That topic has always been a personal favorite, and the opinions, or info, I get from both parties is that both industries share a lot of similarities and only have very few points of divergence, although these ones can easily be seen as the most important ones.
The games industry is currently still growing, and becoming more and more mainstream. With this, and contrary to popular belief, only the smoke and mirrors change with it. The benefits only trickle down to a few fortunate (and skilled and savvy) individuals much like they did in all other entertainment industries when they became mainstream themselves.
That's one of the main similarity we now share with the movies industry. 1% is in the spotlight and retains the benefits (and drawbacks) this entails, while 99% stay behind the scenes and continue to work as if nothing changed. Worse, the conditions can get worse over time as more is demanded of them. After all, with mainstream comes more readily available skills and the job market then gets flooded with people who can all seemingly do the same job. This makes your work less valuable to your employer, unless you have set yourself above the rest of the crowd and he's ready to pay for such skills.
This is what happened to the movies industry when it boomed in the 30s first then progressively with the rise of the first movie stars in the 50s and 60s. And you could draw a parallel between Charlie Chaplin's United Artists venture and the current indie trend. In order to remain competitive and also to earn the respect of their industry, individuals became forced to set their own shop.
Where this comparison stops however is in the details. From a business perspective, the games industry has radically changed its business model in ways the movie industry hasn't in decades. The 90s for the games industry was the era of third party developers working independantly for publishers, then the 00s saw a radical change towards in house developments, only to see the late 00s and early 10s compensate with over the top contraction of all dev forces either by studios closures or projects cancellations.
This is due to the nature of the work. The digital nature of the games industry also makes the work very much less location dependant, unlike the movies industry. The movies industry can only outsource the digital work it needs to studios that then work very much so like the games industry ones, but consolidated around a single location all major studios that couldn't be closed down. Their only other choice to lower costs is to choose a cheap location to shoot the movie in, but that work is only very limited in time.
In comparison the games industry can only become big in places where labor is constantly cheap (Canada has been that place for the past 10 years or so, but for how long?), and all other once huge powerhouses of the industry saw their numbers dwindle recently with a lot more competition from places looking to attract this new industry.
On top of this, and whereas the movies industry is heavily dependant on faces and while one's talent is unmistakably visible to the end consumer, our media does not translate this freely to our customers, no matter how knowledgeable they are. You do not create stars in the games industry with as much ease as you do in movies. Our faces are not out there, and neither are our names. Mainstream barely knows Miyamoto. And it stops there. We don't have our Tom Cruise and George Clooney, and our work is not conducive to ever getting them.
This all isn't helping salaries in the games industry VS the movies one. And until we get our stars that commend such paychecks, in all departments, the overall level of the pay will remain lower.
