Movies may be watched by billions of people, but did you know video games make more money?
These days, everyone is a gamer. Nearly every person on the planet plays something, whether it is League of Legends, Call of Duty, or Pokémon GO. Even those Candy Crush fans contribute to the annual revenues of the video game industry. So, it’s no surprise the industry is growing, but just how popular has gaming become?
Video games made $60 billion more than the movie industry in 2016
The 2016 revenue for the gaming market from NewZoo.
We’re talking box office here. Yep, the gaming industry generated about $99 billion in revenues in 2016. The box office sales made about $38 billion. It is expected that the distance between the two will continue to grow as the years go on. Of course this isn’t including DVD revenue (but as you can see, DVD sales are drastically declining), but the initial first week explosion of sales is astounding when it comes to video games.
Why is the video game industry more lucrative than the movie industry?
Business is growing fast for the gaming industry and the gap is not closing in anytime soon.
Think of it this way; how much does a movie ticket cost? No more than ten dollars. How much does a new video game cost? About $60, right? Sure, more people watch movies than play video games, but when you add in DLC and little in-game purchases, well, it adds up pretty quickly. This includes the sales of hardware such as gaming mouses, headsets, consoles, and computers that developers have created!
Also, the employees make much more in Hollywood. The highest paid actors have a salary of about $30 million. Video game designers, producers, and even developers are lucky to hit $100,000. This enormous gap gives the video game industry a lot more to work with.
A comparison of the biggest movie and games and their sales in the first week
A comparison from 2008.
Let’s start with a popular game/movie from 2008. The Dark Knight, a largely popular movie, made $239 million its first week. That’s a lot. But if you look at the image above of Grand Theft Auto IV you can see that it made over twice as much.
This was a few years ago. Let’s take a look at 2016. The most popular movie of the year was Captain America: Civil War. The most popular video game was Pokémon Sun and Moon. The movie made about $180 million the first week. The Pokémon game sold about 10 million copies worldwide the first week. If the game cost $40, that is $400 million dollars in the first week alone!
The 10 biggest players in the video game industry
Everyone’s favorite classic video game company.
It’s no surprise that Nintendo is the biggest gaming company in the world. They have been for quite some time now. They are the master of all gaming, and they reach the biggest audience. Even anti-gamers know who Mario, Donkey Kong, and Zelda are (or at least think she’s a boy in a green hat)
Coming in second is Rockstar Games. They create ground-breaking titles such as the Grand Theft Auto series, Red Dead Redemption (which is getting a sequel very soon), and Max Payne.
Valve is a little known company by its names, but when I start throwing out names like Half-life, Portal, Team Fortress and Left 4 Dead, I start to get a rise.
Although Capcom and Square Enix are right up there with the rest, Sony is one of the biggest companies in the world. Final Fantasy and Kingdom Hearts have reached millions of people and are some of the best franchises to grace consoles everywhere.
Ranking in at the top of the list are also Activision, Blizzard, Tencent, EA, Ubisoft, Bethesda’s Elder Scrolls series, and Sega.
The 10 biggest players in the movie industry
Sony is the largest movie studio in the world.
Can you guess what the biggest movie studio is? Sure Warner Bros. and Disney are enormously popular, but they don’t quite take the cake. Nope, that would be none other than our very own Sony. Yes, Sony Entertainment owns 17% of the shares in the US and Canada. No one realizes that this company owns studios like Tri Star Pictures, Sony Pictures Animation, Destination Films, Triumph Films, Stage 6 Films and Affirm Films. These are some of the greatest of its kind in the industry. Not just a gaming company, eh?
Comcast, News Corporation (20th Century Fox), Viacom, Lionsgate, MGM, Weinstein, and Dreamworks all steal a place in the top ten biggest players in the movie industry too.
How much does it cost to make a movie vs. making a video game?
A video from Zellphie compares video games and movies.
The actual production of a blockbuster film is about $65 million. But if you count in marketing, then that brings us up to $100 million. As I said before, the employment costs are much, much higher for movies.
The average console game costs about $50 million to make. But the average PC game could be less than $10 million.
If you look at the most expensive game ever made, Grand Theft Auto V, it is about $250 million. Whereas the most expensive movie ever developed, Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides cost $350 million.
How much money is made yearly in the video games vs. the movie industry?
All for the money!
In 2013 the video game industry made twice that of the movie industry. One of the greatest factors here is that the video game industry is continuously growing and moving forward. People have always watched movies, and they always will. But their climb isn’t quite as steep as that of video games.
It is said that less than 20% of people go to the movies on a regular basis. This is because people now prefer watching TV or movies at home, on their PC, or even…their video game console. These over 40% of people play video games regularly.
One thing that makes the yearly revenue of movies vs. video games so complicated is that they are often overlapped. Star Wars for example. They have twelve movies. Yet, they also have how many games now? One-hundred, perhaps, I no longer have an ability to keep track.
What about Prince of Persia or Sony movies? They crossover to both categories.
It is safe to say that the video game revenue, which reached nearly $100 billion this year, is now constantly twice as much as the movie industry, which didn’t hit $40 billion in box office sales.
So, as you can see, the ever-rising industry of video games has now become much larger than that of Hollywood. In fact, their presence has become quite dominant in the world today.
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