Games Enter the Group Chat
The death of the web is inevitable.[...]
3/ APIs are about to stop being keys and start being negotiations. Your agent shows up at Amazon like Ari Gold: "my client is rich and great, let me in."...
I think it's very hard for startups to survive what's coming.
Ben Thompson on the end of the internet:
public social media sites became personal entertainment sites, tuned for engagement, culminating in TikTok, a social media site with basically zero social component.However, that doesn't mean social networking went away: in fact, I think that social networking is stronger than ever; the difference is that it isn't public, but is rather in group chats. Group chats are familiar, they are high trust, they are, in many respects, the best of the Internet: even as technology atomizes us the group chat is the only place you can connect with people you care about, anytime and anywhere.
In other words, the redemption of social media was — just like blogging — to become smaller. The scaling that mattered for most people was not an ever larger audience, but a proliferation of infinite finite groups.
[...]
the public Internet, to an even greater extent than now, will be a battle zone at best (i.e. social media), and a wasteland at worst (everything else). Some of this is economic, as AI consumes everything — both content and attention — without giving any of the traffic back that Google did, but it is also technical...
The Internet as we knew it is dead.
There are, however, green shoots of possibility, and once again the answer is to go smaller. When anyone can make an app, the answer is not to try and make a quick buck in the App Store; in fact, the surge in slop will make the market worse for everyone. Rather, it's to make something for yourself and a small group of trusted friends and colleagues.
So where does that leave games?
One route is CPG. Package the thing, fight for attention in the most oversaturated store that has ever existed. That still works. It's just groceries.
The other is to stop shipping finished objects and start shipping entry points.
If IP is an API and APIs are now negotiations, what's for sale is the means of amusement. A world worth spending time with, some tools and a sandbox to vibecode inside.
Small doesn't have to mean niche. It can mean personal.
You're not buying the game.
You're buying the licence to turn it into whatever your group chat ends up playing at 2am.