Become a fan of Slashdot on Facebook

 


Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror
×
PC Games (Games) PlayStation (Games) XBox (Games) Entertainment Games

Fortune Magazine On 'The Biggest Game In Town' 42

Posted by simoniker from the rich-execs-excited-by-pikmin dept.
Thanks to Fortune Magazine for their feature on why games are seriously big business. The introduction reads: "Music? Sales down. Hollywood? Hit or miss. Tech? Flat. No wonder everyone wants to be in videogames", as the piece goes on to throw out some interesting statistics: "Within three weeks [of release, Madden NFL] grossed $100 million -- two million copies sold at $50 a pop. In roughly the same period, the summer hit movie Seabiscuit returned $78 million." The amount of hours spent in front of games is also highlighted: "On average an American will spend 75 hours this year playing videogames, more than double the amount of time spent gaming in 1997 and eclipsing that of DVD or tape rentals today." But despite the article's EA-hyping, it points out the cyclical nature of the industry and failures, too, such as The Sims Online, to which "...just under 10,000 are now subscribed."
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.

Fortune Magazine On 'The Biggest Game In Town' More

Fortune Magazine On 'The Biggest Game In Town'

Comments Filter:

  • Glossing over the obvious point (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Dancin_Santa ( 265275 ) <DancinSanta@gmail.com> on Tuesday September 02, 2003 @11:35PM (#6856102) Journal
    If you are a large game house like EA with solid games like their EA Sports line, you can expect big returns for yearly updates.

    Try to break into the business without having serious funding. It's almost impossible.

    The only thing that is clear from this article is that them that's got will get and them's that's not shall lose. And it still is news, I guess.
    • "Try to break into the business without having serious funding. It's almost impossible."

      It's not that bad. Lots of opportunities around. I, for one, wouldn't mind working on a shareware PocketPC game. It's not like you'd need a whole lot of resources to get that going. You've got the net as a delivery mechanism etc. Okay, it won't make you insta-rich, but it's an avenue to explore.

      Console gaming is an entirely different animal. Start small.
    • Hi, I hope this is the correct place to post and apologies if it isn't but does anyone know of game developers in Ireland using the PS2 Linux dev kit Thanks Eamonn

  • Uhh.. length of game/movie play? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by QuantumG ( 50515 ) <qg@biodome.org> on Tuesday September 02, 2003 @11:36PM (#6856110) Homepage Journal
    On average an American will spend 75 hours this year playing videogames .. eclipsing that of DVD or tape rentals today.

    You really can make statistics say anything you want. Nevermind that a movie lasts 2 hours (maybe 4 if you're an Oliver Stone fan), whereas a game is required to supply 50+ hours of gameplay or it's considered a waste of money.

    • I'm a lower extreme. Gameplay = ~0 hours. YAY!

      Do you remember those games that allowed 32,000 levels? I don't ... but if you do, can you cut me in on it?

      Yeaaah.

      But you also have to realize that movies are much better made than games, and offer much more enjoyment. Unless you are a half-life super-geek (You know who you are), you don't usually play a game repeatedly. But, you often see people repeating movies over and over again ... maybe because they like the movie, maybe because the repeat button i
      • Either way, this doesn't happen very often with games.

        I'm sure that the 2 million people that bought Madden 2004 will only play 1 game of it, then toss it aside and wait for the next game. I played Metal Gear Solid through about 4 times, and MGS2 through twice. My estimation is if $7.50 == 2 hours of entertainment for movies, then $50 == 13.3 hours of entertainment for movies. Correct? In that case, spending $50 for a game, even if it's only a 25-hour long game, is much more of a bargain than going to th
    • On average an American will spend 75 hours this year playing videogames .. eclipsing that of DVD or tape rentals today.

      You really can make statistics say anything you want. Nevermind that a movie lasts 2 hours (maybe 4 if you're an Oliver Stone fan), whereas a game is required to supply 50+ hours of gameplay or it's considered a waste of money.

      I'm not sure I understand your objection. Sure the average time for the two activities differ in their unit length--I get the point that we see more movies but

      • There are a few things to take into account:
        75 hours means the average person is playing 2 games a year. *cough*I have a hard time keeping to 2 games a month*cough* (and the latter may illustrate a point, my girlfriend plays more than 75 hours every 2 months and I don't consider her much more than a casual gamer).

        Also, the amount of time watching movies would include movies purchased, movies seen in theaters, and movies watched on TV (incl. premium TV such as HBO). Most people I know that regularly rent mo

  • Cheap! (Score:2, Interesting)

    by JM Apocalypse ( 630055 )
    You also have to realize that a huge amount of games are made for the sole purpose of promoting a movie or other product. Most are made very quickly, and you can tell by the quality (** cough ** Harry Potter ** cough **). But, companies like id are there spending years making games, and create a solid game, but making small amounts of profit out of it. I have tried playing these games, and it looks like very little effort even went into them. Join with me, fellow /.ers, and boycott games!

    Well ... at l
    • I think the previous Harry Potter game was pretty good actually and it wasn't made to promote the movie, that's the same as saying the book was written to promote the movie.

      And I think it is time for id to start a new franchise that is not doom or quake. I see a lot of complaining about other companies making sequels to popular games but almost noone complaining about doom and quake beeing sequelized.

      • I think the previous Harry Potter game was pretty good actually and it wasn't made to promote the movie, that's the same as saying the book was written to promote the movie.

        If a game came out to promote Order of the Phoenix then this would be true - but make no mistake, the recent games out at the same time as the movie are indeed movie tie-ins. And a closer analogy - the mass market standard sized paperbacks released alongside the movies are made to promote the movies.

    • But, companies like id are there spending years making games, and create a solid game, but making small amounts of profit out of it.

      Yeah, that's why Carmack has a handful of Ferraris and builds rockets (to carry people into space) in his spare time, because they're making small profits, off two of the best selling PC franchises of all time combined with the best-selling FPS engines.

  • MMOG Cashflow (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    The Sims online is a failure with just under 10k people paying $10 a month?

    That's still $100k a month. Even paying for the huge pipe the game's servers need, there's still gonna be left over cash.

    People tend to forget games like Evercrack, DAOC, even SWG, are huge cash cows.

    Maybe if Sims Online drops below 5k users then there may be some issues with supporting constant developer updates, but even then, the game still makes enough money for it to live on.

    • Re:MMOG Cashflow (Score:4, Insightful)

      by NonSequor ( 230139 ) on Wednesday September 03, 2003 @01:26AM (#6856648) Journal
      I could be wrong, but I don't think that the profit is as good as you would imply. In order to keep subscribers in an MMOG, you have to continue to employ artists and programmers to provide new content and fix whatever problems there may be (MMOG players are the bitchiest of all gamers). On top of that, these games have very long development cycles and so the company needs a lot of cash to offset the development costs.
      • This is such a bad model. An MMOG should a be place where people can go and make their own content. It should be a world full of creativity. Instead, MMOGs are populated with "entertainment" pumped out by artists and programmers.
    • My guess is that over 1/2 of those current subscribers just haven't figured out how to cancel the automatic payment from their credit card.

      I paid for a few extra months because I kept forgetting to remove it...and 'Sims Online' was constantly within my radar. I would guess that many parents out there who subscribed for their kids just forgot about the whole thing...but it keeps charging them every month- but the kids aren't playing it.
    • MMOs are *very* expensive to run. It's not just the network pipe. It's:

      1) *peak* bandwidth (not average bandwidth)

      Typically any ISP will charge for peak, not average bandwidth. That means if a MMOG has a very low bandwidth usage for 23.99 hours a day, and then they get just one big usage spike (like when a patch is released) then the peak usage is charged for the whole month.

      Bandwidth costs are often calculated as 20 to 30% of gross monthly operating costs -- maybe $10,000 - $20,000 per month as a S

  • Advertisers have known about this for a while now (Score:3, Interesting)

    by tessaiga ( 697968 ) on Tuesday September 02, 2003 @11:59PM (#6856256)

    Just as Ford shelled out to have 007 drive an Aston Martin in "Die Another Day", car manufacturers will go out of their way to provide prototype designs and specs for their new muscle cars for inclusion into games like Grand Turismo. As the article points out, gamers spend enormous amounts of time with a good game, which gives your product much better exposure than a 30-second TV commercial or a print ad.

  • ...in the Offline Online Game graveyard? I see that The Sims Online seems to have died horribly. We're now getting all the pre-release hype about Ultima X: Origins (or whatever), but will that be yet another EA online flop?

  • Yuch. (Score:1)

    by luekj ( 692478 )
    EA sucks, at least right now they do. They should stop sucking and start losing some money like civilized gaming companies. Sheesh.

  • $50 (Score:5, Funny)

    by LazyBoy ( 128384 ) on Wednesday September 03, 2003 @12:58AM (#6856541)
    Within three weeks [of release, Madden NFL] grossed $100 million -- two million copies sold at $50 a pop.
    The obvious answer is to charge $50 for movie tickets and CDs.

  • 75? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by August_zero ( 654282 ) on Wednesday September 03, 2003 @03:17AM (#6856908)
    On average an American will spend 75 hours this year playing videogames, more than double the amount of time spent gaming in 1997

    Dear God! When Wind Waker came out I spent like 50 hours in a weeks time with it, I picked up Disgaea last Thursday and I was at 30 hours by Sunday.

    Either 75 is a really low estimate (thats what, an hour and 15 min a week?) Or I can expect some friends and family to be ambushing me with an intervention pretty soon....
    • Either 75 is a really low estimate ...
      Their average would be across ALL Americans (hence the 'On average an American...'), which includes your ma, da and all sorts of other people who never actually play games.

  • Now does anybody have a job for me in this supposedly booming industry?

    One that I can actually live on?

    I'm fluent in over six million forms of cummunication... sigh.

  • Now that games are selling more and becoming a common past-time, will it ever reach a stage where they will eventually become cheaper? Will we start seeing games available on average for $25 a piece or will a new model for distribution be required for costs for the end user to be reduced?

    • Unfortunately, lower prices have little to do with game costs, or with how many people buy it. The way games are priced nowadays is really simple: "Whatever the market can bear". If going to the movies costed $50, nobody would go watch one, since the average moviegoer desn't believe that price is right, and would switch to other forms of entertainment. Thus, the studios/theatres keep the prices lower.

      The videogame publishers believe that if they released new games at $20-30 a pop from week one their profi

      • There is limited truth to this. The trick comes in when someone has a middle of the road game that will compete with other middle of the road games for the gamer dollar. If one company drops their price by five or ten dollars they may be able to steal market share from a competitor. If this starts happening, then competitive pressure will push down prices. Unfortunately for gamers right now, we seem to really want individual titles and don't walk into the store and pick up whatever looks good and is cheap.

  • P2P influences? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by neglige ( 641101 ) on Wednesday September 03, 2003 @05:21AM (#6857197)
    Music? Sales down. Hollywood? Hit or miss.

    Now, how much does filesharing influence this? For music, I'd say quite a bit. Not so much for movies - it's l33t to have the latest blockbuster on (S)VCD, even before the premiere, but in the end - if you liked the movie - you still go to the theatre and watch it on the big screen. Supposedly true for music CDs also, but I guess to a lesser extend.

    What about games? Yes, you can find virtually any title on (most of) your favourite P2P network. Documentation may be missing, or may be included as a PDF, but there are commercial box version available that do not offer much more than that, especially since the advent of DVD cases...

    So either John and Jane Doe take delight in d/l movies, but not games, or the number of people playing a game are much larger than the sales figures. If you have a pirated version of the game, the drawbacks are much lower than those of a pirated movie. And I'm not even convinced that the majority uses the pirated games as a "full demo" and buys the game afterwards, if they like it.

    Just my 2 cents. I would be nice to have numbers so a definite statement could be made... :)
    • Now, how much does filesharing influence this? For music, I'd say quite a bit. Not so much for movies - it's l33t to have the latest blockbuster on (S)VCD, even before the premiere, but in the end - if you liked the movie - you still go to the theatre and watch it on the big screen. Supposedly true for music CDs also, but I guess to a lesser extend.

      I think the music industry screwed themselves out of this by treating MP3s the same as they would full piracy, and by charging nearly as much for downloaded mu
  • As was recently revealed Star Wars Galaxies reportedly has already over 275,000 subscribers, (sorry I dont have a link to article right now, perhaps someone else can supply). The SWG subscription is what most consider a little (a lot) on the high side at $15 dollars a month. Which comes out over $4 million per month just in subscription fees!

    Being an avid fan of SWG, I can only see this number steadily increasing, especially if the developers can continue to fix problem areas of the game. This isnt even
  • "Within three weeks [of release, Madden NFL] grossed $100 million -- two million copies sold at $50 a pop. In roughly the same period, the summer hit movie Seabiscuit returned $78 million."

    Yeah, and Spiderman grossed $114 in 3 DAYS. The Matrix Reloaded grossed $94 million or so in 3 DAYS. And since when is Seabiscuit a "summer hit movie"? No offense to horse-lovers out there (you perverts), but I don't know anybody who's even slightly interested in it. I don't know anybody who's seen it, or wants to see

Slashdot Top Deals

Without life, Biology itself would be impossible.

Close