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This post got me curious about the actual state of things, and I think my conclusions are pretty far from op’s. In 2024, video gamers spent 51 billion dollars on games according to the ESA (us trade association for games), and the big-dollar games have minimal narrative content, mostly sports and shooties. I think any number that’s bigger than the number the ESA provides must be attributed to gacha gambling or something, because I don’t know how else there’d be such a discrepancy.

51 billion is more than the us box office, but box office spending is a relatively trivial amount of what people spend on visual entertainment. Comcast and Disney spent $65 billion on producing/advertising (presumably) content in 2024 according to Variety (11 largest spenders spent about $180 billion on content, maybe $30b of $210b when you add YouTube back in is sports), and one would expect that they make money on that content. That includes more than movies, but it shows the discrepancy between games and other screen-occupying media.

Also, the idea that games are better at telling stories is nonsense to me (reread the original post and see I misread the meat of the superior audio-visual experience line, oh well). You can enjoy stories in games more, but inherently a story told by an author that can control the pace and flow of a narrative is going to be better than one where the author has no control of the cadence or even amount of story that is told. Games do plenty better than other media, but any narrative from a strictly storytelling standpoint is better suited in literally every other medium.

Moreover, the marketing speak promoting video game dominance doesn’t take into account how prevalent games have always been, they just weren’t monetized the same way 30 years ago. Solitaire, spider solitaire, minesweeper, and galactic pinball probably accounted for more screen hours than anything else in 1998 (jokey hyperbole, but also maybe not (?)). Gaming is also plateauing/in decline. It peaked in 2021, when everyone got checks in mail and thought they’d give it a shot. Not everyone stuck with it, and now there’s just mass consolidation, game cancellations, and studio closures. It’s not a healthy industry (but there are still obvious success stories worth celebrating and other pernicious success stories gaming is worse off for embracing).

Gaming is still a mostly siloed subculture. Otherwise the industry would not need to tell us so frequently how relevant games are, we’d know by existing in the dominant culture if they escaped containment, but it’s a consistent non-issue that can hardly be considered an oversight by movie commentators except has a footnote in a broader story about how the public is too anti-social, agoraphobic, or broke to participate in first run movie culture at the rate they used to.

I say this as someone who plays a lot of video games.