That's No Longer Entertainment

Once again, it's Oscar time, and making a big splash this awards season are a bunch of movies I've never seen or heard of made by people I don't care anything about.

I don't think I'm alone in my indifference to the motion picture industry, and there's no better evidence of that than this story on the growth of the computer gaming industry from Ars Technica, which includes a very interesting graph:



Notice how that spike in video game sales is now approaching the level of movie revenues? To me, that says that people are changing their mind about how they want to be entertained. It's more than a temporary fad; it is now a sea change in the culture.

Notice also how the music industry has been taking a pounding lately. People got tired of being force-fed a crappy product from a monolithic cabal of out-of-touch gougers. They stopped buying CDs because they discovered better alternatives. The movie industry is standing on the precipice of the same drop for exactly the same reasons.