[scrollaway]

> Within a few years, video games will be generating photo-realistic feature films on demand, with unique scripts and characters and worlds adapted to the viewer's tastes and mood.

You're vastly underestimating the work that goes into an authentic hollywood movie.

Also, vastly overestimating the quality of video game 3d engines, the performance requirements, the potential plot quality resulting from player-driven storylines, and so on.

[Retric]

The best Games are already higher quality than toy story one (1995). Both in terms of graphics and plot ex Witcher III. Game studios already make more money than Hollywood so long term Hollywood is in a death spiral.

[ascagnel_]

I disagree on both counts.

Even looking at The Witcher 3 running at its highest settings, the human characters are not photo-realistic. The game itself doesn't look like something that was captured on a camera; the output includes blur filters that look impressive but unrealistic (Toy Story isn't a good measuring stick, since it's not trying to be photo-realistic; something like the 2007 Beowulf movie would be a better comparison against live-action).

The biggest games aren't as profitable as movies today. Right now, there's about 35MM consoles capable of playing The Witcher 3 (PS4 and X1). Avengers: Age of Ultron passed $1 billion this summer. For TW3 to match its sales numbers, they'd have to sell roughly 16.7MM copies at $60. Almost half the number of console owners would have to buy this game at full-price for it's revenue number to be the same (yes, the PC market will have an impact, but that's harder to measure, but that market tends to be smaller than the consoles).

[Retric]

Wow has made over 10 Billion which is far more than any one movie. Grand Theft Auto V made 1 billion in 3 days.

Moving up the timeline is meaningless toy story was 20 years old so the point is game year x ~= movie x - y. Means games in y = in ~20 years top games = today's movies assuming steady exponential growth. Which probably does not hold long term, but if today’s movies are ‘acceptable’ then that’s all you need.

[dragonwriter]

Wow is more like a franchise than a single movie, but it beats even the strongest franchisees if you look only at box office and not other revenue sources. Though Marvel Cinematic Universe isn't far behind.