If movies lasted as long as games, they'd cost $13 billion

Economist Ted Castronova has run some entertaining numbers regarding video-game and film production, and concluded that if films were entertaining for as many hours as games are, they'd cost $13 billion to make.

A film like Return of the King costs something like $100m to make, for perhaps ten hours of entertainment (I've watched the film 3 times). That's $10m per hour. Now, a good SW occupies users for more time than that. An intense user will go in for 40+ hours weekly, for three or five years. Let's be more conservative and say it is 25 hours a week for one year. 25x52 = 1,300 hours. 1,300 hours of entertainment produced Hollywood-style would cost $13b. The projection suggests that a fully mature game industry might be willing to put $13 billion into the construction of a fantasy world that provides entertainment, in terms of quality and time, equialent to to watching a string of great movies 3 or 4 hours a day, for a year.

This reminds me of a talk I had with an ex-MMO developer who was describing how important user-created content is to games, since he would sometimes spend a month working on a scenario that players could knock off in a weekend. I responded by pointing out that it takes me more than a year to write a novel that my readers plough through in an afternoon. The economics of game-production are incredibly good, relative to lots of other media. Link (via Wonderland)