This is simply wrong.

Marvel movies (and indeed, most studio releases) are generally produced and released within a year or two. Only the biggest blockbusters have crews in the hundreds, and it is rare for a movie to have a crew in the thousands. For example, Endgame is one of the most expensive movies ever made...and production and post-production (i.e., VFX) took less than 2 years. Dune (2021) was filmed and post-produced in under 2 years. Tenet, Nolan's most technically complex film, was actually filmed and post-produced in just over 1 year. (But contrast to Avatar 2 and 3, which have been in production for over 4 years and counting.)

On the other hand, almost every AAA game of the last decade has spent years in development with a crew of hundreds for almost the entire time. For example, Red Dead 2 was in development for 7 years. Starcraft 2 was in development for over 5 years. Destiny was in development for 4 years.

Note that the above timeline does not include pre-production work (like writing the screenplay, casting, hiring crew, raising funds) because in the movie industry pre-production work proceeds very slowly (for example: Avatar 2 was in pre-production for 7 years; Gemini Man for over 20 years), but the actual production and post-production (i.e., the actual making of the movie, editing, FX) happens at a lightning pace. In the game industry, the creative parts happen in tandem with the development of the game itself.

Also note that while movies can have large crews, the different teams aren't all working at the same time; for example, film crews and other production crews rarely interact with the VFX or other post-production crew.

But if you factor in audience size, things get more complicated. Red Dead 2 sold about 38M copies, a near record, but Avengers Endgame reached something like 250-300M people at the box office, even before streaming etc.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most_expensive_video_g... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most_expensive_films

300M movie watchers is about half a billion hours. If those 38M games all had only one player (probably fairly close) they only have to play the game for 15 hours on average to get at half a billion player hours.

https://howlongtobeat.com/game?id=27100 claims it takes at least 49 hours to beat it, so it’s likely that the game was played for more hours than the movie was watched.

There's a percentage of players of course that will play a game for many hundreds or thousands of hours but the calculation is shakier when you take the falloff of players into account/

https://www.ign.com/articles/2014/03/17/gdc-most-players-don...

Games take a lot longer to produce than films (in total, per hour of content that may not be true).

The largest expenses are related to FX costs and marketing. That's why the cost of low-effects movies falls very rapidly under 100m, you can film a run-of-the-mill romcom for less than 10m.

Also, how far down the stack do you go for each. Both rely on tools to make the production happen. Do you count hours to make the digital editing software and fx programs for films? Do you count the human hours to make Unreal4?

I doubt they count hours towards tools etc developed as they probably paid money for those. So, different bucket I guess, and still important for the overall cost.

For the more common endeavours, then no, of course - they just use what is there, or more likely outsource it to specialised providers in the same way as they would outsource e.g. building a website.

I'm not sure what you mean.

A big Marvel movie costs around $300m-$500m to produce, these days. AAA videogames can go over $300m-$400m I believe. It's basically the same ballpark, as far as input costs go. However, a film results in 2h of output enjoyment for a consumer, whereas games get several multiples of that.

It's a giant wall of text for 30 minutes.

Dollars per entertainment hour is just a way to try to convince gamers that it is reasonable to spend more on games, but perhaps the better argument to make is that we need to pay these companies more or they will go out of business or move to scummy pay to win business models.

It's apples to oranges anyway, even when comparing games to games.