Games

while the idea sounds silly, it does ring true for at least the really profitable portion of the gaming audience. my intuition is not backed up by any objective measure of anything at all (so clown on me otherwise), but i think what a lot of investors are realising now is that the "attention economy" is not infinite, there is definitely an upper limit on how many and how much and where people spend time, and the whale retention is being decimated by online gambling, streamers and porn stars pretending to be your perhaps-girlfriend.

the whole microtransaction business relies on a vast audience of free-to-plays and whales who are buying MTX in order to flex on the newbs/each other (which are increasingly spending more and more on gambling and parasocial relationships). with the rising computational requirements of new games and the stagnant computer hardware of most people (which will worsen in the following years) and the more addictive progression of new games, most free-to-plays are sticking to older games and the whales rather spend their money on either established communities or gambling, than spending it on new communities where there are no noobs to clown on nor there are any other whales to show off to. this is basically the same problem MMOs ran into but on an industry wide scale.

the solution? idk they'll probably just double down on more gacha mechanics and scantily clad children waifus.