King of the New Media Hill

It always surprises me about how many odd coincidences occur in my life. When I'm eating my Hello Panda cookies I suddenly hear about pandas. I miss an important meeting and find out that it was canceled due to weather conditions. I'm taking this new media class and now I'm bombarded with new media articles on the web.

I stumbled upon GamePolitics which detailed who is the king of new media. The "media experiences" were music, video games, cable TV, DVDs, on-demand, and theater. Each of these were compared based on their initial costs, replayability, and cost per play. This wasn't really an official study, but the findings were stunning.


According to the chart, music is pretty inexpensive, has decent replayability since everyone listens to a purchased song more than once, and each play is extremely cheap. On-demand and theater are understandably expensive since it's a one time thing. DVDs and TV seem to be okay as customers normally watch DVD movies numerous times considering that they bought them and TV gets quite a few views for the average $75 charge bringing the cost per play to a relatively small number. But what's this? Video games have a pretty big intial purchase price at around $50 and yet get about 250 plays which means it only costs 20 cents each time!

Looks like video games are pretty lucrative for new media. I suppose it's a combination of getting information across to the public as all new media forms do and their high replay value since the users are heavily involved the outcome is determined by their actions changing the experience every time they play.

I'm wondering why the internet wasn't part of that list. I feel that that would beat out everything since it only costs about $50 per month and yet customers use it for hours everyday. Nonetheless, there's no denying that video games are way up on the new media chain of importance and influence.