Let's face it. This isn't about games anymore.

Recently, I heard about a movie (coming out early 2007) that has a budget of 150 million dollars. Now, I always wondered about the budget disparity between games and movies.

Picture this: The Acclaim studio I worked for had five teams of about twenty people. To pay for the entire studio cost about a million dollars a month. That's rent, computers, test systems (special XBoxes and PS2s that are made to allow programs to run on them), salaries, and more.

Five teams that were working on four different projects (with one tech team). The Red Star, 100 Bullets, All-Star Baseball, and NBA Jam, all at the same time.

Each game took about 12-18 months to build. So that means, we could make four full games in 18 months, at a cost of about 18 million dollars.

Now, consider what you could do with 150 million dollars. That would keep the company open long enough to make roughly 33 games. I'm not talking about half-assed tiny Popcap puzzle games, either. These would be the big games, games that get on the cover of game magazines. Let's say they each have about eight hours of gameplay. That means that 150 million dollars would buy you 264 hours of gameplay. That's 11 days of entertainment as compared to 1.5 hours for a movie.

Thirty-three games, or one movie. It really underscores why video games are overtaking movies as the new entertainment media.

And here's something else to consider, what if we levelled the playing field by using all that money on just one game. I mean, 100 people working for 12 and a half years on a single game! Or, you could separate the team into several groups that are working on the same game, like GTA did for San Andreas. That would let you have 200 people working for just over six years on the game. Either way, by the time it was done, it would be the most developed game on the planet. You think GTA was immersive and content-rich, but it would be just peanuts to this uber-game.

And as we gain more and more customers, as the game industry builds, we'll start making more sales and more money on games. While you may not get much profit from single uber-game, you would make huge profits on those 33 games.

Seems to me that, as games become more developed while remaning so cheap, we will handily supplant movies as the new media of choice for the future. I just don't see another way around it.

I'm not saying that movies will disappear, I'm just saying that they'll be just as important to people as radio shows, books, or magazines. People just won't care as much about them.