Interesting article, but that comment makes me take it all with a grain of salt.

For example with online games advertising is huge. The number of free online flash games that are being developed is staggering.

Subscription based sites like Club Penguin have done great.

Casual games are booming although the price points need to come down to the $5-$10 range.

In game sales and micro transactions for items within games will also grow to be big.

So if you are developing a game there are many ways to make moeny.Will see how big this all gets.

SIMs alone brought in $4B.

9:47 PM

Will see.

Wrong site to say this on, but movies are old hat; they are now secondary forms of entertainment. I can download movies from my PC, XBox 360 or PS3 and stream them to my TV whenever I want. Which is less and less of the time having seen the crap that keeps coming out.

And video games are just getting better. Online play, interaction with a community, emotional highs and lows, rollercoaster stories and they’re fun.

Can’t remember the last time I went to movie here in LA and had fun.

I saw the GTA4 demo and it looks good. Real REal good! (Sorry Iron Man but your days are numbered! - Especially since GTA has the New York/Sopranos vibe going. Plus the realism factor.) Vice City was kind of cartoony but you could have fun soaking up the Miami sun just driving around listening to the radio — not killing anyone!

But I won’t be buying GTA4 because I don’t want to shell out hundreds of extra dollars for the hardware. On another note, the violence is pretty deplorable. It was an issue before but I just thrust myself into it and enjoyed it. but I’ve evolved a bit (I like to think) and don’t want to put junk food into my brain.

By third-party game supporters I mean the thousands game server providers for online gaming, and software makers such as teamspeak, xfire, and ventrilo.

This also doesn’t include the millions of dollars people pay for membership into leagues such as CEVO, Major League Gaming, etc. etc.

Not to mention, there are no high dollar actors to pay. The highest pay gamer in the world (John Wendell aka Fatal1ty (sp)) - makes around 120k a year, which is chump change by Hollywood standards.

That which is unknown and threatening = loathsome, the devil, the root of all evil, etc…

60 bucks, 10 hours, 6 bucks/hour entertainment cost.

Not a bad value. No one mentions this.

Also, bizarrely, because there are so many games, the industry and marketing are almost entirely reviews-driven, meaning that a handful of influential reviewers giving something an “8.9″ or whatever impacts sales exponentially. Games are budgeted to that - with a VP commonly saying something like, “Let’s go for a 90th percentile” on this game and spend more money knowing that if the aggregate rating on a game (in a ten “star” type system) is in the top 10 percent, then it’ll sell as there are legions of game buyers who will only drop that kind of cash on something that’s been signed off on by the critics.

Yes, it’s bizarre.

Look at the Activision/Vivendi merger, which earlier this month was approved by the SEC and - today, I believe - was approved by the EU. You have big, huge, profitable Vivendi who has a ton of money due to one single game - “World of Warcraft.” This game and the mountains of money they make off of it allows them to release tons and tons of those “$10 million hoping to make $12 millon, but more often making $3 or $4 million” games each year. They are merging with - or more accurately, purchasing Activision with all that money functionally to replace their low margin infrastructure with Activision’s tradition of much fewer titles, much higher budgets and much better quality and sales.

Kind of like the perception of Paramount when they bought DreamWorks hoping to replace all their creative types with the DreamWorks brand.

Vivendi will probably lay off tons of people to be replaced by Activision folks and you will see a more streamlined (read: shareholder friendly) portfolio moving forward as - like in the movie business - profits are put ahead of creativity.

It was bound to happen as just too much money is being made out there for a whole slew of MBAs to attach themselves, kick out the actual game-playing nerds who started the companies and use buzzwords like “maximize audience share” et. al.

You have to wonder if, say, a real masterpiece like “Bioshock” will actually even have a place in the new business world of video games when the people holding the purse strings become like Hollywood agents who only actually go to movies when they’re a client’s or to be seen at a premiere - never really just for a Friday night’s enjoyment.