Right, that’s my point - the audience for most individual games, like other media, isn’t big enough to support merchandising as a meaningful revenue stream. (That’s what I meant by “scale of audience” - the audience for a particular piece of media.) Though it’s not just about audience size. Bands tend to be an exception, because people feel passionately about them. Similarly, some games/movies/tv shows lend themselves to merchandising more than others.
The first time I read that claim was many years ago, and it was totally an apples-to-oranges comparison. They compared movie ticket sales (which is an increasingly small fraction of film industry revenue) to all game hardware, software and even development middleware revenue. I suspect that’s still the case, to some degree in the comparisons, because I’d be very much willing to be that the film industry, especially globally, is bigger than the game industry. (Claiming that people have seen no movies in a year obviously refers to the theater. But that’s not really significant anymore. I watch multiple movies each week but haven’t been to a theater in a decade at least.) The game industry just doesn’t have that much money floating around in it. The number of rich game studio or publisher heads pales in comparison to the number of rich movie studio executives. The big expenditure for AAA publishers is in marketing. I.e. all that money is going to television (ads). The fact that the game industry is stuck with sales (and real money transactions) as its sole revenue stream, vs. the movie industry’s ticket sales and DVDs, VOD, tv rights, streaming, etc. makes a difference.
For game developers employed at independent studios, income can be decent (not that I’ve experienced it), but studio shut downs are frequent. (I once worked for three studios in two years, thanks to closures. I think a friend of mine managed more than that for a while.) The average studio workers spends a good amount of time unemployed without benefits (and often with owed salary that they never get); being consistently employed requires a great deal of good luck (or a highly specific, in-demand skill set).
Most game development now is being done outside studios now, though. The average indie (as in not employed by a studio) game developer’s income puts them well below the poverty line. As the average indie game’s first year of sales is now $16,000 on average. (For a game that took more than one person-year to make.) For most indie developers, game development is functionally a hobby. The barrier to entry for game development has disappeared thanks to free tools, so there are far more game developers than can be supported by sales, and again, there are more ways to recover costs for movies than games.
There were $60 to $80 console games even in the late '80s, though they were relatively rare.
