How much revenue does the video game industry make each year?

How to get close to this number

Multiply players by spend. This site's companion questions put paying gamers at somewhere over a billion people spending around a hundred and eighty dollars a year each. Players times annual spend gives a figure in the high tens to low hundreds of billions.

The comparison in the explanation is the one that reorders the cultural hierarchy: more than global cinema box office and recorded music put together. Games have been the largest entertainment sector for over a decade while still being discussed as a subculture, and the gap between commercial scale and cultural standing is wider here than in any other medium.

The composition is the part that surprises people who think of games as consoles: mobile alone accounts for roughly half the revenue. The industry's money comes primarily from phones and from free-to-play monetisation, not from the sixty-dollar releases that dominate coverage — which the whale concentration described elsewhere on this site explains.