The Attention Economy: How Games Win Mind Share in 2026
Players have more to watch, play, and scroll through than ever. They have less time to give any of it. Lexi Sydow explains why that gap is the real battleground for every game in 2026.
The economist Herbert Simon identified this back in 1971: "A wealth of information creates a poverty of attention." 1971. That was before smartphones. Before reels and before the average person carried a supercomputer in their pocket every waking hour.
Today, the average person's attention span on a single screen has dropped to 47 seconds, which is down from 2.5 minutes in 2004 and 75 seconds in 2012. We have more information than ever before, so our attention, our time, and our focus become the bottleneck. It is finite. And treating a player's time like the scarce resource it actually is can completely recalibrate how you think about the value equation.
Hi, I'm Lexi Sydow, Founder of The ATTN Economy. Over the past 15 years, I've worked across mobile analytics, market insights, and growth strategy, most notably at data.ai (formerly App Annie), where I led the insights program and marketing.Â
I've historically focused on complex systems and how the pieces of a digital business actually connect. Earlier this year, I honed in on Herbert Simon's profound observation and on one question that I believe is now central to almost every business decision in games: where does attention go, and how do you earn your share of it?
The premise I keep returning to is this: mobile didn't just give us a new screen; it fundamentally restructured how we allocate our human attention. We carry information everywhere; it mediates everything, and the competition for time on it has never been more intense. The top 5 companies operating in the attention economy today have a combined market cap of over $15 trillion. Yet in gaming, the analysis still happens in silos, with UA metrics here, community data there, and brand sentiment somewhere else entirely. Nobody was synthesizing it into a single picture of how attention actually flows and what that means for who wins.
That's the gap The ATTN Economy exists to close. And for game developers navigating 2026, I think it's the most consequential lens available. Let's get into it.
Attention is now currency
The math changes dramatically when we talk about the attention economy related to games. You're no longer competing for the top slot among just your gaming competitors; you're competing with every video, message, and feed that could fill those 47 seconds.Â
According to Sensor Tower, game publishers are already adapting as video creatives now account for over 53% of ad share, and playables have nearly doubled to 13%. But those formats don't exist in a vacuum. They're competing for the same feed placement as every other brand on Instagram and Facebook, which together drive nearly 70% of discovery. On Instagram alone, over 50% of the time is now spent on reels, up from about a third just a year prior.
There's a clear line between two ways of measuring success. Performance metrics tell you what happened in the last click: an install, a purchase, a session. Mind share tells you whether players think of your game when they pick up their phone with nothing in particular to do. The first is easy to count. The second is what actually keeps a game alive.
The mistake I see most often is treating these as a choice. Brand and performance don't compete; they compound. Performance marketing targets the players who already know you, but it's the brand that makes them know you in the first place. Spend only on performance, and you're paying, again and again, for attention you never earned.
Earned beats paid every time
💬 "Earned attention is more valuable than paid traffic. Someone chose to be there of their own volition — something spoke to them — and that person has far stronger long-term value than a user an algorithm delivered to your install page."
I saw this clearly when I was running marketing for a B2B company with very little budget. We leaned heavily on an insights-led approach: we weren't asking much from people; we were giving them something, data, perspective, a way to understand their market better. What was built over time was authority. Thought leadership. An earned base that trusted us because we'd been useful before we ever asked for anything.
The same logic applies in games. Studios that publish real insights, share what they've learned, and show up in the spaces where their players already talk are building the kind of quiet authority that paid spend can't manufacture. Content is a genuine competitive advantage in an attention economy. And in a crowded market where direct UA is expensive and getting harder, something that gives you an edge outside the standard channels is worth taking seriously.
The mechanics of this are shifting, too. Clipping (taking longer video content and truncating it into shareable moments) is how ideas travel in 2026. It's not just a one-minute video on Instagram; it's the whole ecosystem of how a brand moment gets manufactured and spread. The core mechanic starts with user-generated content, where people organically take something and share it. Still, there's now an entire layer of infrastructure that makes this a deliberate marketing strategy to create the impression of virality. Micro-influencers, with smaller but deeply committed audiences, often drive more action than a celebrity placement. Their reach is smaller. Their trust is deeper. In an attention economy, trust is the multiplier.
"A micro-influencer with a few hundred to a few thousand followers might only have a handful of viewers actively engaging. But that smaller feed is actually an advantage; it gives the influencer time to answer questions and genuinely interact in a way that a larger creator simply cannot. That authentic back-and-forth is what drives conversion, not reach. So when choosing who to work with, the priority should be micro-influencers with a strong, relevant user base who already speak to the audience you are trying to reach."
- Sam Tubtimcharoon, Head of Growth Advisory and Strategy, Partner Network, Xsolla
"Treat clipping like a channel, not buzz. For sourcing: don't pick creators by follower count; look at how clippable they are and how alive their chat is. Chat engagement is the metric we've leaned on most lately, and small and mid-size streamers often beat the big ones there. For briefs: give creators a few moments you'd love to see clipped, a short list of don'ts, and freedom for everything else. Viewers smell a scripted ad instantly. For tracking, last-click misses most of the effect; viewers don't click; they search later. Watch branded search, wishlists, and organic installs in the 24–72 hours after a stream or clip spike, plus creator codes where you can."
- Sergei Kubyshkin, Head of Influencer Discovery, Partner Network, Xsolla
There are also tools now that can actually measure earned media value by tracking what an influencer or creator generates on TikTok or Instagram and mapping it downstream to downloads and engagement. Paid UA isn't going away, and I'd never suggest abandoning that budget. But I would trial programs in the earned space and track them rigorously, because in a market this crowded, that's where the edge is.
Community is the product
💬 "The studios winning long-term aren't just running events and optimized UA programs. They're building identity. Players who feel like they belong to something don't churn the same way transactional players do."
They come back for seasonal events because their alliance is participating. They spend because status inside the community actually means something to them.
What that looks like operationally is investing in the spaces where your players already talk to each other (Discord, Reddit, in-game guilds and showing up there to listen and engage, not just push content. The studios that do this well know which features their most engaged players have been asking for months before they build them. They run betas with community members and create feedback loops that make players feel like co-owners of the game's direction. This kind of engagement is extraordinarily hard to manufacture with ad spend. It has to be Mo earned over time.
A useful analogy from outside games: Accessories design company Coach recently co-created its next line of book charms with its audience, based on novels. Instead of trying to tap into a viral cultural moment, they helped create something that the base was already excited about. When it hit social, it resonated immediately because the audience had helped make it. People defend what they helped build. That instinct doesn't change because it's a game instead of a handbag.
The Brawl Stars live-ops campaign makes the numbers concrete. By interlocking a new-season launch, a live event, and a partnership with filmmaker Taika Waititi, the campaign generated 23+ million views across TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube in just over three weeks. Global daily active users were up 25% in March. Spending rose 30% — an additional $9.7 million month-over-month — to hit $42 million in net-to-publisher revenue. The Brawl Pass Plus jumped to the #3 IAP in the US on announcement day alone. But for the full month, the standard $9.99 season pass remained #1. The events, new characters, and timed collab pushed people to make purchases on a monetization system that was already working. That's the model: reinforce and build upon good foundations, don't replace them.
What spending looks like in 2026
Monetization is changing shape alongside attention. The clean split between free and paying players is fading, and I expect 2026 to belong to hybrid models, where ads, in-app purchases, subscriptions, and rewards work together rather than compete for the same screen. The right balance depends heavily on genre and market: Action and Strategy games in the US run around 82% IAP to 18% ads, while Brazil sits closer to 50/50. Japan skews even more heavily toward IAP. These aren't universal rules; they're benchmarks worth knowing before you set your mix.
There's also a new competitor for player spending, and it's not another game. It's the social platforms themselves. Nearly $16 billion was spent inside social media apps last year. Tipping a creator, subscribing to a channel, paying for access to features or AI tools, players are now spending money on attention in places that have nothing to do with games. TikTok, YouTube, Snapchat, and Meta are all deepening these models. Every one of those dollars is a dollar a game has to earn back, using the same psychological drivers: status, connection, exclusivity, progress.
The other dynamic worth watching is what happens to game spending in an economic downturn. When people's wallets get smaller, they pull back on one-off game purchases faster than they cut app subscriptions. Ending a Netflix subscription feels like severing your cable TV provider — it's become load-bearing infrastructure. A one-off IAP in a moment of economic pressure is much easier to skip. If there's a viable path to subscription mechanics in your game, it's worth exploring.
Start here
If I'm talking to a developer about to launch their first monetized game, my advice is this: don't worry about the money up front.
Focus on the drivers for why people are playing: the core game loop and the promise it fulfills. Is it passing the time? Providing a thrill? Competition? Ensure that your features are actually driving that behavior, and that you can see the evidence: people coming back, spending time, choosing to be there. Engagement is a leading indicator of value, which eventually translates into spend. Get that right first. The revenue will follow.
More tactically: build your community on platforms you engage with but don't control. Discord, TikTok, Instagram, wherever your players already gather. A studio that owns its relationship with its audience is far harder to displace than one renting attention through ads. Find rising micro-influencers; people with a thousand followers in your genre can be more effective than a massive reach account, because it feels like a friend recommending something. And think seriously about clipping as a deliberate strategy, not an afterthought.
The throughline of everything I've seen over 15 years is patience. Attention is finite. Trust is earned. Community compounds. The studios that win in 2026 will be the ones that stop trying to buy a moment and start trying to deserve one.
Attention is the hardest thing to earn in games right now — and the most valuable. At Xsolla, we work behind the scenes so studios can focus on making something worth players' time. Visit Xsolla.com to explore All The Things your game needs to grow, monetize, and reach players wherever they are.
[[Interviews, copywriting, editing, and article publication prepared by Kirill Tokarev, Lisa Sirlin-Hall, Viktoria Steshina, and David Jagneaux.]]
