More and more I am becoming convinced that video games have become a cornerstone of not just ‘at home entertainment’ but as a cornerstone of entertainment. I am not a gamer myself so please don’t send me messages of being a gamer homer. I remember as a kid that video games were something I played after school and before I got out to play basketball before dinner. It was a short and sweet session of punching through blocks with Mario or Luigi. I was on shrooms’ back then: the ones that make you grow larger and allow your opponent to hit you just one more time before suffering a Goomba induced fatal would.
My buddy James directed me to this article on CNET showing GTA IV’s first week performance. $310M ONE DAY OPENING. $500M IN ITS FIRST WEEK. Is that not just ridiculous? I had a blog earlier on Iron Man’s stellar first weekend opening of ($100M). We are talking about 3x that in just one day for a gaming title. I will point out however that for every behemoth title or franchise like GTA, Halo, and Mario there will be a host of other titles that are your equivalent of Bennifer’s disastrous Gigli. It just boggles me.
GTA’s FIRST week of sales would rank it’s publisher Take-Two Games and its developer Rockstar Games (if they combined to become a ‘country’) to be 176th in GDP! They would have a higher combined gross domestic product than the following countries:
- East Timor ($472M)
- Comoros ($436M)
- Vanuatu ($421M)
- Samoa ($387M)
- The Gambia ($379M)
- Solomon Islands ($358M)
- Guinea-Bissau ($343M)
- American Samoa ($334M)
- Dominica ($268M)
- Federated States of Micronesia ($232M)
- Tonga ($219M)
- Cook Islands ($183M)
- Palau ($145M)
- Marshall Islands ($144M)
- São Tomé and PrÃncipe ($142M)
- Anguilla ($109M)
- Kiribati ($73M)
- Tuvalu ($15M)
- Niue ($10M)
That’s just ridiculous. But not as ridiculous as Gigli.
one way to adjust perspective for the difference between games and movies is the individual “ticket” cost, with a game being nearly 5x that of a film. the console is something that has long fallen into “personal ownership,” so that one person commonly owns his/her own console. So, they will need their own game, rather than sharing it. hence, 500MM and counting!!
Also, lack of piracy on such complex games makes it harder to bootleg the game industry, giving the companies an even more legit profit.
sidenote: do you remember EA’s bid (still ongoing) to buy Take Two? TT believed EA was undervaluing the company, especially in regards to GTA IV’s huge success.