• The value proposition is just heavily skewed towards video games. Some games cost less than a single visit to the cinema and provide heaps more entertainment. Sure, it’s different entertainment and the social aspect of going to the cinema is a factor too, but I’m not much into cinemas myself, so I know where my money goes.

    • I’m 50 and really don’t watch movies almost at all any more. They tend to be so formulaic and too long to watch at home at night. If I’m going to watch something it will likely be episodic tv series. I do still play video games on the regular though.

  • I’m an old millennial and Ive usually preferred games to movies.

    I think one reason it’s hard for me to watch movies (or even books) is having no control over the narrative. Writing in a lot of TV/movies are just too, well, stupid. Even if a game is bad, you can at least have fun with cheats/mods or having your own objectives. Movies/TV your stuck with their plot as a bystander to a story.

  • For those that are curious, here’s the exact questions used and the %s by demographic

    Generally speaking I’d also fall into the rather play games category, but it really depends on the context. Unfortunately there aren’t too many couch co-op kind of games anymore so if the goal is to spend time with someone playing a video game doesn’t often work great.

    • If you are interested, this is my Couch Coop To Do List for me and my wife (sorry for bad formatting):

      A Way Out Asterix & Obelix XXXL: The Ram From Hibernia Asterix & Obelix: Slap Them All! BattleBlock Theater Biped Bravery and Greed Bread & Fred Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons Remake Castle Crashers Cat Quest II Chariot Conduct Together! Contra: Operation Galuga Cuphead Darksiders Genesis Death Squared Degrees of Separation Divinity: Original Sin - Enhanced Edition Divinity: Original Sin II Dungeon Defenders Dungeon Golf Earth Defense Force 5 Ember Knights Escape Academy Escape Simulator Fly TOGETHER! For The King For The King II Forced From Space Fueled Up Gauntlet Golf With Your Friends Grave Danger Hammerwatch Heroes of Hammerwatch Huntdown Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes KeyWe Knights and Bikes Kukoos: Lost Pets LEGO 2K Drive LEGO City Undercover LEGO Horizon Adventures Lara Croft and the Guardian of Light Lara Croft and the Temple of Osiris Lost Castle Lovers in a Dangerous Spacetime Magicka 2 Mekazoo Metal Slug Monaco 2 Monaco: What’s Yours Is Mine Moving Out Nine Parchments Nobody Saves the World Operation: Tango Outward PHOGS! Pizza Possum Pocky & Rocky Reshrined Pode Portal 2 Rayman Legends River Tails: Stronger Together Rogue Heroes: Ruins of Tasos Rooms of Realities Rotwood Sackboy: A Big Adventure Shift Happens Sonic Superstars Spelunky Starbound Struggling Surmount Team Sonic Racing The Adventure Pals The Expanse: A Telltale Series The Plucky Squire The Swords of Ditto Tick Tock: A Tale for Two Tipston Salvage Tools Up! Towerborne Trine 2 Unrailed! Unravel Two Unruly Heroes Untitled Goose Game Voyage We Were Here Together Who’s Your Daddy Wizard of Legend II ibb & obb

    • I think the first stat in the graph is the most important one and really speaks to the reason for the last one. I said this is another post about this article, but video games have become their own kind of third space. Going out with friends has become so expensive, whether you’re going to a movie or something else, and in a lot of places you can’t go to hang out without having to spend money anyways, so video games have become a replacement way to hang out with friends. And that’s before you start talking about stuff like friends who moved across the country for work or something.

    • My wife, kids and I play video games together by sharing the controller.

      We were playing classic SNES games together. Like playing Super Mario World or Super Metroid. My youngest isn’t really good at bosses so he hands it off to his older siblings. Where my wife likes to draw various scenes from the game so we can color them later.

      It started during the pandemic but we do it once a month now and it’s been a great family bonding experience.

    • Battle and season passes and events can often be classified as ads. (Mainly “live service” games.)

      Progression systems and gambling systems are a thing in games but not movies. Often taking away from inherent qualities and intrinsic motivation.

      • Outside of sports games & racing games, and Death Stranding & Monster energy drinks, what other games have ads?

        Not being argumentative. I’m a PC gamer and I’m actually curious if there’s like Pizza Hut ads while playing God Of War on a console or something!

        • PC here, I don’t play sports games. RPG stuff. Larian, Bioware, Bethesda, yea the damn Ubisoft AC games, RE, and such. Some of the indy stuff. If it’s DND I have it. And 4x. I love and hate 4x. I’ve not seen ads in any of that. I suppose they could’ve worked McDonalds or some bullshit onto Mars station or the Presidium, but they didn’t.

        • No harm in asking, nw:

          The first one that comes to mind is Fortnite, it has been used for advertising Halo and Star Wars, at least I think those were sponsors veiled as simple crossovers but I’m sure they’re not the only sponsors/crossovers.

          Though, mostly I was refering to almost every live-service game as of late, if you count “please check out the shop and buy these new skins” as advertisements. They’re not being paid by third parties to deliver them, but they sure were as annoying as TV ads when I experienced them…
          The latest example I can think of is Sea Of Thieves, where I still haven’t fully figured out how menus work because sometimes half of the screen points you to some kind of shop.

  • I can’t help but feel that part of this is because to make a movie there’s a higher barrier to entry and so a lot of studios and big budget production companies keep doing the ‘safe’ thing and regurgitating already existing properties or keeping their storylines ‘safe’.

    This happens in gaming too (especially with big budget franchises) but there are really great experiments and indies out there showing what can be done, which is less so in the movie and TV industry.

    People don’t always want the same thing over and over again and if executives could ever learn this it would be amazing how much creativity there would be, but they don’t.

    • I don’t think it is so much that executives cannot learn, it’s more that their priorities are consistent predictable margins, not the overall health of the industry.

      It’s a prisoner’s dilemma, most of the benefit of succeeding with something original is for the industry as a whole; proving certain concepts and ideas are viable, revitalizing public interest in the medium, ect. But the risks are mainly carried by a single publisher or studio, if it flops, they loose money.

      So the general trend is to avoid risk and maximize predictable profit, this shrinks the over all profitability of the industry by fatiguing public interest and willingness to pay, but maximizes safety for individual publishers and studios.

      Having a low budget segment that can afford to take risk on new ideas is key to preventing industry decline, but the industry has moved away from that towards the highest possible revenue generating films. The publishers and studios that used to do that have all ether folded or moved up to bigger budget higher return options, and they’ve pulled up the ladder behind them by making it so difficult to get indie projects in to theaters.

      The same thing could happen in the video game industry. Luckily the indie game market exists, and they’re still able to get their products distributed on large platforms like consoles if they prove a big enough hit on the PC market. It is getting harder though, and more and more, small budget, small team games are getting relegated to PC where there is just a smaller market. Ideally, consoles should make it easier to get small indie games onto their platform, or more people should start playing on PCs.

    • That’s kinda’ how Rockstar Games started, apparently. Strauss Zelnik (spelling…?) suggested the Houser brothers to enter the gaming market because movie and music markets were too saturated and had success rates too low. Gaming was new at the time.

      All of this comes from some YouTube video. Will edit in a YouTube/Invidious link to it here, sometime…

  • For me, the turnoff with movies specifically is the hard time commitment. It’s rare that I have 2-3 hours free uninterrupted, and even if I do, I’m more drawn to the activity that I could put down after an hour if I really wanted to. Also, I’m usually picking up a game or TV show that I’ve already started, so I’m jumping into a story that I’m already invested in, rather than starting a whole new one.