Blizzard's Cataclysm broke a single-day sales record for PC games: 3.3m copies in a day. At $40 each, that's $132m revenue in a day.
The weekend box office for the latest Narnia move this past weekend was $24m. The other fantasy releases like Tangled and Harry Potter, came to $24m in their second or third week. I took my two kids and three neighbor kids to Tangled last weekend. It cost me $90, you know, $10 for $1 worth of popcorn. I'm asking myself, what's the value proposition here? Why are we doing this?
Music sales numbers continue to slide. Michael Jackson sold 8.2m albums for Sony in 2009. If an album still costs $15 (does anyone buy albums?), that's $123m over a year. But after that blip, Sony's sales growth is in negative territory again.
TV ad revenue is down, though still in the billions and billions.
Activision says that Call of Duty Black Ops sold $650m over five days.
I'm seeing a really healthy interactive / fantasy media environment living in homes. Growing robustly despite the blah economy. But I wouldn't put money into music, TV, or going to the movies. TV can be soaked for a few more years yet, but the prospects are dimming. When the economy turns around, these things won't.
With Netflix having $1.36 billion in sales for 2008, I would posit that TV and movie numbers are just moving to different models.
Posted by: Jesse | Dec 16, 2010 at 12:02