The summer blockbuster season started during the last week of April with the releases of Iron Man and Madonna's Hard Candy. The movie took in more than $200 million, for reasons I've already written about. And the album did well in a poor market for music. But the real hit of the season, and probably of the year, is Grand Theft Auto IV.

If
you've barely heard of it, you're not alone. But the game took in more
than $500 million in its first week in stores – almost certainly a
record for any kind of entertainment. Exact comparisons are difficult:
Video games sell a higher percentage of their total copies during their
first week in stores. And Iron Man and Madonna have other
revenue streams, such as DVDs and concert tickets. But it's hard to
argue that video games can be a better business for the companies that
make them. While Iron Man cost well over $100 million, no video game has come close to costing half of that.

One
question this raises is why the media still don't take video games more
seriously. The big publishers get extensive coverage in the business
press. But there still aren't many critics who cover the games, and
they rarely get much space compared to reviewers of, say, Iron Man. This is one reason why more young people don't read newspapers. To the average 20-year-old, Grand Theft Auto IV is an event, while Madonna is an old celebrity who won't dress her age. I'm not saying that Grand Theft Auto IV is necessarily art – but neither is Hard Candy.

The other interesting question is what the success of video games says
about digital copy protection. For every paying viewer of Iron Man or
listener of Madonna, thousands more will see or hear them as downloaded
files or bootlegged discs. Video games are far harder to copy – they
can't be compressed – and it's much more difficult to get them to work
on the machines that are supposed to play them. In the game business,
piracy is a nuisance, not an existential problem. There's no way to get
games for free – so the people who want them pay for them.

Could
this be one reason why the game business does so well? Suggesting this
flies in the face of conventional wisdom, which dictates that the music
business needs to embrace a future where intellectual property flows
like water out of some digital tap. And there are other reasons why the
video game business is thriving – game publishers are more in touch
with the tastes of their customers, and $60 games that can be played
for 100 hours provide more entertainment value than $10 two-hour
movies. But the fact that games can't be copied easily also ensures
that popularity brings in revenue, in a way it no longer does in other
parts of the entertainment business. You can't argue with the numbers.