In a post last December, Venturebeat declared that “video games are the new movies,” citing how Call of Duty Black Ops game sales had topped $1 billion faster than any game in history, and much faster than the time it takes for a blockbuster movie to do so. The New York Post also recently noted how the modern video game industry appear to be, unlike the film and music industries, somewhat immune to the perils of a recession.
“As music labels and Hollywood studios grapple with declining sales of CDs and DVDs, the videogame business seems to be having a much better time,” the paper opined. “US game sales rose 3 percent last month, to $1.36 billion, compared to figures in the year-ago period, industry sales figures released yesterday show … The console segment sales gained 12 percent, with Microsoft Xbox jumping 27 percent — while Wii rose 14 percent and Sony Playstation 3 rose 12 percent.”
To further help illustrate how movies are having their asses handed to them by video games, here’s a handy infographic created by G+ showing how video game sales have stacked up against movie releases in first week sales over the last five years. It’s quite eye-opening…
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Games are way more expensive then movies, so the fact that they earn more then movies isn’t that big of a deal.
Add Halo CE:A and Skyrim to Fall 2011 and hell yeah we’ll kick movies ass.
I don’t know, I think it is kind of a big deal and shows how video games are “becoming” the next craze or whatever. A game is roughly 50-60$, a movie ticket is what? 10?, Cod Black Ops sold 650 million. Iron Man 2 had 128 million. 128 x 5 = 640 million. That is still more earnings if the prices were scaled. And also with how much more expensive games are its even more amazing that they are this close.
all Hollywood has to do is make a movie that doesn’t suck
Because all video games are awesome? Most video games, like most movies suck. They are both hit driven businesses- and if you want to compare, which seems silly, compare on total people, not revenue – the cost difference absolutely matters. Why cant games just celebrate their own success rather than constantly trying to bring down movies?