US video game industry revenue

From 2013 to 2023, Netflix original titles and US video game revenue grew at an r of 0.9742, which is awkward given that they are nominally competing for the same hours of human attention. Netflix originals grew from a handful to over 1,500 per year, while video game revenue crossed $60 billion — both industries apparently thriving on the theory that there are enough dark rooms and screen-illuminated faces to go around. The data suggests they were right. The faces are very tired.

Both industries grew by competing not just against each other but against all prior forms of leisure, successfully expanding the total hours Americans spend on screens. Netflix's content investment, growing from $2 billion to over $17 billion annually, was explicitly designed to increase platform stickiness and subscriber growth. Video game revenue growth was driven by mobile gaming, microtransactions, and the maturation of esports — expanding the total addressable market far beyond traditional console gamers. Both were accelerated enormously by pandemic-era behavior changes in 2020-2021, with each recording its strongest growth simultaneously.

Two industries that appear to compete often grow together because they are jointly expanding a market rather than dividing a fixed one. The correlation reflects not competition but co-dependency on the same resource: human leisure time, of which there turns out to be quite a lot.