Video game partisans like to talk about how video games will supplant cinema in our cultural landscape. The video game industry is already bigger than Hollywood, but video games have a long way to go before they take the place of movies. Problem number one: the structure of the game industry is half a century behind the American film industry. As Luke O'Brien explains in Slate,
Today's game industry is like Hollywood in the first half of the 20th century, when an oligopoly of studios controlled the business. Instead of MGM, Paramount, and Universal, we have Electronic Arts, Sony, and Activision.
An indy film with national distribution (say, Napoleon Dynamite, a movie that has clung, tic-like, to popular culture) cost maybe a million or two to make--beyond the limits of a MasterCard credit limit, but small potatoes compared to the $8 million average cost to create a video game. A PlayStation 3 game will run $15-$20 million, and that's just for the source code. A Sandra Bullock film will cost a lot more than that, but that's not the point. There's no scruffy fringe to the video game industry, as there is in film, publishing, or music, and that's where the dice are rolled.
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