Changing the game: How gaming levelled up into a multi-billion dollar industry bigger than film and TV

Until recently, this economic dominance wasn’t reflected in mainstream culture. The image of a stereotypical gamer can still conjure teenage boys’ bedrooms in some minds. Games awards don’t command the same cultural status as the Oscars. And movie iterations of games have historically been dismal. Just watch a middle-aged gamer, like the author of this piece, wince when recalling the box-office and critical disasters of 1993’s Super Mario Bros, 1999’s Wing Commander or 2005’s Alone in the Dark – adaptations that rank among the lowest-rated films in history.

Over the last few years, however, this has begun to change. The second highest grossing film of 2023 was The Super Mario Bros Movie, which made more than $1 billion and was narrowly beaten to the top spot by Barbie, an equally unlikely juggernaut. The same year, series one of HBO’s zombie apocalypse thriller The Last of Us, also based on a video game, enthralled television audiences and swept up at the most respected awards ceremonies.

This week, the highly anticipated second series of The Last of Us begins on Sky Atlantic/Now, following hot on the tail of the release of one of the year’s most exciting films, A Minecraft Movie, starring Jason Momoa and Jack Black.

A Minecraft Movie is reported to have had a budget of $150 million, which sounds hefty until you realise that the Minecraft game is said to have generated more than $3 billion in revenue over the last decade.

Meanwhile, online Minecraft videos have collectively amassed well over a trillion views. Forget the Olympics and the Moon landings, it’s game-related content that has been viewed by more human eyeballs than anything else in history.

Numbers like this can feel exhausting, even dispiriting. More heartening is the fact that an increasing amount of the content created about and around video games is – whisper it – really rather good. As a parent, gamer, author and aficionado of absurdist comedy, I’d venture that Jim Carrey’s recent performances as Dr Robotnik in the Sonic the Hedgehog films are among his greatest work. The films, which have generated over $1 billion at the global box office, are remarkably well-crafted family entertainment.

So what’s changed? Naomi Alderman – who as well as being the award-winning author of novels including The Power and presenter of Radio 4 series such as Human Intelligence and The Third Information Crisis was also once a games writer – says the most important factor is that people who grew up playing games are now the ones making the decisions. “I wonder,” she says, “whether the new crop of brilliant TV and film productions based on games, shows that at last, the people who are commissioning TV and film played games when they were growing up.”

If you’re wondering how a critically lauded TV series can emerge from a video game, it’s worth noting that many modern games are themselves remarkable creative achievements, worlds away from the simplistic characters and thin plots prevalent in earlier decades.

As David Varela, a scriptwriter working across television and games, explains: “When I was a kid, the story of a game could be written on a napkin. Today, we’re seeing characters with psychological depth, stories with emotional impact and themes with real philosophical weight. A single game can contain enough material for multiple seasons of television.”

In fact, beating a modern blockbuster game often means investing more time than any TV series or film demands, while creating one can involve upwards of 1,000 creative professionals crafting an interactive world from scratch over many years. The BAFTA Games Awards celebrate the best in global interactive storytelling, with this year’s top contenders including the epic sequel Senua’s Saga: Hellblade II, which explores Norse mythology and mental health through a game world that shifts in response to its protagonist’s psychosis, and Astro Bot, a charming space adventure with the polished visual appeal of a Pixar film. Games like these employ cinematic techniques and narrative approaches that increasingly influence traditional screen storytelling as well as drawing upon it.

The most spectacular on-screen experience I’ve recently enjoyed wasn’t in a cinema or on TV, but watching my children, Toby, 11, and Clio, nine, playing the two-player story adventure Split Fiction, a game that sees two aspiring authors trapped inside one another’s imagined worlds by a sinister story-extraction machine.

How best to approach this rapidly shifting entertainment landscape? For British writer and games designer Adrian Hon, the key is unpacking the word “game” itself: “What’s unique about video games is how broad they are. Imagine lumping all of ‘video’ together as an art form: movies, TV, TikTok, YouTube.” They’re not so much a single cultural form as a compendium of possibilities, spanning everything from quick puzzle games on a smartphone to months of immersion in shared interactive narratives.

This digital renaissance has transformed what was once a solitary, niche pursuit into a social, cross-generational experience. When families gather to compete together in Mario Kart or Nintendo Switch Sports, they’re participating in the same cultural phenomenon that drives Hollywood’s biggest blockbusters and prestige television dramas.

As we move through 2025, the boundaries between traditional media and interactive entertainment will continue to blur: a cross-pollination that promises richer stories, immersive worlds and experiences spanning generations and mediums. Gaming hasn’t just levelled up; it has changed the landscape of entertainment.

Dr Tom Chatfield is a British author and tech philosopher. His most recent book, Wise Animals (Picador), explores the co-evolution of humanity and technology.

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