titles compared to text, music or non-interactive moving images. Beyond this, the very way in which games are consumed makes them a very different case to non-interactive media. A brand new mainstream game costs $40 or more, and in return it offers a ‘live’ experience that cannot simply be reproduced or consumed passively. Games are premium products, and are perceived as such.
The time a player will invest in playing a major new game is typically at least twenty hours, a figure that in the case of multi-player or role-playing games may run into the hundreds or even thousands. This means that ill-made, disposable products simply don’t work in the gaming mainstream. The most financially successful console game of all time, Grand Theft Auto IV , is designed to take around 100 hours to complete, a tribute to the complexities of its non-linear virtual world. With a budget estimated at over $100 million, the game credits a production team of over 550 people, plus almost double that number again of voice actors and performers used for motion-capturing virtual citizens. The result was both a brilliantly realised virtual world and the most successful release of an entertainment product in history. Retailing at $60, GTA IV grossed $500 million in revenues in its first week on sale in April 2008, $310 million of which came on its first day, substantially more than the previous holders for the most successful book ( Harry Potter & The Deathly Hallows at $220 million in twenty-four hours) and the most successful film ( Spider-Man 3 at $60 million).
Meanwhile, in online gaming, the biggest titles cost around $10 per month to play, and offer different but similarly robust reasons for spending to digital consumers: the fact that the entire point of gaming in a virtual online world is the people you get to play with, and the knowledge that your achievements are both valid and cannot be taken away from you so long as you keep paying your monthly bill. Outside of the official realm of an online game, there is no gaming community to speak of and thus no incentive to invest time or energy in playing something that offers no guarantee of fairness, regular updates, reliability or company. As with GTA IV , the business of building a rewarding and engrossing virtual world from scratch – let alone maintaining it – is extremely labour-intensive, and essential if a consumer’s interest is going to be maintained. In this context, the most successful online games rank among the world’s most valuable media properties, with the most famous of all – World of Warcraft – generating over $1 billion a year in revenues from over twelve million subscribers.
The story of the gaming industry is, it seems, a remarkable and cloudless tale of expansion, with money virtually making itself for all involved. Even in the advertising sector, where digital revenues across other media have proved unable even to approach the levels of the pre-digital age, the video games market is growing by more than 10 per cent a year, thanks to the hundreds of millions of eyeballs now watching games for hours every day. And yet, when viewed by sector rather than under the umbrella of global statistics, gaming reveals itself to be a rather more complicated and contradictory field than the overarching trends imply.
Much like most other creative sectors, the video games industry is divided between those companies who fund and distribute games, the publishers, and those who actually make them, the developers. It’s a divide that exists for sensible historical reasons. Funding, sales and distribution expertise don’t tend to coincide with creative and production skills, although the giant companies of the gaming world – Sony, Nintendo, Sega, Electronic Arts and others – encompass both publishing and development divisions. The industry also consists of two parallel sectors: games on consoles, and games on computers. Computers are a constantly evolving field, but consoles
The time a player will invest in playing a major new game is typically at least twenty hours, a figure that in the case of multi-player or role-playing games may run into the hundreds or even thousands. This means that ill-made, disposable products simply don’t work in the gaming mainstream. The most financially successful console game of all time, Grand Theft Auto IV , is designed to take around 100 hours to complete, a tribute to the complexities of its non-linear virtual world. With a budget estimated at over $100 million, the game credits a production team of over 550 people, plus almost double that number again of voice actors and performers used for motion-capturing virtual citizens. The result was both a brilliantly realised virtual world and the most successful release of an entertainment product in history. Retailing at $60, GTA IV grossed $500 million in revenues in its first week on sale in April 2008, $310 million of which came on its first day, substantially more than the previous holders for the most successful book ( Harry Potter & The Deathly Hallows at $220 million in twenty-four hours) and the most successful film ( Spider-Man 3 at $60 million).
Meanwhile, in online gaming, the biggest titles cost around $10 per month to play, and offer different but similarly robust reasons for spending to digital consumers: the fact that the entire point of gaming in a virtual online world is the people you get to play with, and the knowledge that your achievements are both valid and cannot be taken away from you so long as you keep paying your monthly bill. Outside of the official realm of an online game, there is no gaming community to speak of and thus no incentive to invest time or energy in playing something that offers no guarantee of fairness, regular updates, reliability or company. As with GTA IV , the business of building a rewarding and engrossing virtual world from scratch – let alone maintaining it – is extremely labour-intensive, and essential if a consumer’s interest is going to be maintained. In this context, the most successful online games rank among the world’s most valuable media properties, with the most famous of all – World of Warcraft – generating over $1 billion a year in revenues from over twelve million subscribers.
The story of the gaming industry is, it seems, a remarkable and cloudless tale of expansion, with money virtually making itself for all involved. Even in the advertising sector, where digital revenues across other media have proved unable even to approach the levels of the pre-digital age, the video games market is growing by more than 10 per cent a year, thanks to the hundreds of millions of eyeballs now watching games for hours every day. And yet, when viewed by sector rather than under the umbrella of global statistics, gaming reveals itself to be a rather more complicated and contradictory field than the overarching trends imply.
Much like most other creative sectors, the video games industry is divided between those companies who fund and distribute games, the publishers, and those who actually make them, the developers. It’s a divide that exists for sensible historical reasons. Funding, sales and distribution expertise don’t tend to coincide with creative and production skills, although the giant companies of the gaming world – Sony, Nintendo, Sega, Electronic Arts and others – encompass both publishing and development divisions. The industry also consists of two parallel sectors: games on consoles, and games on computers. Computers are a constantly evolving field, but consoles
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