Lara Croft is the heroine of a phenomenally successful video-game series that inspired the Angelina Jolie movie “Lara Croft: Tomb Raider.”
She’s the biggest celebrity in the video-game world, and you don’t have to be a game player to have heard of her.
But as far as mainstream-media coverage of the video-game world goes, Croft is an exception, a star who has helped draw attention to an often-neglected area of pop culture. And so it’s surprising that by some estimates the video-game industry generated more revenue in 2000 than the movie industry was able to whip up at the box office.
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“A lot of people say that,” says Doug Lowenstein, president of the Interactive Digital Software Association. “And a lot of people in our industry say it. It’s not accurate, though.” Lowenstein says that the video-game industry generated $6 billion in software sales in 2000. The motion-picture industry earned $7.3 billion at the box office. But if hardware sales — from game systems and computers — are figured in, then the video-game industry is on a par with the movie industry.
Lowenstein says it won’t be long, though, before such qualifiers become unnecessary.
“Certainly if we hit the projections that analysts are forecasting for the industry, we’ll leave the motion picture box-office number way behind over the next four or five years,” Lowenstein says. “Analysts are talking about the industry hitting $16 billion in sales by 2004. There’s no way (that) the movie industry is growing, that the box office is growing anywhere near that rate. They sort of blip up a few percent a year, mostly because they raise box-office prices.”
Lowenstein says the comparison covers only retail sales vs. domestic box office, and that the movie industry also generates revenue from overseas box office, home video and television rights. But he still believes that gaming isn’t getting the coverage it deserves.
“In general, the broad consumer mass-market media pays attention to us twice a year,” says Peter Dille, vice president of marketing for THQ, an interactive software developer and publisher. “Once at E3, and the other time during the fourth quarter.”
E3 is the Electronic Entertainment Expo, the world’s largest video-game trade show; even so, it merits less attention from most newspapers than the biannual television critics press tours.
But the video-game industry may be sneaking up on the mainstream media.
“Imagine if we were 25 years into the development of the American cinema, and the only thing the mainstream media said about film was that it was sometimes overly violent,” says Henry Jenkins, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Center of Media and Culture. “We would have said they missed out on some of the major stories of the 20th Century. In a few years, we will look back at the media neglect of games with the same shock and wonderment.” According to a survey by Peter D. Hart Research Associates, a Washington-based company, about 143 million Americans play interactive (video and computer) games, and 32 percent of game players are age 35 or over. The survey also found that 13 percent of gamers are over 50, and that 43 percent are women.