Artificial intelligence will make the creation of almost everything cheaper. And that will make something else far more valuable: the things that cannot be produced cheaply — our attention, our trust, and the places we actually want to return to.
GTA VI may therefore be more than the biggest cultural event of the year. It could offer a glimpse of what an economy might look like when we can no longer tell exactly when we are playing and when we are working.
When I last wrote for Solvo about HHC and kratom, it took only a few days for the government to launch a full-scale war on the green menace. So, just to be safe, let me make clear that I am not predicting a collapse in global productivity following the release of GTA VI.
Still, it could become one of the most important cultural moments of the decade. And not only because a rather unhealthy proportion of the world’s population is insanely excited about the game.
As I write this, more than two hundred economists, researchers and technology figures are calling for urgent preparation for the economic consequences of artificial intelligence. Sixteen Nobel laureates have signed the appeal, along with people associated with OpenAI and Anthropic. Their warning is simple: society had decades to adapt to previous technological revolutions. With AI, we may have only a handful of years…
And then there is a game that, on November 19, is expected to bring tens of millions of people into a single digital city called Vice City.
Nobel Prizes, artificial intelligence and GTA VI may sound like the setup for a bad joke. In reality, they may fit together almost perfectly.
AI will be like email. Essential, but not exceptional.
There is little point in debating whether artificial intelligence is a genuine revolution. Spoiler alert: it is.
A much more interesting question is: who will actually make money from it?
There is a comfortable assumption developing around AI today that the long-term advantage will go to every person or company that starts using it a few months before everyone else. In the short term, that may well be true. But a lead built on a tool that everyone will soon have access to has a very limited shelf life.
Not long ago, it was remarkable when someone used AI to create an illustration, a video, an analysis or part of a computer program. Today, at least in my view, it is becoming a standard part of the work of anyone operating at a reasonably high level. Generative AI has reached more than half of the world’s population within three years and is spreading faster than personal computers or the internet.
In a few years, AI will therefore no longer be a competitive advantage. It will be a necessity, just like email.
Those who do not use it will be left out. Those who do use it will certainly not automatically win.
AI will dramatically reduce the cost of creation. Texts, images, advertising, applications, websites, music, videos and entire digital products can be produced faster, more cheaply and by smaller teams.
But once almost everyone can produce almost anything, the ability to produce something itself stops being scarce.
Something else will become scarce.
If millions of people can generate a similar output, the output itself is no longer what creates value. What creates value is the audience willing to give it their sustained attention.
Attention. Trust. Brand. Community. Distribution.
And above all, the ability to create a place people want to return to, even when nobody is forcing them to with expensive and often annoying marketing campaigns.
When creation becomes cheaper, people’s attention becomes more expensive.
That may be where a far greater business opportunity lies than in being able to prompt a few dozen percent better than everyone else.
The revolution may be real. So may the bubble…
This thesis probably will not make some investors very happy: the stock market around AI may currently be overheated, much like internet companies were at the end of the 1990s.
That does not mean AI is a fake trend.
Quite the opposite.
The internet was real too. In the end, it transformed communication, media, commerce, politics and virtually every sector of the economy.
Its enormous potential, however, did not stop investors from paying absurd amounts of money for companies with no customers, no revenue and sometimes barely a product. It was also an extremely expensive lesson for many of them — one that probably still gives some of them restless nights.
People correctly anticipated the revolution. They often just picked the wrong long-term winners.
And, as we know, history repeats itself.
Hundreds of billions of dollars are flowing into AI. Technology companies are planning almost unimaginable investments in data centers, and a substantial part of the market is based on the assumption that the current pace of growth will continue. Some valuations are approaching record levels, and investors themselves are beginning to ask whether future profits can possibly justify the enormous costs.
AI can therefore be both the biggest technological transformation of our lives and a financial bubble.
There is no paradox in that.
The real paradox would be believing that every company that adds the two letters “AI” to its presentation today will automatically become the Amazon of the next decade.
Zuckerberg built the future. The people just didn’t show up.
Mark Zuckerberg understood the importance of digital worlds almost painfully early. And by “painfully,” in the context of the bill, I mean that quite literally — at least from my perspective.
He bet that we would work, shop, communicate and spend a significant part of our lives in them. Facebook became Meta, the company started making headsets, and tens of billions of dollars were poured into a project that was supposed to change the world.
The problem was that most people did not exactly dream of entering a virtual office as a faceless avatar.
Reality Labs has lost more than $70 billion since 2021. For us Czechs, that is roughly one and a half trillion koruna.
Ouch.
Meta gradually scaled back its original ambitions, laid off employees and shifted attention and capital toward AI and smart devices.
Zuckerberg may not have been wrong about where the world was heading.
He may simply have been wrong about the timing — and about the route.
The most popular video games among the youngest generation, Roblox and Fortnite, did exactly the opposite.
They did not begin with a grand vision of the future.
They began with fun.
People came to play. They met friends there. They began creating their own worlds. And only then did an economy emerge around their time, attention and creativity — an economy that can extend into the physical world.
Roblox, for example, has long ceased to be merely a video game. It resembles an endless digital amusement park in which the attractions are built not by the operator, but by the visitors themselves.
And it is by no means just children creating a simple map after school. Behind successful projects are professional teams of programmers, graphic designers, animators, designers and marketers.
In the first quarter of 2025 alone, Roblox paid creators $281.6 million. Over the previous twelve months, more than one hundred of its developers earned over $1 million.
Not one hundred players who received a million dollars for playing.
More than one hundred creators and studios that built million-dollar products inside someone else’s platform.
Fortnite, meanwhile, distributes 40 percent of the net revenue generated by its in-game store and related purchases among the operators of user-created worlds.
The amount they receive depends, among other things, on how many people their world attracts — and, most importantly, how long they stay.
So once again, I have to emphasize one particular word:
ATTENTION.
The metaverse, then, may not have been a bad thesis after all.
It simply was not ultimately built by one of the world’s largest companies — a company that, incidentally, even changed its name because of it.
And that is where GTA comes in.
GTA V has sold almost 230 million copies since its release in 2013. Its online component is still generating enormous revenues, and Rockstar has something Zuckerberg could not buy even with tens of billions of dollars:
A world people genuinely want to enter — and, above all, spend an absurd number of hours in on a regular basis.
But the ecosystem that has developed around the FiveM platform is even more interesting.
FiveM allows users to operate their own servers built on GTA V. The best known are so-called roleplay servers, where players do not simply complete pre-written missions. They take on a role and enter a living city populated by other people.
Someone is a police officer. Someone else is a doctor, judge, taxi driver, mechanic, restaurant owner — or even a drug dealer.
These servers have their own laws, jobs, companies, politics and, above all, economies.
Players do not enter a finished story.
They create it together.
It is one-third video game, one-third social network and one-third virtual theatre.
People are already working around these cities, programming new features, designing cars and clothing, building buildings, managing communities or broadcasting their virtual “lives” to millions of viewers.
In 2023, Rockstar acquired Cfx.re, the team behind FiveM. In 2026, it launched an official marketplace where creators can sell maps, vehicles, clothing and scripts.
The marketplace includes police computers, car dealerships, farming jobs, racing systems and entire virtual auto repair shops.
Rockstar therefore no longer owns just a video game.
It owns a city, the technology, the marketplace and, above all, a huge global community of loyal players.
There is no confirmation that an ordinary person will be able to make a living in GTA VI by running a virtual bar or selling cars. We know far too little about the future online component, and claiming otherwise would mean promising something Rockstar has never announced.
But I like to speculate.
And, more importantly…
All the necessary pieces are already on the table.
A video game more expensive than the world’s tallest building
Rockstar has not disclosed the official budget for GTA VI. Estimates range from the high hundreds of millions to as much as $2 billion.
For comparison, the construction of the Burj Khalifa cost approximately $1.5 billion.
Avatar: The Way of Water, one of the most expensive films in history, had a production budget of more than $350 million.
So we may be looking at a video game that costs more than the world’s tallest building — and several times more than a Hollywood blockbuster.
At first glance, that sounds insane.
But a skyscraper rents out offices and apartments.
A film sells tickets, rights and subscriptions.
A digital world can sell all of them at once.
Access. Virtual currency. Clothing. Cars. Real estate. Memberships. Advertising. New stories. Creator tools.
And perhaps, one day, a share of the businesses that other people build inside it.
Analysts at DFC Intelligence estimated that GTA VI could generate $3.2 billion in revenue during its first twelve months, including more than $1 billion in pre-orders.
That is a prediction, not a result.
Rockstar has not released official global pre-order figures, and I do not think it plans to do so before launch.
The real value of the game, however, may not become apparent in its first year.
The decisive question will be whether Rockstar simply sells an enormous number of copies — or creates an environment in which other people will work, create and make money for ten years.
And, of course, make money for Rockstar too.
It is worth emphasizing again that the previous GTA game was released thirteen years ago, and tens of millions of people are still returning to it.
AI will hand out the tools. Platforms will keep the land.
Now let’s go back a few paragraphs to artificial intelligence.
Creating a high-quality game world used to require dozens of programmers, graphic designers, animators, musicians and writers, plus months or years of work.
AI will dramatically lower that barrier — something also confirmed by the words of Daniel Vávra, the most influential game developer not only in the Czech Republic but, I would dare say, in Europe, behind the now-iconic titles Mafia and Kingdom Come.
An individual or a small team will be able to create a building, character, advertisement, dialogue, piece of clothing, music track or simple game mechanic.
Not everything will be good.
Most of it probably won’t be.
But vastly more people will be able to try.
This opens the door to a new type of business.
A person from a small village anywhere in the world could create their own version of an iconic game for a global audience without significant infrastructure or a professional team.
There is just one rather important catch.
The cheaper creation becomes, the more valuable the audience’s attention becomes.
AI can generate millions of new worlds.
But Rockstar, Roblox or Epic will decide which of them anyone gets to see.
Creators will have more powerful tools, but they will still be building on someone else’s land.
The platform owns the rules, the customers, the algorithm and the payment system.
It can change the rewards, alter the terms or remove an entire project with a single decision.
The new world of work may therefore be more free.
But it still may not belong to us.
It is still just a game. And that is precisely why it matters.
Of course, I may be overestimating the importance of GTA VI.
Maybe in November we will simply get a video game that has been anticipated for more than a decade.
Global productivity will fall for a few days, a few relationships will undergo a stress test, and then everyone will return to normal.
But the individual pieces fit together almost suspiciously well.
AI is making creation cheaper.
Roblox and Fortnite have shown that user-generated worlds can support not only YouTubers but genuine businesses.
Rockstar has acquired the biggest roleplay platform in the video game industry and opened its official marketplace.
Hundreds of millions of people already consider it perfectly normal to spend a significant portion of their time in digital worlds, at least on social media.
The next step may not simply be that they start playing more in those worlds.
They may start creating economic value there on a massive scale.
The future of work may therefore not look like a world in which people stop working.
It may look like a world in which we stop being able to tell exactly when we are working and when we are playing.
The biggest economic changes, moreover, rarely introduce themselves as economic changes.
The internet was initially a toy for geeks.
Today, we can barely function without it.
The Industrial Revolution moved work from fields to factories.
The internet moved it onto computer screens.
AI may move it into digital worlds that, at first glance, will look like games.
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