I understand the point of view. The best-selling film of all time got beaten out by a standard new-one-every-year FPS in terms of gross revenue.
But I don’t think that’s grounds for a belief that films are somehow obsolete.
First, I would only take in net revenue for any considerations. Films and games cost different amounts to produce, and of course it varies per film/game.
Second, I would have to see the average sales, rather than a single standout game/film.
But if we were to pretend, for a second, that those were true:
Yeah. Of course CODBLOPS outsold Avatar. CODBLOPS costs $60. A ticket to the theater is $11.25 (Or I think 3d is like $14? So we’re going to combine the two, round down, and say $12 for a movie ticket). If the game is $60 and the film is $12, then I wouldn’t believe an argument of “Films are inferior to games” from a financial point-of-view unless the game made more than 5x more revenue than the film. Because that’s the difference in cost between the two forms of entertainment.
But then, we could also consider the hours-per-dollar. A ticket at $12 for a 2-hour film is 0.167 hours per dollar. So if a game were to surpass that, then we could assume games are better. For CODBLOPS, then, you would need to get 10 hours of gameplay in order for it to have a better hpd ratio.
But I know that this is all a strawman. I am looking at movie rentals (Honestly, that’s all a theater is) to game purchases.
Games and films have completely different distribution systems. You just can’t compare the two. Almost every single big-name film comes out through a theater, while you never hear anyone say “Dude, let’s go to the arcade, they’ve got the new COD game!” (Arcades being the best analogue to theaters, for games), everyone purchases or pirates their games, they don’t rent it through any means.