Stop Asking What Game Is Biggest

Everyone loves asking: "What's the biggest game on Earth?"

Most people answer: The FIFA World Cup. Billions watch. Countries unite. It's a cultural phenomenon.

But I think that's the wrong question entirely.

Welcome to the Attention Economy

The biggest game on Earth isn't played on grass. It's the relentless competition for human attention.

Think about it. GTA VI. Fortnite. TikTok. Netflix. YouTube. Even LinkedIn.

They're all fighting for the exact same thing: your time.

For years, we believed our industry competed against other games. Call of Duty versus Battlefield. PlayStation versus Xbox. EA versus Ubisoft.

That world is gone.

Today, every hour someone spends in GTA VI is also an hour they're not watching Netflix, scrolling TikTok, or following the World Cup.

Entertainment has become one giant, shared economy—and attention is the only currency that matters.

What This Means for AAA

This shift explains everything happening in AAA development right now.

Success isn't just about making a great game anymore.

It's about building an ecosystem people return to.

Summer Game Fest replacing E3? Yes.

GTA VI becoming a global cultural event months before launch? Absolutely.

Publishers pouring money into creators, communities, and live services? You bet.

None of these are isolated trends.

They're all symptoms of the same underlying transformation.

The Hidden Problem Nobody Sees

But there's another change happening behind closed doors.

As competition for attention intensifies, production gets more complex.

Teams grow larger. Outsourcing expands. Development cycles stretch longer and longer.

Knowledge now has to travel across hundreds—sometimes thousands—of people, companies, and countries.

Yet many studios are quietly losing something far more valuable than technology.

They're losing institutional memory.

When Experience Walks Out the Door

Experienced developers leave. And they take context with them.

Suddenly, teams are solving the same problems they solved three years ago—but they don't remember the solution.

Creative consistency suffers. Production risk skyrockets. Quality becomes unpredictable.

Great Games Aren't Accidents

People love to say hit games are "lightning in a bottle."

I disagree.

Games are creative, sure. But creativity isn't random.

Think about great painters. They first learned composition, anatomy, perspective, color theory. They built on foundations.

AAA development works exactly the same way.

The better an organization captures and compounds its knowledge, the better its chances of creating something exceptional.

Innovation scales on top of memory—not instead of it.

My Prediction for the Future

When I look at where our industry is heading, I don't think AI, graphics, or game engines will be the biggest differentiators.

The winners will be the organizations that preserve, transmit, and compound their knowledge better than everyone else.

Because in an industry competing for the world's attention, the companies that remember how they built greatness yesterday have the best shot at creating it again tomorrow.