Just reading the delightful articles of Gamespot, at Freeplay Brad Shoemaker makes his point on ever rising production costs of games and he compares them to movie industry by example being Microsofts Halo 2, it sold so good that it toppled most Hollywood films (or so MS stated).
Yes, games like Halo 2 can easily make more money than any Hollywood film, first of all I use two products as compare points. Halo 2 and Spider-man 2.
Production costs are rising, but truth still being that you could do two Halo 2s with the Spider-man 2 special effects budget of 54million dollars, so hell yeah Halo 2 can make easily more money than a movie like Spidey 2.
But halo made 125million dollars in it's first 24hours, compared to Spidey 2, it is more than it's 3-day gross, pretty impressive, but then again, Spidey 2 was also one of the best selling DVDs last year, and tbh if every person who saw Spidey 2 paid 50 dollars to see the movie or own the DVD I'd guess Spidey 2 would be the winner hands down, now you might ask where did I get the price of 50 dollars for a movie ticket or DVD that is insane, well call me doctor and take your medicine since that (or even more) is what you and couple of million others paid for Halo 2 (a game that cost less to do than Spidey 2 special effects).
So why do keep comparing these two industries with each other? Well beats me, people just like to see all entertainment all alike, but for that matter we could compare Formula 1 and game industry, both are valid entertainment, or how about NFL and games industry?
Yeah, I agree, movie industry is the one closest to game industry since they both have people working around the same concepts like actors, effect makers and script writers, but let's be honest too, they still are so different that we should not so hastily compare them together like apples to apples, games usually take very long time to make compared to movies that have actual making process of less than a year or around a year, also can we compare all movies made all around the world or are we just comparing Hollywood movies and games? Blockbuster movies eat 10 times the budget blockbuster games do, but blockbuster games cost around 5 times the movie costs on DVD. So every time you see a apples to apples comparision with games and movies, just take it with a grain of salt.
