We have an article up about the $500 million dollar first-week sales of Grand Theft Auto 4 which includes a frightening comparison to the box office for the top 12 movies that same weekend. (Read it here.)
But don’t let it get you down, Hollywood — you’re pretty much dead in the water.
If you just look at the economics of it, the amount brought in by GTA 4 isn’t as surprising; since each copy costs around $60 dollars, $500 million isn’t an impossibly hard number to reach. In fact, to put things in perspective, think of the $500 million as roughly 6 million copies of the game sold.
Unfortunately, it’s not a simple math for the movie industry, as $100 million for “Iron Man” this past weekend doesn’t even mean 6 million people saw the film… at $8 per ticket. It simply means that “Iron Man,” like so many other of the films movie-goers will see this year, will hit big and quickly fade away. But how about GTA?
GTA’s first wave of profits is just that, a first wave that will demand a long high tide. Why? Unlike “Iron Man,” which movie-goers normally see and are done with, each copy of GTA bought is only part of the equation. By having both PS3 and Xbox 360 versions available, Take-Two (the game’s publisher) has a one-two punch that help the game beat Halo 3 and other high selling game titles (Mario Kart on the Wii, for example, is a far sales cry from GTA).
More over, good games sell systems – which leads to boons for both Microsoft and Sony on the hardware sales. And Microsoft’s Xbox Live service should be getting a bump from the players picking up the multiplayer aspect of the game — which is an awesome experience in itself.
Even when gamers are done with GTA, retailers like GameStop can make buckets off the resell copies — offering dirt cheap trade-in amounts to video game consumers hungry for their next fix…
It’s a win-win for all invested in the video game industry, but not so much for Hollywood.
