Mind blowing statistic

Holy f*****g s**t !!! Pardon my french, but I just read a statistic, in an article online, that pretty much blew my mind. I mean at first I thought something was wrong with my eyesight and that I had perhaps misread the statistic. After a second and then a third much slower reading I realized that I had not made a mistake.

But I still did not believe my eyes. So I did some cross referencing and fact checking. And as it turns out the thing in question is actually true
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Now to back up and present some setup. In the music industry it is uncommon but not unheard of for an artist to sell a million records. When this happens they say the artist has "gone platinum" .  A great many musicians, given a few years have gone double or even triple platinum. A select few have even sold as many as a hundred million records during a lifetime of outstanding achievement, constantly touring and recording.

At an average cost to the consumer of $10 per album, after selling 100 million albums a recording artist can be said to have made a billion dollars selling records. Accomplishing this generally requires an entire generation, decades of work.

One might say, but what about movies, they often make hundreds of millions of dollars in a short period of time don't they? Well like musicians, the good ones do, but again it often takes a long time to rack up a billion dollars in movie sales. Many movies never make this much money. There are of course a couple of notable exceptions. Avatar made a billion dollars in 17 days. Avengers did it in 19.

What about video games? I am sure you are thinking, yeah right that crap my kid/brother/boyfriend plays can't make that much money can it? Believe it or not,  it's not that uncommon for a popular game to sell say two or three million copies when it first releases and  ten million copies total during its "lifetime".  At say fifty bucks a pop that's like 500 million dollars.  But still that might take as much as five or ten years to happen.

The newest offering from Rockstar Games is Grand Theft Auto V. In it's first three days it made one billion dollars in sales. No, that is not a misprint or a typo. Billion with a b. That means roughly twenty million copies sold within 72 hours of its release.

There are twenty million people in Australia. Now imagine every single man woman and child going out to the store and picking up a copy of the same game within three days of one another.

There are a little over 6 billion people on the planet. That means that one third of one percent or around one in every three hundred people on planet Earth bought a copy of GTA V within 72 hours of its release.

By the time the holiday season is over in a few months, it will surely have made even more money. The game reportedly is going to have online play and the option for tons of micro-transactions to let one use real money to buy everything from cosmetic gear to weapons, cars and other accessories.

A few online first person shooters already make hundreds of millions of dollars a year this way. As long as they are reasonable about pricing and are not obviously being too greedy, there is no reason to believe GTA V will not do the same.

Music and movies used to be where it was at as far as entertainment. But it seems neither one can really hold a candle to video games anymore.