US video game industry revenue

The observation that podcast proliferation and video game revenue have been climbing in lockstep is the kind of thing that should make anyone running for political office deeply concerned about the amount of time their constituents are spending with headphones on. The constituents, for their part, are not listening.

Both boomed in 2020 for the same covid reason. Video game revenue surged as locked-down households bought consoles, games, and subscriptions in record numbers, while the podcast count exploded as millions of would-be broadcasters used their free time to start recording. The common variable is the hours of screen-and-speaker time liberated by lockdown. Two forms of media that discovered, simultaneously, a captive audience.

So the correlation is the sound of a year lived in headphones. People played, people listened, people stayed in. The pandemic was a gift to anyone who built entertainment for one person at a time.