Games Outgross Movies in US

Videogames best all that Hollywood has to offer.

It is often said that videogames make more money these days than Hollywood, but how accurate is that? The film and videogames number crunchers in the US have done their homework and the results are in for 2004.

In 2004, US cinema ticket sales rose slightly more than 1% to $9.4 billion. The interesting bit is that fewer people went to the movies last year and the slight increase over 2003 was due to a rise in movie ticket prices.

But what about games? According to US trade body NPD Group, videogames brought in $9.9 billion in 2004, which is a decline of less than 1% from 2003.

The videogame industry works in defined cycles that depend on new hardware and currently all three home consoles are approaching the end of their lifecycles. This has two effects: hardware sales either decline or remain flat as the market becomes saturated; and software sales go up, thanks to more people owning consoles than before.

There was new hardware in 2004, though. The twin-screened Nintendo DS was released late in the year and this helped portable video gaming cross the $1 billion barrier for the first time.

But the real winners in 2004 were the PlayStation 2 and Microsoft's Halo franchise. Six of the 10 best-selling games for 2004 (see below) were released for Sony's console, with PlayStation 2-exclusive Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas coming out tops with 5.1 million copies sold.

Perhaps more surprising - given that fewer Xboxes have been sold than PlayStation 2s - is that Halo 2 was the second-best-selling game of the year, as more than four million people picked up the title.

What's more, the success of Halo 2 sparked so much interest in the series that the original Halo: Combat Evolved, which was released alongside the Xbox in 2001, was the ninth-best-selling game of 2004 in the US.

But where do videogames go from here? Even though Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo will all reveal their next-generation machines during 2005, it's unlikely that all three consoles will be released this year. Of the three, Microsoft has been most vocal about releasing the Xbox successor in 2005.

Portable gaming will also benefit from more games being released for the Nintendo DS and the debut of Sony's new portable wunderkind, the PSP. But for Xbox, PlayStation 2 and GameCube the biggest games may well lie in the past.

Here are the top 10 best-selling console games in the US for 2004:

1. Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas (PS2) - 5.1 million
2. Halo 2 (Xbox) - 4.2 million
3. Madden NFL 2005 (PlayStation 2) - 3.2 million
4. ESPN NFL 2K5 (PlayStation 2) - 1.5 million
5. Need For Speed Underground 2 (PS 2) - 1.4 million
6. Pokémon FireRed (GBA) - 1.2 million
7. NBA Live 2005 (PlayStation 2) - 1.2 million
8. Spider-Man 2 (PlayStation 2) - 1.1 million
9. Halo: Combat Evolved (Xbox) - 1.1 million
10. ESPN NFL 2K5 (Xbox) - 1.0 million

Alex Wollenschlaeger
Editor, Kikizo Games