Halo 2 - Electric Boogaloo

Saw this post at movie marketing madness about video game sales overtaking box office sales, and it got me thinking - how does the growth of the video game market affect the market for feature films?

First of all - what are the numbers? According to this slide show from BusinessWeek, 67% of American head of households play video or computer games. The average age of a gamer is 33 and almost a quarter of the market is over 50 (why are there not more games being developed for this market?). And most gamers have been playing for about 13 years. According to the chart @ MMM, in 2007, the video game market and domestic box office sales generated just over $8 billion. Project this over the next 5 years, and the video game market overtakes box office sales in about 2011. So what does this mean?

It means two things - first, video games (which can set you back by as much as $60 a pop) compete for your measly entertainment dollar. Second, to play a video game means to invest a large amount of time - some games, if you played them non-stop, and at an advanced skill level can still take upwards of 30 hours to complete. Therefore, video games are also competing for your increasingly valuable free time. Often, a gamer is faced with a difficult decision: do I pick up the latest game, which can provide several weeks of entertainment, or do I check out the latest film, which only lasts for 2 hours? More often then not, the video game wins.

So how does a film compete? It's a tricky question, and one that will no doubt be of major importance to studios in the next few years - if it isn't already. One tactic a film could use is to take the Matrix approach to video games. When the Matrix was at the height of its popularity (just before the horrid sequels were released) the team behind the films released a series of media vehicles that all had plot tie-ins to the new movies. One of these was a video game, and both the game and the film ended up being huge financial successes. In this case, neither the film nor the game had to compete for attention - it was basically a packaged deal.

Ultimately, if you create content that lives in a variety of media, and that also works hand in hand, you'll generate revenue from a variety of places. This is where movie marketing needs to go. More synergy between different types of media to create an entirely more engaging and worthwhile user experience.