So Little Time, So Much To Do Dept.

Here's an extended example. A friend of mine who's an avid gamer has described his preference for video games in terms of cost-effectiveness. If you spend $50 on a game that gives you a few hundred hours of gameplay, as opposed to $25 for a newly-released movie that you're going to watch only a couple of times (if even that), which of those is the more sensible investment? Ditto a newly-released $25 hardback, or a $15 trade paperback, or what have you.

This isn't to say that it's not worth spending $25 on a movie. I know I would gladly blow $25 on some movies without blinking. It's just that such decisions exist in far less of a vacuum than they ever did. Once upon a time, the only way to spend that much money on a movie was to take a ton of people to the theater or to buy a ridiculous amount of popcorn and soda. Now you can blow that kind of money on a film without even buying the refreshments, so of course spending $50 for something that will pay you back with far more entertainment over time will seem that much more appealing.

Likewise, video games are themselves being eroded — sometimes from within, as per casual games like Angry Birds, and sometimes from without. I strongly suspect you will not be able to find a single niche of the entertainment world that has not discovered it is losing its core audience in some form to ... other niches of the entertainment world.

A parallel phenomenon appeared in the tech world with the rise of tablets. It wasn't that people would stop buying PCs or notebooks altogether and start buying iPads or 'Droid slates — it was that those new devices opened up a whole new market for people who didn't really need a whole PC. I personally do need a full-blown PC; the range and type of things I do on a computer simply isn't supported by a tablet. But I can't begrudge anyone else their choices — and I can't deny that the appearance of those devices has given us that much more granularity of choice.

That's what it comes down to more than anything else, I think: increased granularity of choice. There's more games in town than ever, more ways to spend an (increasingly-scarce) entertainment dollar than ever, and we ignore that at our own peril. It's why it makes that much more sense, as much as I hate it, for a given "entertainment property" to span multiple incarnations. To make a movie, video game, novelization, comic, etc., etc. from the same thing is less a form of mean-spirited artistic invalidation — as some people might have it, me included once upon a time — than it is a kind of fail-safe redundancy.