Gaming hit $196 billion last year. An all-time record. It's also been losing the battle for attention for five straight years. It's a composition crisis. And what the industry needs to do about it.

Two trajectories tell the whole story. Meta: $90B in Reality Labs losses. 1,500 laid off in January. Quest sales down 30%. Roblox: 144M daily users. Bookings up 55%. $1.5B paid to creators. The metaverse arrived. It just doesn't look like VR headsets. (Source: @ballmatthew)

The core argument: gaming is stuck between two models. Game as Product: studio → content → audience. Linear. Decays without new releases. Game as Platform: studio → tools → creators → content → audience → new creators. Compounding. Only one of these is growing.