US video game industry revenue

Between 2015 and 2023, Facebook's monthly active user count and US video game industry revenue both grew in a manner that a graph would describe as 'up and to the right.' The r-value of 0.97 is the kind of number that an MBA student would present as synergy. What it actually represents is two large digital entertainment industries growing simultaneously in the same economy, which is roughly as surprising as discovering that both got bigger when screens became more important to human life.

Both metrics track the maturation and mainstream adoption of digital entertainment across the same period. Facebook grew from approximately 1.4 billion to 3 billion monthly active users between 2015 and 2023, while US video game industry revenue grew from around $23 billion to over $57 billion. Both were turbocharged by the pandemic's 2020-2021 digital acceleration and sustained by structural shifts in how people allocate leisure time. The underlying driver is the same: increasing hours spent on screens across all demographics, with the pie growing large enough to sustain multiple digital entertainment categories simultaneously.

Industries that compete for the same resource — human attention — can grow in parallel when the total supply of that resource is expanding. Correlation between competitors sometimes measures the size of a rising tide rather than any connection between the boats.