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Comment by pbourke | Hacker News Reader

Isn’t gaming a larger industry than the movies, driven largely by consoles? Seems like gaming had its iPhone moment a generation ago.

Edit: gaming is larger than the movie and music industries combined

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Yes it's true it's larger than books and movies, but games in the end just compete with other forms of media for customers' entertainment dollars.

Unless we can come up with a use case for VR beyond gaming and fulfilling escapist fantasies. It will likely just be another contender for entertainment dollars.

Smartphones on the other hand essentially made it possible to do anything a general desktop pc could do for people on the go without having to be tethered to a chair infront of a desk. Phones can be used for payment, notetaking, etc. There are people who use smartphones and don't play games at all.

And the ultimate use case of VR is that you will be able to be "on the go" without ever leaving your chair -- in a form that's good enough that it doesn't feel inferior to being in person.

It's sort of the inverse of the smartphone use case.

Is it there yet? Of course not. But if/when it does get there... that's a much more compelling use case than a smartphone.

This is true but I think this is mostly irrelevant to the topic at hand. If VR was as popular as PS4 then we'd have said "VR took off". It doesn't need to be as popular as smartphones to be called successful but it's arguably not successful yet by many definitions. It certainly hasn't "taken off"

Most gaming accessories never took off. The racing wheel has been available for decades now and never "took off" and yet it never went away either. Racing wheels have a market and will continue to forever.

I predict VR will be slightly larger than the racing wheel market but they will not become super common in the next decade because they require a large amount of space. This doesn't matter at all because even today VR games and hardware are great fun to use.

The usecase I always envisioned was an all-in-one replacement for multi-monitor setup, TV, and essentially all visual media. I also imagined the flexibility to operate a computer in bright sunlight or while laying in bed thanks to a the goggles being sealed and replacing your vision. This is surely only a matter of the technology improving a bit. I believe a redesign of periphals suited to the ergonomics of VR would be required for my particular vision to be achieved. I suppose what I'm talking about is just a HMD but it could be optionally combined with head tracking like the implementations that exist now. I recall many years ago that HMDs where available so theyre nothing new. Why didnt they take off? Too clunky? Unpleasant somehow?

> Isn’t gaming a larger industry than the movies,

nowhere near comparable in reach. Way more people watch movies than play games. Since movies are typically cheaper to consume, it appears as a smaller industry while it is actually bigger in reach.

> Way more people watch movies than play games.

I don't believe that is true, any evidence for this?

Games cost a lot more than music and movies. $50, $60, $70 per game...

Gamers like to pay for collectables, DLC, limited editions, figurines, steam sales for games they don't play, etc.

Meanwhile unlimited music streaming is $9/mo. (Are concerts and merch considered in the "industry" revenues?)

Unlimited steaming on Netflix is $13.99/mo for their mid-tier plan.

If games had an "unlimited streaming" subscription equivalent, the industry's revenue would be much smaller.

I'd imagine the $ spent per unit of time for games today (especially live service games) is very low. In fact, I believe gaming is one of the most cost effective forms of entertainment. There are games that can be completed in a few hours, but on the other end of the spectrum you have people playing a single game for thousands to even tens of thousands of hours.

In addition, there are unlimited streaming services for games, one of which being Xbox Game Pass which is growing in popularity. Unfortunately it doesn't feel the same because how many games can one truly complete on a monthly basis?

It’s close between books and video games, depending on which examples you choose. If you chose a best seller from 2020, say A Promised Land, it’s $25 for approximately 15-20 hours of entertainment. I think most books are at a $/hour or less.

Single player video games are also in that range - 30-40 hours of gameplay for $60. But where it gets really crazy is endless games (Sims, Factorio, Simulators) or free to play games (League of Legends, Fortnite) where you could be entertained for thousands of hours for a couple of dollars. I personally played a free to play game for 2000 hours while spending about $40 total on it.

Even movies are pretty cheap, considering we most of us watch what’s included in our monthly subscriptions of Netflix/Amazon/Disney. Even buying/renting movies works out to about 1$/hour.

Conclusion - we’re in a golden era for entertainment where the options are nearly unlimited and dirt cheap.

> Games cost a lot more than music and movies. $50, $60, $70 per game...

That's only half the gaming market by revenue. The other half is mobile gaming and those games are typically under $5.

If you count by player, then the mobile market is larger.

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