2007 was a banner year for video gaming, and the industry has the figures to prove it. The Entertainment Software Association announced today that total sales for 2007 were $18.85 billion, with $9.5 billion of that spent on games and $9.35 billion on consoles.

Both the movie and music industries should be jealous of gaming's 2007 growth. The motion picture industry saw modest growth in 2007, reporting a total box office take of $9.66 billion, a modest increase over 2006's $9.49 billion. Things aren't going as smoothly for the music industry.

Comparing total sales of the games industry to only the box office gross of movies is cherry picking data. The box office is a small portion of the film industry's revenue. If you include DVD sales, TV licensing, Pay-Per-View, etc, the movie industry made something like $45 billion last year. And that's not including sales of DVD players, so it's only fair to not include the sales of game consoles in the comparison. So that's games' $9.5 billion vs film's $45 billion.