Counting Rupees: GTA IV vs. Iron Man

Each week Jeff Engel and Geoff Brooks contribute Counting Rupees, a column on the business behind gaming:

According to several "analysts" last week, the successful launch of Grand Theft Auto IV threatened to sink the box office returns for Iron Man. The thinking went that since the game and the movie both target primarily the same demographic (males 18-29), that demographic would stay home and play the game instead of going to see the movie. While it's impossible to declare with complete certainty, as Variety did, that GTA IV had absolutely no effect on Iron Man's opening (with $104.2M in domestic receipts, $201M worldwide, and a release date for a sequel already announced), whatever effect it may have had was clearly not enough to significantly impact the movie. But clearly, many had predicted that the game could adversely affect box office receipts. It makes me wonder -- have we ever seen this sort of effect before?

The most obvious place to start looking would be the last GTA game: San Andreas. GTA: San Andreas debuted on October 26, 2004.

A few days later, the $1.2M movie Saw, with an arguably similar target audience, debuted and not only raked in $18,276,468M on opening weekend, but went on to make $55,185,045 in the US and $103,096,345 worldwide, in addition to spawning three successful sequels (and two more on the way). What's additionally telling about this is that Saw was a completely new property created on a small budget, yet people still apparently put the game down for a few hours so they could go see the movie. Iron Man had the added advantage of being a well-known comic book with a high-profile adaptation. Obviously, Iron Man also did substantially better than Saw, but if people turned out to go see a complete unknown when they had just bought GTA: San Andreas, it seems pretty clear that they would similarly turn out for one of the most hyped movies of the summer. Maybe there's another example I'm missing (although I've tried to find one), but if the last GTA game didn't stop people from going to the movies, there's no reason to believe the new one would either.

The reasons why big video game releases don't impact similarly demographically targeted movies are fairly simple. To begin with, a movie represents a short term "event" for someone. It's something that's easy and (fairly) cheap to do, gets you out of your home and typically represents a social occasion that can be considered "going out." While some games are social experiences and may even have in-person multiplayer modes (Rock Band, Super Smash Bros, Mario Kart), it's still fundamentally a solo activity, particularly for a game like GTA. Going to a movie is often not a solo activity for a lot of people, and even if it is, it still feels like you're taking a break from your home and that, in the words of George Castanza, you're "doing something". With this in mind, big video game releases are far more likely to impact other things you do in your own home such as watching TV, reading books, or viewing movies at home (which is a lot different than going out to see a movie).

Second, a movie only lasts around two hours. Most games are played for far longer than that. It's safe to say that even if someone is playing a game like GTA obsessively after they get it, they'd probably have no problem taking a break for a couple of hours and then coming back to play the game some more. To add to this, a game also costs a lot more money than a movie. This probably contributes to the fact that a person will likely be happy to spend more time with a game, even if it's broken up by a movie, so that they feel they've maximized their investment. In any case, maybe there are some people who are so obsessed with a game that they won't even leave their home for a few hours to see a movie demographically targeted at them (and thus interesting to them), but that likely doesn't represent the vast majority of the gaming audience right now.

So, if these are fairly obvious – even basically acknowledged in the follow-up Variety article – why were analysts predicting problems for the movie? It probably has more to do with the fact that movie ticket sales have been sliding in recent years and industry insiders are just trying to figure out why. The problem is, there's a whole host of other issues people bring up when asked why they're not going to the movies anymore, and I've never seen video games listed. More issues commonly cited are the rise of cheap DVDs, poorer quality movies, more and more pre-movie ads at theaters, and annoying audiences (SSSHHHH!).

Of course, this isn't to say that video games have had no impact at all on the overall rate at which people go to movies, just as the rise of the internet and DVDs have probably had some impact. Certainly, when people have more mediums in which they can consume information and entertainment than they did before, the older mediums are going to see less time to devoted to them. However, what likely happens is that people simply start increasing their "filters" for what they're willing to see. For instance, if a person used to see 2-3 movies a month, that might get reduced to an overall one movie a month. So which movie does he/she see? Probably the one most demographically targeted to them (or their significant other). In an odd way, this means that it's more likely a video game release would impact movies that are not targeted at the same demographics as the game, as those are the movies that people may have given a chance before they had the option of playing a video game. Iron Man, with the strong hype behind it and a strong appeal to the demographically similar GTA IV audience, was never in danger of losing that audience exclusively to the game.

As co-editors of A Link To The Future, Geoff and Jeff like to discuss, among many other topics, the business aspects of gaming. Game companies often make decisions that on their face appear baffling, or even infuriating, to many gamers. Yet when you think hard about them from the company's perspective, many other decisions are eminently sensible, or at least appeared to be so based on the conditions at the time those choices were made. Our goal with this column is to start a conversation about just those topics. While neither Geoff nor Jeff are employed in the game industry, they do have professional backgrounds that are relevant to the discussion. More to the point, they don't claim to have all the answers -- but this is a conversation worth having. You can reach them at