3, Informative)
Not just Apples and Oranges, just plain wrong! (Score:5, Informative)
If you include DVD/media sales of movies, movies win. If you don't include console hardware sales, movies win.
The movie industry (worldwide) grosses $180B. US movie industry grosses 63B. Box office only accounts for 26% of revenue.
reference: http://www.factbook.net/wbglobal_rev.htm [factbook.net]