I was pretty impressed with the compositing movie editors are able to do:
[via Fubiz]
Also, the same video made it to YouTube, but for some odd reason, the guy who uploaded it there removed the movie-production studio’s name from the beginning and end of the video.
This article came up on Slashdot today.
“Claims by the MPAA that illegal downloads are killing the industry and causing billions in losses are once again being shredded. In 2009, the leading Hollywood studios made more films and generated more revenue than ever before, and for the first time in history the domestic box office grosses will surpass $10 billion. … [N]either the ever-increasing piracy rates nor the global recession could prevent Hollywood having its best year ever in 2009. With an estimated $10.6 billion in consumer spending at the US and Canadian box office, the movie industry will break the 2008 record by nearly a billion dollars.”
They reference a TorrentFreak article claiming that domestic box office numbers are higher than ever — and, therefore, movie piracy isn’t having any effect:
Claims by the MPAA that illegal downloads are killing the industry and causing billions in losses are once again being shredded. In 2009, the leading Hollywood studios made more films and generated more revenue than ever before, and for the first time in history the domestic box office grosses will surpass $10 billion.
Those despicable Hollywood liars. Additionally, these kinds of stories seem to be an annual occurrence (What piracy crisis? MPAA touts record box office for 2007, What piracy? Movie biz sees record box office in 2008).
But, I don’t consider TorrentFreak to be a reliable source, and expect a big dose of spin coming from them. Too bad they didn’t provide any statistics so that we could see the trends. That’s okay. I will. Shown on the right are the total domestic (US and Canada) box office numbers, according to BoxOfficeMojo. The dollar amounts are in millions. (Hollywood Box Office, the original source for the $10.6 billion estimate has adjusted their estimate downward to $10.5 billion.)
Okay, you might see some trends here. There’s some pretty strong growth from 1980 until around 2002. Then, after 2002, the box office revenues hover between $9 billion and $10 billion a year.
Let’s take a look at those numbers in chart form. Strong growth up until around 2002, then some leveling off. But, the movie industry is still growing, right?
Well, if you consider that inflation is around 4%, you start to wonder if the movie industry is keeping up with inflation. What happens if we take a look at these same numbers and adjust for inflation using the Inflation Calculator?
This chart shows the inflation adjustment in the third column and the Inflation-Adjusted (2008) domestic Box Office numbers in column four. Once you take the inflation adjustments into account, you can see that 2009 wasn’t the best year ever. The best year ever for the movie industry was 2002. If box office revenue reaches $10.5 billion this year, after adjusting for inflation, it will be the fifth highest year, behind years 2001-2004. Here’s a chart of these numbers:
Once inflation is taken into account, the 2009 box office numbers are about 9% lower (or $0.8 billion) than 2002 numbers. (Hm, that’s a few years after music industry revenues also peaked*.) On average, movie box office revenue increased by $177 million/year between 1980 and 2002. Then, on average between 2002 and 2009, it has declined by $114 million/year. Yes, this could be a short term dip in revenue (like the slump in the early 1990s), but had revenue grown at the same rate between 2002-2009 as it had between 1980-2002, revenues would be $2.0 billion (20%) higher in 2009.
If we wanted to go one step further, we could also point out that the US and Canadian populations have grown from 227 million and 24.5 million in 1980 to 305.5 million and 33.9 million in 2009, an increase of 35%. Based on that, we can see that the movie industry’s growth in the past 30 years has been based on population growth. Per-capita spending has fluctuated a bit, and has declined by 14% since 2002.
Per-capita inflation-adjusted domestic box office:
It’s not a horrible downturn, and it is similar to the decline seen in the early 1990s, but it’s also not an argument that piracy isn’t hurting the movie industry, nor is it “shredding” the claims that movie piracy is “causing billions in losses”.
I should also point out another interesting bit of spin. The Ars Technica article linked at the top says: What piracy? Movie biz sees record box office in 2008. Looking at that headline, it looks all wonderful for the movie business, doesn’t it? But, once you look at the inflation-adjusted numbers, you can see that 2008 numbers ($9.63 billion) were the worst numbers since 2000, and per-capita spending was the worst since 1997. Funny the tricks you can play when you don’t adjust for inflation.
* Graph of the music industry downturn since 1999:
Ha. This this hilarious. (For you kids who aren’t in the know.)
I remembered hearing about Battlefield Heroes a while ago. It was an interesting idea: they were making a decent-looking first person shooter, and it was free to play. You could buy stuff in-game, but it was just avatar customization stuff that had no effect on the gameplay. The question I wondered back then was: would avatar customization make enough money for them to pay salaries? It seemed unlikely. One possibility is that they’d get millions of players, but keep their servers load lightweight (people would play peer-to-peer, which would cost them nothing). Then, even if a few percentage paid for avatar customization, they might do okay. But, it would require phenomenal success (in terms of the number of players). I thought I’d keep an eye on them, just to see what happened.
Well, recently, they announced some changes in their system. You can still play for free, but the changes make it harder to do well in the game unless you’re paying for in-game upgrades. The game has two ways to get upgraded weapons: Valor Points, which you earn by playing; and Battle Funds, which is what you get when you pay real-world money. The new update effectively reduces the value of Valor Points and increases the value of BattleFunds.
I’m going to give them the benefit of the doubt here, and say that they thought their business model would work, but after a while, decided they needed to boost their revenue. It didn’t really seem possible for them to survive on just avatar-customization alone. The whole “pay real-money for in-game upgrades” is quite a balancing act. On one extreme, players pay money for purely aesthetic changes (avatar customization). You get lots of players, people are happy, but the company is earning very little money per player. On the other extreme is a system where you can’t be an effective player in the game without paying money — the game is really a demo unless you pay some real-world money. You get fewer players, and people get more resentful over the bait-and-switch of “free to play, oh wait – you’re nerfed unless you pay” which harms the company/game reputation, but the company earns more money per player. Then there’s the balancing act of staying in the middle ground – trying to earn enough to survive and pay employees, but avoiding guilt and negative stigma of the bait-and-switch. I guess I’m not that surprised to see them shift towards a stronger pay-model, since their initial business-model seemed overly optimistic.
Link: EA restructures Battlefied: Heroes pricing; fans enraged
I stumbled on this while reading Penny Arcade: they’re doing a video-blog/Reality Show*, but only for a limited time. Click the image below to see the videos.
* They’re calling it a “reality show”, but I don’t see any physical challenges, infighting, or any disgusting “eat this live snail/spider/scorpion” contests, so I think it’s more similar to a ‘day in the life’ documentary.
(Clicking on the images will lead you back to their source.)
I have to give Valve credit for being consistently creative. They just released a bunch of Team Fortress and Left 4 Dead Christmas cards at their store. Good for a laugh even if you don’t buy anything.
“You bring a game into a house, nothing to stop an eight year-old kid from becoming a terrorist and shooting people.”
Obviously, John Christensen could’ve done a better job with the interview, although he probably isn’t put into too many television debates, so I can forgive him for that. It also looked to me like they might’ve been doing the interview early in the morning, and Christensen was not entirely awake. The other people were obviously better prepared for the attack. The “let’s have a fair and balanced debate” by the host was rather farcical. It seemed more like “let’s both beat up this novice and unprepared public speaker, and the fact that we give him a chance to speak will make us look like we’re providing balance”.
According to Ripten.com:
Fox contacted [Christensen] that same day with just a few hours notice. In addition to Jon never having been on television before, the segment was filmed at 3:30 AM his time, which meant he wasn’t exactly “well rested†before going on air.
Ultimately, though, game-companies are at a disadvantage because the media looks for things to talk about, wants to push people’s buttons, talk about controversy, and get credit for talking about it first. They will come after game companies because they want to drive-up viewer numbers. Playing on people’s preconceived notions is the easiest way to do it. At best, the only thing interviewees can do is hold them at bay – by providing a cogent defense of the industry. They’ll always be back, though.
Stephen Totilo, of Kotaku, does a better job of handling the press:
Cool New Flash Drive
I picked up a new flash drive recently. This is a 4GB flash drive that I picked up for $15. (All the electronics are stored in the black plastic area you see here.) A quick look at Amazon reveals that they’re selling 128 GB USB flash drives. I’m amazed how small this stuff is.
John Carmack and Apple
John Carmack recently commented that working with Apple is a big pain. I know how companies like to control their image, but there are some times when it gets ridiculous. Retaliation for saying the wrong thing about them?
“My relationship with Apple has been long standing, but it’s a rollercoaster ride,” he told Kotaku. “I’ll be invited up on stage for a keynote one month and then I’ll say something they don’t like and I can be blacklisted for six months.”
Working with Apple on iPhone games has been no different, Carmack said, but he is happy to see that former collaborator Graeme Devine is now working at Apple in the iPhone Game Technologies division. (Source)
You’d think that someone as big as John Carmack would have enough weight to avoid getting these kinds of punishments.
Google Chrome
Ever wonder why Google made Chrome, and started pushing it on www.google.com? Aren’t there already a perfectly good browsers (Firefox, Safari)? I was confused for a while until I thought about this.
Mozilla, the organization behind the popular Firefox web browser, has extended its search deal with Google for another three years. In return for setting Google as the default search engine on Firefox, Google pays Mozilla a substantial sum – in 2006 the total amounted to around $57 million, or 85% of the company’s total revenue. The deal was originally going to expire in 2006, but was later extended to 2008 and will now run through 2011. (Source)
Google’s business is advertising. Maintaining its advertising sector means staying on top as the number one search engine in the face of upstarts like Microsoft Bing. Sure, Google can keep paying Firefox hundreds of millions of dollars to be the default search engine (which, by the way, Bing doesn’t appear on the Firefox Search-Dropdown at all). But, someone at Google must’ve realized that they don’t want to be at the mercy of Firefox. The more marketshare Firefox has, the worse the negotiating position is for Google. I’m sure Google doesn’t want to get in a bidding war with Microsoft over Firefox’ search window. Someone at Google obviously realized that even if they can take 20% marketshare from Firefox, that would reduce Firefox’ negotiating power, and save them a lot of money. Ideally, Chrome would eat-up all of Firefox’ marketshare. Chrome users are, by default, pointed to Google’s search-engine. It just makes sense for Google to drop a few million on their own browser rather than pay-off Firefox year after year.
So far, Google Chrome has made a strong showing; 30 million users after just 10 months, which is a heck of a trajectory. Firefox is around 330 million users (24%), and IE still has 2/3rds of the browser market.
Smart people saying dumb things:
In the smart-people-saying-dumb-things department, I ran across the comment below on a blog recently. (To be fair, I can’t actually vouch for Brad Armstrong being smart.)
Seriously?
The internet has enlightened me to how misunderstood the software and the software industry is. I like the “big corporations” spin; it’s always a good way to side-step people’s critical thinking centers of the brain. Maybe I should comment about the legal system being a right of all Americans, and therefore, he should have to work for free. I think it’s entirely fair to call someone a hypocrite if they demand that software developers work for free, while they work a job that pays their bills. Only full-time volunteers (40-50 hours/week) and people who give 100% of their income to charity are allowed to cast that stone. It’s irksome that software developers have to justify getting paid for our work.
I’m also thinking of becoming an anti-physical property believer. Everything should be shared with everyone. That’s the best way to meet everyone’s needs. The big corporations don’t want us to share because sharing means buying less stuff. This means that you’re a wicked and evil person if you stop me from borrowing your car, watching your TV, using your computer, and sleeping under your roof. Oh, and I’m inviting all my hippie friends. They don’t shower because it messes up the natural oils on their skin. If you try to stop me, I’ll just have to “beat the system in order to fight the big corporations who own the corrupt legal system” – i.e. I’ll take what I want. Ownership is a scam created by the big corporations!
Google recently added a new feature to search. They teamed-up with a few other companies to place music in their search results. As far as I can tell, they provide four full tracks and links where you can buy their music. Pretty cool stuff, and a good way to check-out music by bands if you don’t know much about them. Here’s an example:
