For most of my life, I’ve experienced this strange phenomenon. Didn’t really matter if it was games, tech or whatever, it was always the same idea: The chase for The Next Big Thing.

For these people, The Next Big Thing is where they’ll finally make more money than before, with a new and shiny something, whatever it is, better than before, bigger than before, more stuff than before, so on, so forth. Or so we’re told.

Between the things I’ve seen in my life, I’m sad to say that only a few things were The Next Big Thing. And so it doesn’t really exist because they weren’t, not really.

The Xbox One was gonna be The Next Big Thing for consoles. Crypto and NFTs were The Next Big Thing for finance, economy. Grand Theft Auto was The Next Big Thing for games. AI is The Next Big Thing for tech.

The spiel goes on and on, and I’m afraid to say that most of it didn’t really take off completely as a certain number of people wanted it to be.

Have you…

Let me ask you a few questions. You don’t need to reply it to me, but to yourself.

Have you actually played Grand Theft Auto 3?

The reason I’m asking is that the game that was gonna be the The Next Big Thing is not all that special, it’s actually a bit jank. While I like it and it’s not a bad game in any way, it has so many things that are a little strange inside of it, with many missions being straight up weird. The game itself had internally a delay and it feels more like a 3D version of the older GTA games (that were top down 2D) than an actual 3D game, which is strange.

For the record, Driver 1 and Driver 2 by Reflections Interactive beat GTA3 by the punch with the 3D department, back on PlayStation 1 generation.

Granted, people did chase the GTA clones but quickly realized that it didn’t work. So much so that not even Rockstar was able to make a new game for over 10 years. Multiple of its direct inspirators and outright clones are alright dead, so the chase happened for a bit and then stopped.

Even though open-world games are common nowadays, how many of them are GTA clones? Not that many.

Have you used Cryptocurrencies?

This question is interesting because Crypto is essentially for grifters and scammers to get rich without having the repercussions of the law. A lot of people lost a lot of money from it, but they were pushed as The Next Big Thing. In the end, it hasn’t been, the bubble sorta popped, and now it’s in the hands of big corps trying to lobby congressmen (at least in the USA) to make sure it’ll continue to exist as much as possible.

The underlying technology, blockchain, aka a public ledger, has one use only: cryptocurrencies. Literally anything it could do (being a public database with records) can be done by using a regular database, and making it public doesn’t make it any better since there are real reasons why you’d not want to make your database public. The golden goose that this tech has chased doesn’t exist.

During its almost 20 years of existence, nothing has happened in the space that makes it unique and different, other than being a financial bed for scamming people out of their money. 20 years prior to crypto, we went from the creation of the World Wide Web to Yahoo, to Google, to Youtube (and Google Video) to the first iPhone, and many other things.

Have you dealt with NFTs?

You probably haven’t. Nothing better than charging millions of real currency into what is essentially a receipt to an image or digital object. Since it’s directly tied to cryptocurrencies, it has been used to scam people.

If you have, you should get whatever money you invested (and lost) on it back.

Have you bought an Xbox One?

After the massive backlash Microsoft got from it, it was dialed down a notch, and back to its original vision, a next generation game console. The issue here was that a lot of people were betting that the Xbox One was gonna be number one, with EA killing its own ‘pay 10usd to play an used copy online’ system just before the reveal. Square-Enix was gonna make Kingdom Hearts 3 exclusive to Xbox One (before multiple delays).

And look at how that turned out… Microsoft almost sold Xbox off before they changed leadership, saving the brand from a quick demise by turning into a slow erosion that shows that it can’t stand on its own two legs without the larger company backing them up.

Have you used an AI-related service?

By ‘AI-related service’, I mean ChatGPT, Gemini, etc, not systems that already existed and now have AI in the name.

In any case, none of these have been any good or different from things we already had. The notion of replacing people with AI might be interesting to some bumfuck C-Suite that wants to maximize profits but nothing has changed in that department, humans are still needed to do all sorts of jobs.

Plus, think about it: if they want to replace you with a fake-sentient machine to do your work, that means they want slaves, not workers.

The Chase

Yeah, the other thing. As far as I can remember, this has been a thing, the so called ‘chase’ for the The Next Big Thing. This chase is nothing but a pursuit for more profits, to make sure the shareholders and investors make their money back. And because technology hasn’t innovated since circa 2007 or 2008, they are desperate to throw anything at the wall to make it stick.

Phones have looked the same for ages, the same old slab shape. 4K monitors aren’t still not worth it. Raytracing is dumb. Virtual Reality is not the future and arguably, not the present either. AI automation is only for that, any other uses kill the proposition, since it can’t handle anything large scale.

Since we have stagnated, the chase for it has been pro-active on finding everything that could be seen as The Next Big Thing. In reality, they want to find a reason to keep doing things to get value for shareholders, but it’s clearly not working. Features have been removed and served back to us in a pretense to get us excited. Several features that were also useful are being put behind paywalls. Subscription services are raising prices without increasing their quality.

This all comes down to a realization, are we really sure we know what’s best for us in general?

Closing Words Addendum

^{Edited 2026/04/05: I forgot to add this bit, so it looked like I just ended on a strange note.}

This is one of the few things I actively dislike about technology and other related things, innovation doesn’t need to exist in every single market and having something trying to be disruptive for the sake of it makes it worse. Ultimately, these people chasing the next thing will usually fall flat when it doesn’t work, and most of the time, it won’t.

Remember, if people try to pitch in what something will be like in 5 years instead of today, you don’t have a product, you have a promise and usually those don’t stick.