EA’s Battlefield 3 Outsells Steve Job’s Biography By A Long Shot

And you thought people liked reading biographies.

Well, this is apparently not the case, as EA’s Battlefield 3 outsold Steve Job’s authorized biography written by Walter Isaacson, which was released just nineteen days after the Apple CEO’s death. To draw a comparison from the chart above, Battlefield 3 sold an estimated 5,000,000 copies its first week and generated $300 million of revenue, while the Steve Job’s biography sold approximately 379,000 copies and earned $13.2 million.

Now, this says less about our culture and the forms in which we choose to entertain ourselves than you might think. The book industry in the US is still a $40 billion industry, worth over twice the amount of the collective video game industry. And this is also not a typical book we are looking at, it’s a biography, which as Billy Pidgeon, a game analyst at M2 Research said in an article over at VentureBeat:

“When it comes down to it, it’s more fun to play games than it is to read a biography.”

There are very few people that I personally know of that read biographies for pleasure over memoirs or mystery fiction, so it’s more than understandable that Battlefield 3 would sell over three times that of the Walter Isaacson written Steve Jobs biography. Plus, as much effort as Mr. Isaacson put into the biography, creating a game like Battlefield 3 takes quite a bit more manpower and resources and is inherently more fun.

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