This news article got me thinking.

Video games, and GTA as the current flagship video game franchise, blow other entertainment media out of the water.

As a gamer, I don't really like the GTA series. I think they're buggy pieces of sensationalist average-ness that, without hookers and swear words, would be just another sandbox style game where you do a lot of nothing to kill time just because.

I mean, if you played the same game, same engine, but replaced the gangster main character with a delivery boy who, instead of dealing drugs and working for syndicates, delivered pizzas in a large open city with lots of stuff to do in it, no one would care nearly as much.

My personal opinion on the franchise aside, the sales numbers speak for themselves, and should prove beyond any doubt to any reasonable person that video gaming is not a fad industry, but now the premiere money making entertainment medium in the world.

Consider this: Block buster game budgets (about $20 million) are still far below the budgets of major motion pictures. This season's big movies, Iron Man and Indiana Jones, both cost about $180 million each, not counting marketing budgets which, in Indy's case, is estimated to be almost the same as the production costs, at $150 million [Source: LA Times])

That means they need, in Indy's case, nearly $400 million just to break even.

Video games not only makes more money in net worth, but compared to the development costs, they require fewer sales to break even. Of course, the cost of each individual unit sold (US$60, AUS$120) is much greater than a movie ticket (US$8, AUS$12), and you only need one copy per household (as opposed to one movie ticket per person).

When it comes to numbers, it's pretty clear cut. Gaming makes more money for less, and its about time it was treated as a proper form of entertainment, for all ages, instead of having the issue degenerate in to whinging about kids playing games their parents should never have bought for them in the first place.

The whole video game issue will go away. Eventually. It's been said before, countless times, that such scapegoating happened with comic books and rock and roll music. Eventually, it went away. Not entirely, but it was not front page news when someone killed themselves listening to music, or one kid accidentally punched another kid in the face play-acting super heroes.

Believe it or not, books were considered unjust, back when the printing press was invented. People reading novels for fun was considered heinous when they could be reading the bible or working in the fields. Of course, the contrvoersy over Harry Potter leading kids to witchcraft by loud-mouthed whinging christians complain show just how far we haven't come (and it's also a good indication of who's to blame.)

So we just have to ride the whole storm in a tea-cup issue out, and GTA's sales is a pretty buoyant fact to cling to until we reach dry land.