Just How Long is a Billion Seconds? Longer Than Your Favorite Game Took to Make!
You‘ve probably seen hysterical stats like "This video has 1.5 billion views!" or "That company just reached a $2 billion valuation!".
But have you ever stopped to think about just how massive those numbers are?
I couldn‘t visually grasp it. Until I realized a billion seconds is nearly 32 years.
Let‘s dive into the strangely long timescale of a billion seconds and why it matters to us gamers.
Timescales in a Nutshell
First quick refresher…
| Time Unit | Total Seconds |
|---|---|
| 1 minute | 60 seconds |
| 1 hour | 3,600 seconds |
| 1 day | 86,400 seconds |
| 1 year | 31,536,000 seconds |
Seems straightforward. But the leap to a billion seconds is truly unfathomable…
- 1 million seconds = 12 days
- 1 billion seconds = 31.7 years!!!!
My mind literally can‘t comprehend that scale jump. But this table helped:
Yeah, massive difference. That‘s basically an entire generation!
Let‘s compare it to something gamers can understand – how long your favorite games took to develop:
| Game | Development Time |
|---|---|
| Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2019 | 5 years |
| Elden Ring | 6 years |
| Cyberpunk 2077 | 9 years |
Yet a billion seconds is 3-6 times longer than even those games took!
Really helps conceptualize how gargantuan it is.
Why This Blows My Mind
We see "billions" thrown around so casually when it comes to games.
"This console has sold over 2 billion units!"
"Our last game generated $1.5 billion in sales!"
With a better grasp that a billion seconds is approximately enough time to develop THREE Call of Dutys back-to-back-to-back…those huge numbers finally mean something tangible.
For example, take Activision. Call of Duty is their biggest franchise, with a new title dropping annually.
- If a billion seconds (31 years) represents 3 CoD development cycles…
- Then $1.5 billion of CoD sales is equal to 45 years worth of their normal CoD annual releases!
That revenue would cover nearly half a century of their regular production schedule.
Now I finally have scale around what a billion actually means – both in terms of raw time and for the gaming industry specifically.
This stuff matters if we want to interpret the mind-boggling statistics thrown at us daily as gamers.
Let me know if these sort of temporal translations help you visualize massive numbers or gaming metrics better!
[poll] Does framing timescales in terms of game development help conceptualize huge numbers for you?- Yes, it makes billions finally understandable!
- Meh, I still can‘t grasp billions no matter what
- Other (let me know in the comments!)
[/poll]
Anyway, next time someone touts billions of something, remember – that sh*t is LONG!!!
So what longtime development achievement should we compare to next? Let me know in the comments!
