US video game industry revenue

As Americans have self-published more books per year—each one a testament to the democratization of literary ambition and the collapse of editorial gatekeeping—the video game industry has earned more revenue with almost identical momentum. The correlation is 0.957 across ten years, which suggests that the same economy producing two million aspiring novelists per year is also producing 220 million gamers, and that both groups are spending their evenings in front of screens. The overlap in the Venn diagram is larger than either group would like to admit.

Self-published titles grew from about 150,000 per year in 2010 to over 2 million by 2023, powered by Amazon KDP and the near-zero marginal cost of digital distribution. Video game revenue grew from about 25 billion to over 57 billion during the same period, driven by mobile gaming, live service models, and the mainstream acceptance of gaming as a primary entertainment medium. Both industries benefited from the same technological infrastructure: cloud platforms, digital storefronts, and the smartphone that serves as both a reading device and a gaming console. Both also benefited from the pandemic's acceleration of at-home entertainment spending, which pushed both curves steeper in 2020 and 2021.

Ten years of self-published books and video game revenue growing together is a story about the digitization of leisure: both represent entertainment that can be created and consumed without leaving the house, and both have been turbocharged by the same platforms and the same cultural shift toward screen-based living. The words accumulate, the revenue accumulates, and the screens stay on.