Welcome to the Tech Policy Podcast of Evan Schwarger.

On today's show, video games, the workforce, STEM education, what do these things have to do with each other?

Recently, we had Mike Gallagher from the Entertainment Software Association on this show

to talk about all the various ways in which

technology policy impacts the video game industry and why gamers should care about what their

government is up to. Today we're going to go a little bit deeper and focus on a few of these

issues more in depth with someone else from ESA. So Eric Huey is the senior vice president

for government affairs at the Entertainment Software Association.

And to remind listeners, that is the trade group that represents the video game industry.

So Eric, thanks for joining the show.

Thank you, Evan, and thanks to tech freedom.

So this might not be intuitive to folks, but the video game industry is important for jobs. It's important for

the American workforce. Can you give folks a sense of just what type of size we're looking at here?

I mean, is this a big job creator, much smaller? It's a huge job creator and it's only growing.

This industry is a $30 billion domestic industry and $110 billion worldwide. So it's growing. It's now larger than box office Hollywood and the music industry combined. So interactive technology is the wave of the future. It's the way that people interact with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, and you see that in the way that, that movies are made. You see that in the way the sports are covered. You know, they adopt a lot of the, you know, Madden angle approaches and FIFA and those things. And these innovations that happen in our industry are then bleeding

over into other tech and entertainment industries. And in the process, we're creating a

tremendous amount of jobs and job pathways. When you think about what it takes to fuel a $30 billion

dollar domestic industry, people probably tend to think of our industry, if they think about it,

in terms of Silicon Valley or Seattle, or maybe Austin in Los Angeles, maybe Boston.

But the reality is there are 2,700 different video game companies in the U.S. in 3,080 different locations.

So we have video game locations across over 90% of congressional

districts. These are actual video games companies that are up and running. And there are a number of

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