The Reason the Video Game Industry Is Bigger Than Hollywood

Tales of Vesperia continues to rock my world.  I played for several hours again today after reading wealth reports and working on the upcoming About.com content I’ve been writing this week (I tend to publish the good stuff over there in big batches because I like for it all to work together and be cohesive).  The rest of my week is going to be consumed by preparing for a Board of Directors meeting with my sporting good company, which will probably be held in Kansas City or Houston, I haven’t decided which yet.

I still think it’s funny that the 35 and under crowd – we get video games and we have made it a bigger industry than Hollywood.  Yet, statistically if you talk to someone middle age or higher, they still associate most games with 13-year-old teenage boys.  Their generation grew up going to movie theaters; our generation grew up playing Legend of Zelda on the original NES console (path through the forest to the graveyard and death mountain: left, up, left, left, down, left).

Why is the video game industry bigger than Hollywood?  I think it comes down to economics.  I look at this way … for $30 or $50, we get between 30 and 100 hours of “interactive movie”, which costs between $0.30 and $1.67 per hour of entertainment.  If you go to a movie and pay $10 for a ticket, you are paying $5 per hour (in some cases more if the film is only 1.5 hours long).  Not only is a good game cheaper in the long-run, but you can spread it out over several weeks or even a month.  That is, of course, assuming you have a life and a job.

Not to mention, if the soundtrack is fantastic, you can buy it on iTunes and you have a new favorite music collection.  There is a reason the Tokyo Symphony’s performances of Final Fantasy music are sold out rapidly each year.  The last soundtrack I bought was the entire Infinite Undiscovery album.  It was worth every penny.

In 10 or 20 years, you mark my words – I’m going to drop a ton of cash and buy myself a video game company.  I won’t show favoritism with my subsidiaries but … who am I kidding?  I’m going to love it, the insurance group, and the luxury retails more than all the rest.  That’s just the truth of it because of my personality.

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