Home entertainment trumps video games

Since the early 1980s, people have speculated that the popularity of interactive entertainment was hurting ticket sales at movie theatres.

In 1982, the New York Times reported that video games grossed $8 billion a year, “compared with about $3bn for all the movies shown in theatres”. More striking, the paper reported that

had “grossed about $1.2bn – three times as much as history’s most popular movie, has earned in the five years since its initial release”

The claim that the size of the videogame industry rivals or exceeds Hollywood has been a staple of mainstream news reporting for more than three decades.

It’s true that Americans spent almost $24bn on video games last year, compared with a measly $11bn on movie tickets.

But the theatrical box office is not even close to the entire revenue stream for “movies” or “Hollywood”. Americans spent an additional $18bn on home entertainment such as Blu-rays, DVDs, iTunes and Netflix.

Sure, some of that money is spent to binge-watch TV shows instead of movies. But we’re already $5bn ahead of videogame revenue without considering the cost of (or the rights fees paid by) premium cable channels such as HBO.

The video-game numbers are inflated, too, by the inclusion of sales of hardware such as consoles and controllers.

The home entertainment figures don’t include the cost of things like Blu-ray players or universal remotes.

More important, dollars aren’t people. Here’s some rough maths: When

makes $1bn, it’s because 20 million people, give or take, have bought the game.

When makes $1bn, it’s because 100 million tickets were sold, more or less. Even if every ticket buyer saw the new

twice, and every player shared the game with another member of their household, the Lucas film movie would still come out ahead. ACTION: Games such as ‘Doom’ can improve your ‘perception, attention, memory, and executive functioning’, studies have found. or even Some sports, driving and adventure games might be considered “action games”, but the research has emphasised the benefits of shooters,