Quote Originally Posted by Gentlegamer View Post
I think another answer is that film studios make money off catalogue sales of their films (these days, principally on DVD). Video games, as software, don't have that kind of "shelf life."
That's a big part of it and rights to catalogue sales typically get sold in chunks which is something I have never seen in the video game world probably because until services like Gametap came along, there was literally no market for games on defunct platforms. The other big part of the equation is that films can make money in just about every part of the world and often do with very little localization save for either subtitles or dubbing which costs surprisingly little to do. Also, even a movie which flops has some value in the cable/premium pay cable/PPV/DVD Rental market. Movies typically don't get resold on the used market (unless you have a wholesale shift in technology like VHS to DVD) multiple times the way a game does (with no money coming back to the developer/publisher) and movie studios get a guaranteed residual when a copy of a movie gets sold to Blockbuster or Hollywood Video on top of the purchase price. A game which fails gets thrown in the bargain bin and is generally never heard from again.