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Comment by lupire | Hacker News Reader

Meanwhile, $20M is peanuts for movie that only charges $10/ticket

I think the economics of this are radically different. The movies that get released in theatres have already gone through A Great Filter - they’ve either been selected or made from the get go to movie theaters. When you have a film going to theatres you already have a lot of spend behind it, a marketing campaign etc. Sadly the most reliable correlation for whether a movie makes profit is how much you spent on marketing (and no I am not kidding).

Lots of movies, in fact the vast majority of them don’t get to go to theaters. It used to be that this meant VHS or dvd release, now it means streaming, sometimes even just YouTube or Vimeo release. If you go to any film festival circuit I no your life you will see upwards of 1000+ films in a year. But not that many of them will go to theaters anywhere in the world.

Basically the 20$M films you talk about have some reasonable chance of sucess. Gaming is a bit more of a free for all, having steam, early access, GOG. You have a Wild West capitalism type of ultra competitive env. When you launch a film in theatres, that is not what’s happening at all - you’ve already gotten a booking at the natural moated monopoly of Very Large Screens, a limited amount of which you have in the world.

Basically I would estimate that the chance to launch a game and have VERY slim returns is far higher than a film.

In fact, you see the same problem in movies where you either have big tentpole blockbusters or smaller low-budget movies ( like Blumhouse or A24 releases) or indies. There aren't many mid-budget (I guess that's around 50-75 million USD ??) movies made any more.

Yes, you do have breakout hits in that space once in a while, but not enough for studios to risk them without big name stars. Or more commonly actors who fund their own productions.

In both industries the case can be made that the market has made the choice and whiners should STFU. But then we should also make peace with what's lost in return.

As much as people say that there is no organic way to find films at this point in time. There is nothing like Early Access for films or TV. You need the backing of a large organisation to make a film - they’re just too expensive. So interestingly games have both a lower start cost, a better alt-funding infrastructure and more opportunities for competition through an open storefront like Steam.

There is nothing similar in Film today - people don’t open the Vimeo paid section daily looking for new stuff to watch, neither does Vimeo allow for “fund this project” drives. I have hopes crypto DAOs will emerge to solve this issue.

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