Kudos to them, but sadly this was a popularity contest where the likes of Justin Bieber and such were receiving votes.

I'd rather a wide-range, rational panel try to offer their opinions rather than open up a massive internet vote.

Didn't Halo 3's launch weekend generate more revenue than the biggest Hollywood opening weekend of all time?

Video Games are just as influential and big as the movie indudstry.

Well it may be a false comparison, but the video game industry is now larger than the film industry in terms of revenue. The film industry made around 10.5 billion in revenues in 2008, while the video game industry made around 11.5 billion. This is counting movie and game sales and rentals. The film industry may hold more cultural cachet and influence, and more people consider films to be true art, but that is changing as well.

No, the video game industry is not bigger than the film industry.

Film Industry in the US employs 361,000

http://www.bls.gov/oco/cg/cgs038.htm [bls.gov]

All software publishing in the US employs 263,700

http://www.bls.gov/oco/cg/cgs051.htm [bls.gov]

Globally video games are worth 40 billion

http://articles.moneycentral.msn.com/Investing/Extra/VideoGameSalesOvertakingMusic.aspx [msn.com]

US film revenue is 42 billion, total box office gross is 10-11 billion, but that's only a piece of the US film industry.

http://www.allbusiness.com/media-telecommunications/movies-sound-recording/10512814-1.html [allbusiness.com]

Let's not forget that it has donated money towards hospital equipment as well.

In that case, he's a pathological liar [slate.com].

Before today I was completely unaware of Child's Play, so I visited Guidestar [guidestar.org] to have a look at actual numbers. This information is from their 2007 form 990 (the latest I found at Guidestar and the one that probably looks worst for expenses). It fully discloses Penny Arcade's affiliation (gee, the IRS cares about people trying to wash salaries and actually checks this sort of thing).

• Three Penny Arcade shareholders are "Directors, Officers, Trustees, or Key Employees" - none receive any compensation from Child's Play and the three combined received $515,725.25 in compensation from Penny Arcade. Looks like they're missing a huge opportunity to wash salaries in the way described.
• They paid a $37,000 for a project manager to administer $384,059 of cash and non-cash (e.g. games) grants. They allocate the project manger half to program (giving stuff away) and half to fundraising. I am a little confused by the PM, since they list no employees or independent contractors in their highest paid list.
• They spent $41,669 on fundraising expenses, most of it in three areas: $6000 for professional fundraising, $18,500 for the PM, and $12,024 for travel.
• They held a fundraising auction that lost $23,441.

I have questions as a result of that (very quick and limited) review, but none in the area of trying to wash salaries. I'm curious about where the Project Manager expense actually goes. I'm curious about the disaster of an auction - why they did it, what they learned, whether they plan to try again. I fail to see evidence of the sort of fraud you are claiming.

Corporations get into charity for multiple reasons: good public relations, donating to related interests, belief in the cause. That doesn't make promoting or giving to a charity a fundamentally bad thing. Unless you have evidence to back up your claims, the evidence I've seen suggests they are unfounded.

So do I, and so do the authors of http://xkcdexplained.com/ [xkcdexplained.com]

It is if you're doing it because you're jealous of them. (^_^)