First it was the fact that the most successful popular entertainment releases of all time are games, with the Call of Duty franchise leading the charge, again and again and again. Then it was the growing popularity of what some refer to as eSports, or professional gaming, with a prize pool of $11 million and school-sponsored teams. More recently, it was the news that Marcus “Notch” Persson, the creator of Minecraft, sold his company Mojang to Microsoft for $2.5 billion, making him a billionaire overnight and allowing him to instantly buy the most expensive house in Beverly Hills. I’d have retired too!

That’s a good-lookin’ house, Notch

Now, we have YouTube star PewDiePie – that’s him in the header image – who makes videos of himself playing games and reacting to them in an often profane and what some would say hilarious manner. It’s not my thing, however with almost 38 million subscribers he is YouTube’s number one star and that celebrity earned him $7.4 million in 2014.

While I’m personally not a fan of his mainly because of his manic, arm-flailing approach, I have to respect what he’s accomplished. If you provide something people want, then this is often the result. Not only that, game videos are big business, with services like Twitch, which allows you to stream your gameplay in real time or upload play-throughs becoming more and more popular, even being embedded into consoles. YouTube recently announced a similar feature.

Since the game industry brings in a whopping $81 billion a year, crushing other entertainment industries like music, movies and sports, I suspect we’ll see this type of thing only get more popular.

Or you could just just combine them into something that is hopefully great. I mean, how bad could it be?