How Video Games are Reshaping the Entertainment World

Can you think of an entertainment juggernaut bigger than the Star Wars films? From 1976’s Star Wars to this year’s Solo: A Star Wars Story, they have brought in global box office revenues of just under $9.5 billion (Dh35bn).

It’s impossible to find anything comparable in the world of music, where the top-earning act of last year, according to Billboard, was Irish band U2, with $54.4 million. But look to a younger form of entertainment – video games – and finding a Star Wars-beater becomes easier.

The Call of Duty (CoD) franchise, which started with an eponymous 2003 release, reached game sale revenues of $16bn after the release of last year’s CoD: WWII. The latest game in the series, CoD: Black Ops 4, released last Friday, is likely to add another billion dollars to that figure, and most likely more. To put this into perspective, that’s more than the Harry Potter and James Bond franchises have made over the course of their existence in terms of film revenue – put together.

For those of a certain age, video games undoubtedly have greater cultural impact than most other forms of media. And you don’t need to actually play games like CoD or Fortnite to be counted among this group – according to mediakix, almost 15 million people watch other people playing games via live-streaming service Twitch every day. The YouTube channel with the most subscribers – 66.7 million – belongs to Swedish gamer Felix “PewDiePie” Kjellberg. He earned $15m in 2016 alone simply via videos of himself playing games while providing commentary.

It can all seem a little strange to the uninitiated. Why will tens of millions of people miss out on sleep over the coming weeks and months to play Black Ops 4?

First-person shooter (FPS) games like the games in the CoD franchise are probably one of the easiest genres to understand, even for those who have never played a game. As the name suggests, you play it from a first-person view. You see what the character you are embodying sees, which in this case, of course, includes the realistically modelled gun you’re holding in front of you (developers even go to the trouble to record the sounds of the actual guns firing to make the experience as realistic as possible).

Pull the trigger on your controller and the gun fires. There’s something visceral about the whole experience, especially when you find yourself in the middle of a large firefight on a map that recreates a realistic real-life battle zone. It all becomes even more exciting when you’re playing not against computer-controlled enemies but against other players. The sounds and the sights might be realistic, but the gameplay is anything but. This is because the experience is meant to be fun before anything else. Die, and you return – or respawn – a few seconds later.

And the cultural and economic impact of video games is only set to grow, even more so in the Middle East than in some other regions, especially because so much of the population is young.

In some quarters, famous game streamers are bigger celebrities than Hollywood actors, and for many becoming a professional gamer has replaced the dream of being a professional footballer.

It’s fair to say that if you know nothing at all about gaming, you’re essentially cut off from understanding what’s become an important aspect of life for many people, and a common experience that draws people around the world together.

The first three Black Ops games have a player count of 200m, and together they have logged 15bn hours of gameplay. If you’ve never picked up a controller, you’re likely to find yourself in an ever-shrinking minority.

(Excerpt) Read More at: TheNational.ae