Avengers: Endgame had a budget of $356m and grossed $2.796B at the box office. That's $2.44B of profit with one sales avenue in a few months.
Tomb Raider (2013) had a production cost of about $100m and sold 11 million copies by 2017. At $60 each, that's $660m. That's $560m of profit assuming no price drops ever, with every possible sales avenue, in four years.
When was the last time you spent $60 or more on a movie? I can't think of a single time I ever have.
Games:
- Buy a game or DLC and it's yours forever.
Movies:
- pay per viewing in a theater
- DVD
- Blu-Ray
- streaming
- special edition
- ultimate edition
- director's cut
- deluxe edition
- remaster
- box set
- anniversary edition
- unrated version
- widescreen version
And did you ever have to spend $400+ on a dvd or blueray player? I think not.
- The first VCRs sold for about $1000.
- The first DVD players sold for about $1000.
- The first Blu-Ray player (Samsung BDP-1000) sold for $1000.
- The PS3 was considered an inexpensive way to get a Blu-Ray player at $500.
And did you ever have to spend money for additional content (whether it's cosmetic or not) in a movie? No. When you buy a movie, you get EVERYTHING.
See above for a description of all the extra content, formats, etc. for movies. And remember, each one involves buying the entire movie again.
The only reason games cost more is greed. Prove me wrong.
Even games with one-time purchases are often updated regularly, with not only bug fixes but additional content. I have several games in my Steam library that I finished at one point but now have extra levels to play because the devs decided to create more content and simply give it to me at no additional cost.
When a movie gets additional content, the closest you can get to real content is deleted scenes that were already made but simply excluded from the original release because they weren't good enough. Deleted scenes are even delivered in lower quality, too, because mastering that footage properly and editing it into the original cut is just too expensive, I guess. And it's always wrapped into a new "edition" which involves repurchasing the whole movie. Want to listen to director's commentary? Pay twenty bucks! Again! None of this $1.99 microtransaction stuff.
Do you know how much Atari 2600 games cost? Some were $50-60, most were $30-40. Do you know how hard they were to produce? The infamous E.T. was made by two people in five weeks. Of course, that was rushed, and the result was bad, but good games might have a team of half a dozen people working for several months.
I remember paying $70 for Mortal Kombat 3 on the Genesis.
AAA games nowadays involve hundreds of people working for years. And do you know how much they cost? $60.
Even when inflation is taken into account,
Oof. Just $30 in 1979 is equivalent to $112 today. A $50 game? $187 today. MK3 for $70 in 1995? $119 today. Not only have prices not increased, they've plummeted. You're paying less than half of what you used to for a product that involves orders of magnitude more effort. If not for DLC, a lot of the modern games you love probably wouldn't have been approved for funding in the first place.
