Shrinking List of Video Games Is Dominated by Blockbusters Big video game makers, like their cousins in books and music, have scrambled in recent years to adapt to the digital technologies buffeting their business. Tens of millions of people now play games on smartphones and tablets, usually for a sliver of the cost of playing on a game console. Electronic Arts Electronic Arts sells its marquee games, like FIFA soccer, at $60 each. But one part of the games business is thriving as never before: the blockbuster. The biggest console and PC games - usually those games that are part of an established franchise and have the slickest production values - are posting spectacular sales figures. This month, the latest in the gritty urban adventure series Grand Theft Auto took only three days on store shelves to reach $1 billion in sales, faster than any video game ever, its publisher said. "The winners have gotten massive," said Doug Creutz, an analyst Cowen & Company, a stock research firm. The richest games are getting richer partly because the industry makes fewer games over all, concentrating players" spending. Publishers are also squeezing out a little more money per game sold by selling add-on content and other digital goodies. And the legions of players eager to do battle with one another online create a sort of virtuous cycle, as players are attracted to the titles with the biggest pool of opponents. Now, the most popular games, like Call of Duty, Halo and Assassin's Creed, or top sports games, like the FIFA soccer series, have the biggest development budgets and fan bases and are getting a bigger portion of sales. The top 20 games in 2012 accounted for 41 percent of total American game sales in stores, nearly double what they did a decade earlier, according to the NPD Group, a market research company. "At a time when people are bemoaning the fate of the interactive entertainment business, if you pursue a strategy of giving consumers the highest-quality titles in the business, they will come out for what you have to sell," Strauss Zelnick, chief executive of Take-Two Interactive Software, the company that publishes Grand Theft Auto, said in an interview. The lower output of publishers makes the stakes higher. In 2012, only half as many new games were released in American stores as in 2008, NPD said. Electronic Arts, the publisher of the Madden football series and other sports favorites, sold 67 different titles in stores in the fiscal year ending March 2009. In its last fiscal year, it sold 13. Because fewer games are released, game makers must get more sales out of those games that do reach store shelves. "Every publicly traded publisher will talk about a "bigger, better, fewer" strategy," said Edward Williams, an analyst at BMO Capital Markets. But a blockbuster strategy comes with big risks. Games meant to be console blockbusters generally require tens of millions of dollars to build the graphics and gameplay that smartphones and tablets cannot yet match. Grand Theft Auto V, for example, features a sprawling game universe even more immersive for many players than big movies are for theatergoers. Those costs require millions in sales - and create big losses if sales are weak. The development costs on Grand Theft Auto V were likely to have been more than $100 million, and its marketing $50 million more, said Evan Wilson, an analyst at Pacific Crest Securities. He estimated that a typical console game would break even at about four million units, while that figure would have been one million a decade or so ago. Game makers have tried to compensate for the higher costs by getting more out of consumers with each game. Like many big publishers, Electronic Arts sells its marquee titles, including the FIFA soccer games, at the standard price of $60 each. The company also lets gamers enhance the game by spending money online to compose fantasy teams of their favorite soccer superstars. For its last fiscal year, E.A. said such digital revenue from FIFA was more than $200 million, up 94 percent from a year before.