4 ms·

I hear that metric a lot - dollars per entertainment-hour. It's an interesting metric - but it's also important to remember the 1.5 hour Marvel film almost cert

I hear that metric a lot - dollars per entertainment-hour. It's an interesting metric - but it's also important to remember the 1.5 hour Marvel film almost certainly took more human hours in the input side than virtually any video game. At least, my 10k hours in StarCraft took far far far fewer human hours to produce than my 1.5 hours watching the Avengers. Sort of a "labor theory of value" for entertainment pricing, I guess.

throwaway17_17 5y ago
I would really like to see that comparison, i.e. the ‘human hours’ required, for a AAA game by a largish developer vs. the average Marvel film. I may try to do some rough numbers later because that just seems like an interesting thing to know. Also, how far down the stack do you go for each. Both rely on tools to make the production happen. Do you count hours to make the digital editing software and fx programs for films? Do you count the human hours to make Unreal4?
- spelunker 5y ago
  Do you count the hours to design and produce the computer hardware used to render the CGI for a film? Do you count the years and cost of raising a child from birth to being a member of the crew? I doubt they count hours towards tools etc developed as they probably paid money for those. So, different bucket I guess, and still important for the overall cost.
  - cecilpl2 5y ago
    Paying money for a tool means having a person develop that tool for you.
    - slugiscool99 5y ago
      Sure, but game devs use tools like unreal engine the development time of which shouldn't be factored into the human hours calculation
    - spelunker 5y ago
      Obviously yes, but if you're attempting to add up person hours worked for some project, I don't think you would include the hours spent in say Mac OS.
  - toyg 5y ago
    It really depends on the production - some of them, particularly animated ones, had to develop their whole pipelines from scratch as part of their early productions. You can bet that time was accounted for as part of production costs. Same for pioneer productions like The Mandalorian (iirc costing $3m per episode, a large chunk of which went into developing experimental 3d soundstages). For the more common endeavours, then no, of course - they just use what is there, or more likely outsource it to specialised providers in the same way as they would outsource e.g. building a website.
evrydayhustling 5y ago
If you allocate all those hours to one gamer, there's no contest. Check out the dev costs of games here [1] to the "net negative" (no marketing) costs for movies here [2] -- 4 games break $100M while you need $200M as a movie to get on the list. So, twice as much for 2h of content! But if you factor in audience size, things get more complicated. Red Dead 2 sold about 38M copies, a near record, but Avengers Endgame reached something like 250-300M people at the box office, even before streaming etc. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most_expensive_video_games_to_develop https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most_expensive_video_g... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most_expensive_films https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most_expensive_films
- tsimionescu 5y ago
  Isn't a huge part of that money going to the actors, not into more typical actual labor? Games take a lot longer to produce than films (in total, per hour of content that may not be true).
  - toyg 5y ago
    Not that huge, really. A-list actors will get 10-20m tops, add all the others and you're probably looking at around 30m-40m over a budget of 300m-500m. The largest expenses are related to FX costs and marketing. That's why the cost of low-effects movies falls very rapidly under 100m, you can film a run-of-the-mill romcom for less than 10m.
- Someone 5y ago
  I think the OP's argument is that you also have to factor in hours played, and that, per player-hour, respectively movie-watcher-hour, the game is a lot cheaper. 300M movie watchers is about half a billion hours. If those 38M games all had only one player (probably fairly close) they only have to play the game for 15 hours on average to get at half a billion player hours. https://howlongtobeat.com/game?id=27100 https://howlongtobeat.com/game?id=27100 claims it takes at least 49 hours to beat it, so it’s likely that the game was played for more hours than the movie was watched.
brokencode 5y ago
The fact is that independent game developers struggle to survive, so that is what I’m using as my yardstick for whether they are making enough money. Dollars per entertainment hour is just a way to try to convince gamers that it is reasonable to spend more on games, but perhaps the better argument to make is that we need to pay these companies more or they will go out of business or move to scummy pay to win business models.
johnchristopher 5y ago
That only works out if 1 hour of video games has the same value as one hour of a movie. It's apples to oranges anyway, even when comparing games to games.
snarfy 5y ago
Do you not remember beating StarCraft and watching the ending credits scroll? It's a giant wall of text for 30 minutes.
gamblor956 5y ago
also important to remember the 1.5 hour Marvel film almost certainly took more human hours in the input side than virtually any video game This is simply wrong. Marvel movies (and indeed, most studio releases) are generally produced and released within a year or two. Only the biggest blockbusters have crews in the hundreds, and it is rare for a movie to have a crew in the thousands. For example, Endgame is one of the most expensive movies ever made...and production and post-production (i.e., VFX) took less than 2 years. Dune (2021) was filmed and post-produced in under 2 years. Tenet, Nolan's most technically complex film, was actually filmed and post-produced in just over 1 year. (But contrast to Avatar 2 and 3, which have been in production for over 4 years and counting.) On the other hand, almost every AAA game of the last decade has spent years in development with a crew of hundreds for almost the entire time. For example, Red Dead 2 was in development for 7 years. Starcraft 2 was in development for over 5 years. Destiny was in development for 4 years. Note that the above timeline does not include pre-production work (like writing the screenplay, casting, hiring crew, raising funds) because in the movie industry pre-production work proceeds very slowly (for example: Avatar 2 was in pre-production for 7 years; Gemini Man for over 20 years), but the actual production and post-production (i.e., the actual making of the movie, editing, FX) happens at a lightning pace. In the game industry, the creative parts happen in tandem with the development of the game itself. Also note that while movies can have large crews, the different teams aren't all working at the same time; for example, film crews and other production crews rarely interact with the VFX or other post-production crew.
toyg 5y ago
> the 1.5 hour Marvel film almost certainly took more human hours in the input side than virtually any video game I'm not sure what you mean. A big Marvel movie costs around $300m-$500m to produce, these days. AAA videogames can go over $300m-$400m I believe. It's basically the same ballpark, as far as input costs go. However, a film results in 2h of output enjoyment for a consumer, whereas games get several multiples of that.

throwaway17_17 5y ago

I would really like to see that comparison, i.e. the ‘human hours’ required, for a AAA game by a largish developer vs. the average Marvel film. I may try to do some rough numbers later because that just seems like an interesting thing to know. Also, how far down the stack do you go for each. Both rely on tools to make the production happen. Do you count hours to make the digital editing software and fx programs for films? Do you count the human hours to make Unreal4?

spelunker 5y ago
Do you count the hours to design and produce the computer hardware used to render the CGI for a film? Do you count the years and cost of raising a child from birth to being a member of the crew? I doubt they count hours towards tools etc developed as they probably paid money for those. So, different bucket I guess, and still important for the overall cost.
- cecilpl2 5y ago
  Paying money for a tool means having a person develop that tool for you.
  - slugiscool99 5y ago
    Sure, but game devs use tools like unreal engine the development time of which shouldn't be factored into the human hours calculation
  - spelunker 5y ago
    Obviously yes, but if you're attempting to add up person hours worked for some project, I don't think you would include the hours spent in say Mac OS.
- toyg 5y ago
  It really depends on the production - some of them, particularly animated ones, had to develop their whole pipelines from scratch as part of their early productions. You can bet that time was accounted for as part of production costs. Same for pioneer productions like The Mandalorian (iirc costing $3m per episode, a large chunk of which went into developing experimental 3d soundstages). For the more common endeavours, then no, of course - they just use what is there, or more likely outsource it to specialised providers in the same way as they would outsource e.g. building a website.

evrydayhustling 5y ago

If you allocate all those hours to one gamer, there's no contest. Check out the dev costs of games here [1] to the "net negative" (no marketing) costs for movies here [2] -- 4 games break $100M while you need $200M as a movie to get on the list. So, twice as much for 2h of content! But if you factor in audience size, things get more complicated. Red Dead 2 sold about 38M copies, a near record, but Avengers Endgame reached something like 250-300M people at the box office, even before streaming etc. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most_expensive_video_games_to_develop https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most_expensive_video_g... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most_expensive_films https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most_expensive_films

tsimionescu 5y ago
Isn't a huge part of that money going to the actors, not into more typical actual labor? Games take a lot longer to produce than films (in total, per hour of content that may not be true).
- toyg 5y ago
  Not that huge, really. A-list actors will get 10-20m tops, add all the others and you're probably looking at around 30m-40m over a budget of 300m-500m. The largest expenses are related to FX costs and marketing. That's why the cost of low-effects movies falls very rapidly under 100m, you can film a run-of-the-mill romcom for less than 10m.
Someone 5y ago
I think the OP's argument is that you also have to factor in hours played, and that, per player-hour, respectively movie-watcher-hour, the game is a lot cheaper. 300M movie watchers is about half a billion hours. If those 38M games all had only one player (probably fairly close) they only have to play the game for 15 hours on average to get at half a billion player hours. https://howlongtobeat.com/game?id=27100 https://howlongtobeat.com/game?id=27100 claims it takes at least 49 hours to beat it, so it’s likely that the game was played for more hours than the movie was watched.

brokencode 5y ago

The fact is that independent game developers struggle to survive, so that is what I’m using as my yardstick for whether they are making enough money. Dollars per entertainment hour is just a way to try to convince gamers that it is reasonable to spend more on games, but perhaps the better argument to make is that we need to pay these companies more or they will go out of business or move to scummy pay to win business models.

johnchristopher 5y ago

That only works out if 1 hour of video games has the same value as one hour of a movie. It's apples to oranges anyway, even when comparing games to games.

snarfy 5y ago

Do you not remember beating StarCraft and watching the ending credits scroll? It's a giant wall of text for 30 minutes.

gamblor956 5y ago

also important to remember the 1.5 hour Marvel film almost certainly took more human hours in the input side than virtually any video game This is simply wrong. Marvel movies (and indeed, most studio releases) are generally produced and released within a year or two. Only the biggest blockbusters have crews in the hundreds, and it is rare for a movie to have a crew in the thousands. For example, Endgame is one of the most expensive movies ever made...and production and post-production (i.e., VFX) took less than 2 years. Dune (2021) was filmed and post-produced in under 2 years. Tenet, Nolan's most technically complex film, was actually filmed and post-produced in just over 1 year. (But contrast to Avatar 2 and 3, which have been in production for over 4 years and counting.) On the other hand, almost every AAA game of the last decade has spent years in development with a crew of hundreds for almost the entire time. For example, Red Dead 2 was in development for 7 years. Starcraft 2 was in development for over 5 years. Destiny was in development for 4 years. Note that the above timeline does not include pre-production work (like writing the screenplay, casting, hiring crew, raising funds) because in the movie industry pre-production work proceeds very slowly (for example: Avatar 2 was in pre-production for 7 years; Gemini Man for over 20 years), but the actual production and post-production (i.e., the actual making of the movie, editing, FX) happens at a lightning pace. In the game industry, the creative parts happen in tandem with the development of the game itself. Also note that while movies can have large crews, the different teams aren't all working at the same time; for example, film crews and other production crews rarely interact with the VFX or other post-production crew.

toyg 5y ago

> the 1.5 hour Marvel film almost certainly took more human hours in the input side than virtually any video game I'm not sure what you mean. A big Marvel movie costs around $300m-$500m to produce, these days. AAA videogames can go over $300m-$400m I believe. It's basically the same ballpark, as far as input costs go. However, a film results in 2h of output enjoyment for a consumer, whereas games get several multiples of that.