It’s been two weeks since Modern Warfare 2 was released worldwide, and the hype and controversy has had time to die down to a level you can shout over. One thing that has emerged from the fallout of the nuclear explosion that was the MW2’s release, is that the game has broken records for revenue in the first five days, not just in the gaming industry but also in the movie industry. Has gaming finally come into it’s own, or are the perceptions here a little skewed?The two previous record holders prior to MW2 were Grand Theft Auto 4 in the gaming world, and Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince in the world of movies. As you would expect, Harry Potter would have beat out GTA4 had the two been compared, but until now the gaming and movie industries have been kept separate. MW2 has emphatically beaten both of these and everything from proclamations of gamings superiority over the movie industry to comparisons of value for money have emerged all over the world media. So lets start with a comparison of value.
Unfortunately, both movies and games are subjective; what is a good game or movie for some could be an appalling experience for others. You simply cannot say one game is better than another because, no matter how glaringly obvious one games flaws are, there will always be someone who will like it. This means the only way to compare the value of a game is to look at numbers- I know I know! the numbers game, statistics and the like, very rarely gets things accurate, but we can’t paint a picture.
At the time of writing this article, the price of a cinema ticket at my local cinemas averages at around £7.20, The RRP price of MW2 was £39.99. So on the face of it you’re getting a better deal with the movies, but the obvious differences throw a big fat hurdle at that argument; a film is a short, passive experience, a game is a longer interactive experience. Films can vary from an hour and a half to over three hours, and games can vary from seven hours to over forty hours, but according to the IMDB Film Length Project, the average length of a film in the last decade is 129 minutes, but for the sake of ease, we’ll round it down ten minutes to a straight two hours. Games, however, are harder to quantify. Firstly you have the vastly varying length of the main plot. For some games, the main plot may be all there is to the game, and this can range from seven to sixteen hours, but most games these days have additional content that can stretch play time for some games (example: Fallout 3) upwards of 40 hours. Again, for the sake of ease I will fabricate an average of ten hours. So, if the average game length is five times that of the average movie length, then that £7.20 cinema ticket times five comes to £36. So when you look at it like that, movies are better value for money… just.
This, however, is a slightly unfair comparison. A movie ticket is not analogous to buying a video game. Part of what you are paying when you go to the cinema is the experience. You are paying for the communal activity of going to see a film in a large group, on a huge screen with perfectly tailored surround sound and all the trappings that have become traditional for the cinema, such as popcorn and loud, slurped drinks. People may have issues with the idiots at the back of the cinema, or the one person who always forgets to turn their phone off, but the movie going experience has become something that people expect, and has remained relatively unchanged for over fifty years. So what is analogous to buying a video game that you play on your television in your home? A DVD.
I’m going to use DVD’s for my comparison because Blu-ray’s are outrageously overpriced for what you get and, currently, most people still own more DVD’s than Blu-rays. So sticking with Harry Potter and MW2. The RRP of Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince was £24.99. Now as we’re working on the inaccurate statistics style of comparison here, it’s worth noting that Half Blood Prince is 153 minutes, not the 2 hours we have been working with, so in the interests of fairness I’ll assume the average price for a new DVD is £19.99. I know there are many that are cheaper, but this comparison is looking more at high end releases on both sides.
At £19.99, a two hour film doesn’t compare so well to our average game; £99.95 in fact. That’s nearly a hundred pounds to get the same amount of entertainment hours that you could get from £39.99 of video game. At the time of writing this article, Harry Potter is selling on Amazon for £13.98; a £6 price drop, but still it works out at just under £70 when compared to a video game. Take from this what you will; movies are overpriced, gaming is under priced, manufacturers charge too much for the physical media of a DVD. You can argue the subtleties of this comparison but with such a large difference in value it’s hard to ignore that there may not be some merit to this kind of analysis. The average retail DVD would have to sell for a little under £8 to match the average video game for value for money, and very few successful films hit the shelves at that price.
So what did I mean by the perceptions being skewed? Well it is true that MW2 has smashed records for the opening week of sales, but the comparison here is also unfair. The movie industry, unwisely in my opinion, limits the release of it’s products to cinema screens. Fearing that if the media was available for download or physical media purchase straight away, it would hurt their movie ticket revenue, they hold off DVD (and other media) release until they are satisfied that the last of the money that they could squeeze from the box office has been drained. This seems silly because, as I stated earlier, going to the movie is an experience in itself. A lot of people who, upon going to the cinema to watch a film find that they had the times wrong or that screening has sold out, will just get a ticket for a different film.
Movie studio’s over estimate the importance of their films in the cinema experience.
In truth, if Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince had been released on physical (and download) media at the same time as it’s cinematic debut, it would probably have set the bar that MW2 has just broken so high that only the next Harry Potter films could break it, but the movie industry apparently doesn’t want that. So to sum up, the gaming industry is becoming as big as the movie industry… but I don’t think it’s quite there yet.
Related Links
- Buy Modern Warfare 2 for Xbox 360 | Playstation 3 | PC
- Infinity Ward Website
- Modern Warfare 2 sales figures
