What media firms can learn from the PC video game industry's embrace of freemium models, remixes, mods, and crowdsourcing
Lessons from the PC video game industry — The future of media is here—it's just not evenly distributed — The success or failure of tech and media products depends … Tweets: @cdixon and @joshelman Tweets: Chris Dixon / @cdixon : Lessons from PC gaming — “Instead of fighting for scarcity, fight for attention” http://medium.com/... ... http://twitter.com/... Josh Elman / @joshelman : .@cdixon nails it on the gaming industry — already bigger than movies and TV http://medium.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
The piece lands mid-argument: months earlier, the counter-case held that great content isn't commodified and that Facebook hosting news changes nothing about media economics. Chris Dixon's answer is PC gaming's track record — freemium pricing, mods, remixes, crowdsourced content — distilled into the line Josh Elman amplified to his followers: fight for attention, not scarcity, in a medium he notes was already outgrossing movies and TV.
The surrounding coverage reads as the thesis playing out over the decade: by 2019 Microsoft, Amazon, and Google were racing to own cloud gaming infrastructure around an industry set to generate $152B that year, and by 2020 analysts were framing Stadia-style cloud-native play as a new business-model frontier rather than a delivery tweak.
First-order effects
- Media executives get a working template from an adjacent industry — free base product, paid add-ons, modding and remix cultures, crowdsourced content — that directly challenges the position that premium owned content alone is the differentiator.
Second-order effects
- If media shifts toward free distribution, strategic value migrates from rights-holders to whoever controls distribution and infrastructure — the pattern behind how corporations controlling music and ebooks lost their leverage to tech platforms, per Benedict Evans' 2017 analysis.
Third-order effects
- The endpoint is media operated as services rather than shipped goods — the same restructure Andreessen Horowitz identified when arguing cloud-native gaming could unlock entirely new gameplay experiences and business models.
- The counterweight is inside gaming itself: executives reported by end of 2024 that cinematic production costs deliver diminishing financial returns, suggesting the durable export is the freemium-and-community layer, not ever-larger premium productions — see the diminishing-returns debate over cinematic game budgets.
The trend: Media economics are migrating from selling scarce copies to monetizing attention through free access, user-created content, and services, with distribution-platform owners capturing the value pool.