The Attention Drain (Ep. 28)

Blake and Mitch discuss the thesis that the games business is losing share of attention to non-game interactive applications. They discuss whether there is actually a defined market for interactive entertainment, and whether applications like TikTok should be considered "interactive."  They discuss and try to quantify the impact of game-like retention and engagement mechanics being adopted by such disparate applications as Snap, Duolingo, Strava, Fan Duel, Polymarket, Tinder, and OnlyFans. They conclude that it is not only a problem of "share of day" -- the hours that are being devoted to these addictive, interactive apps -- but also "share of wallet" -- the disposable income they are harvesting.  They discuss the structural change that they noticed coming out of the pandemic: that children in the pre-teen and teenage cohorts sought a different kind of pleasure in gaming during lockdown -- the pleasure of sociality. Mitch and Blake both feel that this change is endemic, and as this cohort has now aged into the key 18-34 demographic, that change is being reflected in gamer taste. They riff on some of the games and games-adjacent companies that anticipated or reacted quickly to this audience change, and reaped rewards for doing so.  They conclude by discussing how these new non-game interactive competitors are tapping into ancient human interaction patterns around things like gambling, social competition, and sex that have been part of human culture -- and important categories of human spending -- for millenia. They warn that the games business needs to react to this current attention drain as an on-going competitive threat, and learn back some of the lessons these new competitors learned from games.