The little dinosaurs are ignoring the great big elephants in the room: gaming. The article doesn't mention it. The market for video games in 2024 was around $225B, compared to movies at around $33B. Hollywood has worked very hard not to realize that their industry has become niche and have succeeded.

My last week may be an indicator. I've watched zero TV or movies but have spent about 40 hours helping a small colony of scrappy hard working beavers survive on post apocalyptic earth. Steam got my money, Hollywood didn't.

The biggest competition for movies is actually from Youtube.

While the streaming business led to a growth of the movie industry, pre Covid and pre strikes at least, it's difficult to compete when millions of people can produce good content for low prices.

On top of that, it doesn't help that movies stopped innovating, 2025 box office was entirely dominated by prequels and sequels.

I don't care about avengers, I really don't, the first bored me enough.

I don't game at all but watch at least one movie a day as my relaxing time: criterion collection, mubi etc. I go to an indie cinema about once a month, often to see older movies as much as new ones. The cinema is rarely full but they have a good café and affordable subscriptions and I'm guessing some municipal funding, they won't ever run out of films to show. Though the day A24 goes out of business will be my sad day.

Of note here too: There's been a lot of (social media at least) backlash against AAA studios lately. Anecdote: 2025 had a number of great (High quality, popular, award winners/nominees etc), and they weren't from big studios. There seems to be a niche middle-budget level that produces wonders. Just to limit scope to 2025: KCD2, Expedition 33, and Blue Prince were all incredible games. Expedition 33 has my favorite sound track (Or album in general?) of all time. Death Stranding 2 is another great one. By a big studio, but let a creative person run wild with it.

I suspect the problem with AAA games is the same one movie studios face; mass-market appeal and profit-driven-design degrades the experience.

They're trying to avoid thinking (or at least talking) about it because they don't control it. They're hoping that the next downturn (which will almost certainly include a partial collapse of the game industry as we know it) will present an opportunity to scoop up incumbents. At that point, they'll be open about their relationship to, and ambitions, for gaming. Until then, the most you'll hear is A24 stuff, Kojima stuff, and tut-tutting about Ubisoft (almost certainly their first target).

The gaming industry has been bigger than the film industry for decades. This isn't new.

The time I used to spend watching movies is now spent on YouTube.

With the high quality cameras and drones at approachable prices, it's amazing to watch individuals create videos at such high quality but also has a bit of that DIY vibe that makes it more relatable and enjoyable.

My current fav is watching 4X4 overlanding videos of people driving along some stunning landscapes.

That’s because Hollywood makes movies, not videogames. You also spent a few hours driving but Hollywood hasn’t done anything about it because they are not in the business of making cars.

That game sounds interesting. What is it called? I only saw Beavers Be Damned when I searched Steam.

As I wrote elsewhere, I think TV is what is actually consuming cinema's lunch. The average hours spent watching TV have only gone up over the years, but the same is not true of film. Gaming as a "primary" hobby is also quite male-coded (women tend to play on their phones, but they spend by far the most amount of time watching trash tv and Bridgerton or whatever).

Didn't The Game Awards receive more viewers than the Super Bowl? It used to be referred to as, like, "the Oscars for video games", but now it's immensely more popular than the Oscars.

> The little dinosaurs are ignoring the great big elephants in the room: gaming

Partially, but a massive issue has been the offshoring of Hollywood [0].

UK, Canada, EU states like Ireland and Poland, and others match dollar-for-dollar in subsidizes to incentivize local production, and factoring in lower salaries are able to outcompete even Georgia.

After COVID and the WGA/SAG-AFTRA strike, production completely left Hollywood.

Film production is high risk and expensive, so margins really matter, so the double whammy of the COVID shutdowns and then fhe WGA/SAG-AFTRA strike became existential.

California has been trying to reincentivize onshoring [1], but it's too little too late. Hollywood even lobbied the Trump admin [2] for a 100% tariff on foreign produced films [3] which more diversified media companies pushed back.

[0] - https://milkeninstitute.org/content-hub/research-and-reports...

[1] - https://www.politico.com/news/2025/06/06/gavin-newsom-hollyw...

[2] - https://www.politico.com/news/2025/10/15/hollywood-lobbying-...

[3] - https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c4g78e809zqo