Yahoo News is reporting $17 billion was spent on new video games in 2007.
That's 'billion'. With a "B". For comparison; the 2006 gross domestic product of Iceland was around 16 billion US dollars.
The news wasn't the dollar figure itself; rather, the news was the gap between video game sales and box office returns. It widened again this year. People spent $9.7 billion on movie tickets. And no, I'm not sure either number is worldwide or US only. Y!News didn't feel it was important enough to say.
Doesn't surprise me, really. The National Association of Theatre Owners reported that the average ticket price in the US for 2006 (the most recent number available) was $6.55. Which, by my math, would be around 1.48 billion trips to the movies each year. Taking a look at most of the movies released lately, I'm finding running times between 80 and 120 minutes, so I'm going to figure, at 100 minutes per movie, that's about 2.5 billion hours of movie time per year. Compare $17B, at $60 a head - figuring every game at the high end of the console game-only market - is 283M games sold. Still an impressive number, but dwarfed by the box office trips. But then again, compare the average straight playthrough time of a video game - discarding RPG[2]s which can offer anywhere from12 to over 200 hours of play and MMORPG[3]s - I'd guesstimate 6 hours per game bought, or 1.7 billion hours, which is comparable.
But truth told, I don't know why they are comparing those two (VG sales vs BO return) numbers.
First, we don't know - or rather, the article doesn't differentiate - if that $17B figure is software only; or software and hardware. Which would seem to make a hell of a difference; even discarding the secondary market for accessories (controllers, memory cards, etc.) and the growing gaming-PC market, the cost per console runs about 5-10x more than the software (150-600 per console vs 30-60 per title, discarding for a moment games like Rock Band, Guitar Hero, and the Singstar series which are bundle packaged with specialized controllers), making a significant difference in weighing and comparisons.
But that's not addressing the more fundamental problem with this sort of comparison. A more telling comparison - in my eyes, at least - would be VG sales against DVD sales. Because, quite frankly, a video game purchase is much more akin to buying a DVD than going to the movies. Especially given the movie house's explanation of the rising costs of tickets: you go to the movies for the experience of going out to the movies. Quite frankly, you would buy neither a video game nor a DVD for the experience of buying it, you buy it in order to use it. So, I'd like to see a comparison of the units sold for DVDs vs Video Game software. Quite frankly, I put the hardware in the same category as DVD players anyway. You get the XBox 360 in order to play one format of games and the Wii to play another format; you buy an HD-DVD player to play one format and a BluRay deck to play another. The only reason to choose one over another is limited availability of software titles. That is one place where I'll give the electronics industry some credit. Format wars are decided fairly quickly (the writable CD extension mess notwithstanding). Heck, even the movie rental services have an analog in the MMORPG subscription service.
Where was I actually going with this? Hell if I know. I just thought it was interesting.
First, we don't know - or rather, the article doesn't differentiate - if that $17B figure is software only; or software and hardware. Which would seem to make a hell of a difference; even discarding the secondary market for accessories (controllers, memory cards, etc.) and the growing gaming-PC market, the cost per console runs about 5-10x more than the software (150-600 per console vs 30-60 per title, discarding for a moment games like Rock Band, Guitar Hero, and the Singstar series which are bundle packaged with specialized controllers), making a significant difference in weighing and comparisons.
But that's not addressing the more fundamental problem with this sort of comparison. A more telling comparison - in my eyes, at least - would be VG sales against DVD sales. Because, quite frankly, a video game purchase is much more akin to buying a DVD than going to the movies. Especially given the movie house's explanation of the rising costs of tickets: you go to the movies for the experience of going out to the movies. Quite frankly, you would buy neither a video game nor a DVD for the experience of buying it, you buy it in order to use it. So, I'd like to see a comparison of the units sold for DVDs vs Video Game software. Quite frankly, I put the hardware in the same category as DVD players anyway. You get the XBox 360 in order to play one format of games and the Wii to play another format; you buy an HD-DVD player to play one format and a BluRay deck to play another. The only reason to choose one over another is limited availability of software titles. That is one place where I'll give the electronics industry some credit. Format wars are decided fairly quickly (the writable CD extension mess notwithstanding). Heck, even the movie rental services have an analog in the MMORPG subscription service.
Where was I actually going with this? Hell if I know. I just thought it was interesting.
[1] http://www.natoonline.org/statisticstickets.htm
[2] Role Playing Games. Game genre characterized by the player's characters gaining abilities based on the number and difficulty of enemies faced, see Final Fantasy, Pokemon; compare 'Adventure' games where additional abilities are gained by reaching certain plot-points (Legend of Zelda) or locating 'power-up' items (Super Mario Bros, Halo3).
[3] Massively Multiplayer Online RPG. Sub-genre of RPGs featuring persistent online worlds in which a player's character is able to interact with other players' characters. See Everquest, World of Warcraft.
[2] Role Playing Games. Game genre characterized by the player's characters gaining abilities based on the number and difficulty of enemies faced, see Final Fantasy, Pokemon; compare 'Adventure' games where additional abilities are gained by reaching certain plot-points (Legend of Zelda) or locating 'power-up' items (Super Mario Bros, Halo3).
[3] Massively Multiplayer Online RPG. Sub-genre of RPGs featuring persistent online worlds in which a player's character is able to interact with other players' characters. See Everquest, World of Warcraft.
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