As we look ahead to the new year, you might argue that the most-anticipated entertainment release of 2026 will not be Avengers: Doomsday or whatever Taylor Swift has planned to bequeath her legion of fans. Instead, it will likely be Grand Theft Auto VI, due for release in November.
GTA VI, which is considered one of the most highly anticipated game releases in history, has a budget rumored to be in the range of $1-2 billion, making it around 2-4 times more costly to develop than the most expensive movie ever made (Star Wars: The Force Awakens at $533 million, if you were wondering). What’s more, it’s almost certain that GTA VI will rake in more money from sales than any movie ever released, possibly within the first few months of its release.
The Numbers Point To Gaming’s Dominance
So, might we say that the gaming industry is bigger than the movie industry? Well, it depends on how you frame it. Financially speaking, yes, it is much bigger, and it has been that way since the mid-2000s. In fact, it is about six or seven times bigger. In 2024 (when firm figures were last released for a full year), gaming revenue exceeded $200 billion according to PWC, whereas the global box-office take was circa $30 billion; even if you add the music industry (global sales of $29.5 billion in 2024), you can still say that gaming dwarfs these more traditional forms of entertainment.
Gaming’s draw is arguably its diversity. Casual gamers playing and paying to unlock Candy Crush features on their smartphones have probably little in common with committed League of Legends players. Kids playing Wii games have little in common with professional esports players. You can even throw activities like live casino gaming at a social casino into the mix as an arm of the diverse gaming entertainment spectrum.
Of course, if you talk about the diversity of gaming, then you can maybe question the methodology of the claims that gaming is definitely bigger. For example, Netflix can claim to be part of the movie industry, especially these days, and Netflix’s revenues for 2024 were in the region of $40 billion. Throw in other streaming services like Disney+, Paramount and Amazon Prime Video, and the gap shortens significantly. If you add paid television services, then the combined total exceeds gaming.
Difficult To Agree On Firm Figures
That said, we are wading into murky waters here, but it highlights how difficult these things are to measure. We mentioned PWC’s figures for gaming revenues earlier, yet that body measures gaming revenues in a much different way than other bodies, and there can be 10s of billions in the difference in the calculations. For clarity, hardware sales (PS5 sales, for instance) are not taken into consideration when publishing these gaming revenues.
And yet, we can also say that the original question of which is bigger does not necessarily have to be a financial one. You could probably ask the average person on the street to cite a few dozen Hollywood actors off the top of their heads, and they could do so without thinking too hard; what response would you get if you asked them to name five esports players? Gaming’s cultural impact is playing catch-up on movies and music, but it has a massive gap to fill.
Indeed, that’s possibly the most interesting thing about all of this: Gaming’s vast economic influence has somehow maintained a self-contained culture. Yes, there are more gaming crossovers than ever before, and you probably have children in your life who sport Minecraft hoodies, but, generally speaking, there is a sense of insulation to gaming culture that has not yet permeated the mainstream, at least not fully.
Thus, to circle back to our original question: the gaming industry is financially much bigger than the movie and music industries, even combined. But we’d argue that those forms of entertainment enjoy much more cultural impact, although perhaps things will change in a generation or two.