Hollywood times three
If you don’t play video games, it’s easy to lose sight of how large the industry is. It earned $120 billion in revenue last year — almost three times as much as Hollywood. Two-thirds of adults in the U.S. play video games, either on their phones, a computer or a console. Gaming is so popular that millions of people visit streaming sites every month to watch other people play games.
Yet video games do not attract nearly as much media attention as movies, television, music or sports. We’re going to do our part to address that deficit by telling you — if you don’t already know — that this week is a big one for the industry, because two new video game consoles are coming out: Sony’s PlayStation 5 and Microsoft’s Xbox Series X.
New consoles are rare. Sony and Microsoft both released the most recent versions of their systems seven years ago. The new consoles will probably stick around for that long, too, meaning these will be the machines that power video games for most of this decade.
The key difference with the new consoles is the quality of the image, with even more realistic graphics. The new systems also promise faster loading times.
“Years of technological advancements and game development are coming to fruition,” Kellen Browning, who covers video games for The Times, told us. “Imagine if a new iPhone only came out once every seven years — that’s what this moment is like for gamers.”
The New York Times