Posted January 31, 2012

I'll explain:
You buy a new car: company gets 20000$ from the sale and 10000$ for parts down the road
You buy a used car: company gets 0$ from the sale and 10000$ from parts down the road
You buy a new game: company gets 60$ of the sale and nothing down the road
You buy a used game: company gets 0$ of the sale and nothing down the road
So really the parts argument is void. Comparing a facet of a business with another business which lacks that facet it pointless. I think "apple and oranges" fits.
1. I would actually like to see some factual data on those numbers. I'm really interested in book publishing actual costs.
2. The way you present it (numbers for books - maybe assumptions, maybe facts; and no numbers for games) sounds like you think that book publishers make HUGE amounts of money and game publishers don't make HUGE amounts of money. You would be sadly mistaken if that is the case. Good games bring HUGE revenues just like good books. Hell, bad games with good marketing bring HUGE revenues, which I don't feel is true for most books tbh.
publishing costs see http://www.blot.co.uk/book/costs.html and thats for self publishing with typesetting etc £2500 for 500 copies thats 5 quid a copy and thats for a SMALL expensive job done by individuals 4x the amount of pages in Hard instead of paper back with images etc is only 5500 thats 3 grand for for 1500 books (so while those first 500 cost you 5 quid each the next 1500 cost 2 quid each but thats a lie since you'd have 2000HB not PB books for that PB's will be a lot less by then) opening run for publishers is usually 20-100k books
Game company advances are 90%-120% of the cost of production (AAA game 12-120 million depends on platform) to get them you must reach the milestones the publisher sets AND are always in lieu you don't get your first check till you hit the first milestone...
you can get DVD 1000 units glass mastered and pressed for £375 so the per unit cost without case+bumf is less than books (lowest cost I can find for DVD's is 17p a disc for 200k which is a decent first release for a game still for just the disc) But the upfront costs are much much higher
3. Films double dipping? Yeah, because we don't have Game, Game Deluxe Edition, Game Weapons Pack, Game Horse armor, Game GOTY Edition, Game Ultimate Extreme Mega Edition... They got plenty of means of making easy money, don't cry for them.