What Hollywood Could Learn From the Gaming Industry

GameDaily's David Radd has up a piece today looking at what Hollywood could learn from the games industry. His main points are that game companies are much more in touch with their customers, do a better job of generating buzz, and utilize the internet as a communications medium more successfully. From the article: "Today, publishers like Activision report that their ad budgets are equal to their game production budgets. But despite this significant increase in the scope of video game advertising, the 'buzz' factor is all important. And with the Internet, viral advertising has a way to touch both groups."

Speaking of in touch...

[Mark LeMunyon]

ValvE, the creators of the Half-Life series, do an excellent job communicating with their fanbase. Gabe Newell, ValvE's director, not only repsonds to fan email, but actively posts on fan forums!

How many film directors or actors do that?

Lets hope they learn nothing from the game biz

[SmallFurryCreature]

Or we will have more remakes then you can shake a stick at. If they learned from the game industry we could have Casablanca Original, Casablanca Technicolor, Casablanca Cinemascope, Casablance 3D, Casablanca THX etc etc. Just as the game civilization has gone through numerous versions while the game itself really hasn't changed. Still the same tech tree, still the same endings just using more recent tech to display it.

We would also have movies wich wouldn't have the correct ending until the 3rd patch. George Lucas would love it.

They would give us heroes who remain silent for the entire movie or in extreme cases go back to the dawn of film and force us to read endless cue cards.

You wouldn't be able to stop your video when watching a movie but would be forced to resume from the beginning of the scene because of the lousy save system.

Movies would come with insane copy protection schemes.... oh wait a minute. That they already learned.

But worst of all, if Hollywood learned from the game industry all the movies would be directed by Uwe Boll.

Re:No way

[manno]

Are you sure? I'm fairly sure you can play single player games without an Internet connection or CD. As I have played HL2 on the plane without an Internet connection...

Obviously I need to log onto steam to play Counter-Strike. The only legit complaint I can think of is if they make you log onto steam to play LAN games. That could really present some problems for some users. I wouldn't call it DRM though I'd call it copy protection, and while it helps the content creators, it also has some great features for users too.

For instance I can play steam on any Windows PC I want. Once I purchase a game on Steam itself I have access to all my games even though I don't have the CD's. Meaning that if I visit my family in NY, and they don't have Steam on any computer, I just need to install the Steam client, and it lets me download any game I own on that account to any PC I'm on, without even having an install CD within 3,000 miles of me. This is a feature that has come in handy many-a-time. It's Greatly superior to EA's moronic Battlefield 2 solution that forces you to log onto their central server and have the CD in the tray. Hardly RIAA level of security. I personally like and welcome our new Steam overlords.

Peace,
-manno

Re:WHAT?!?

[psycln]

If you take the number of employees into account then Valve Corp [valvesoftware.com] with a little more than 70 employees [valvesoftware.com] made $70mil [forbes.com] in 2005. That is $10mil per employee. Compare that to the number of human resources involved in the "Titanic" or "Star Wars" and you get a better picture of who's making a more efficient use of human resources.