Bigger turnover for games than for movies in Britain

The Daily Telegraph has looked into spending of British households on entertainment. The result: games rank higher than movies.

In estimates, spending on games and consoles in the twelve months leading up to September 2009 was 1,73 billion pounds. The movie industry earned around 1,2 billion pounds with cinema tickets and sales of DVDs and Blu-rays in the same period.

The paper writes: "This is the clearest evidence yet that the video games market has come of age and transformed itself from a niche form of entertainment for teenage boys into a mainstream form of entertainment for millions of British families."

Former minister Tom Watson views these statistics as evidence that the government needs to take this industry more seriously. "Like anything digital, Parliament has a very narrow view of video games. Too many politicians think video games are played by teenage boys staying up all night shooting things in their bedroom. And yes there are plenty of those, but there is also a huge range of people of many different ages who love playing games.”

source: computerandvideogames.com