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0 pointsevrydayhustling4y ago0 comments

If you allocate all those hours to one gamer, there's no contest. Check out the dev costs of games here [1] to the "net negative" (no marketing) costs for movies here [2] -- 4 games break $100M while you need $200M as a movie to get on the list. So, twice as much for 2h of content!

But if you factor in audience size, things get more complicated. Red Dead 2 sold about 38M copies, a near record, but Avengers Endgame reached something like 250-300M people at the box office, even before streaming etc.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most_expensive_video_g... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most_expensive_films

0 pointsevrydayhustling4y ago0 comments

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most_expensive_video_g... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most_expensive_films

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4 comments · 2 top-level

Someone4y ago· 1 in thread

I think the OP's argument is that you also have to factor in hours played, and that, per player-hour, respectively movie-watcher-hour, the game is a lot cheaper.

300M movie watchers is about half a billion hours. If those 38M games all had only one player (probably fairly close) they only have to play the game for 15 hours on average to get at half a billion player hours.

https://howlongtobeat.com/game?id=27100 claims it takes at least 49 hours to beat it, so it’s likely that the game was played for more hours than the movie was watched.

JulianK4y ago

As an added layer I suspect that most people watch the entire movie but most people don't finish games.

There's a percentage of players of course that will play a game for many hundreds or thousands of hours but the calculation is shakier when you take the falloff of players into account/

https://www.ign.com/articles/2014/03/17/gdc-most-players-don...

tsimionescu4y ago· 1 in thread

Isn't a huge part of that money going to the actors, not into more typical actual labor?

Games take a lot longer to produce than films (in total, per hour of content that may not be true).

toyg4y ago

Not that huge, really. A-list actors will get 10-20m tops, add all the others and you're probably looking at around 30m-40m over a budget of 300m-500m.

The largest expenses are related to FX costs and marketing. That's why the cost of low-effects movies falls very rapidly under 100m, you can film a run-of-the-mill romcom for less than 10m.

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