When Heritage Goes Playable: Digital Spectacle and Cultural Attention Externalities in Platform Markets

Digital platforms reallocate scarce consumer attention, yet the externalities generated within these ecosystems and their heterogeneous reception across culturally distinct audiences remain poorly understood. Against this backdrop, this study investigates whether major digital spectacles can trigger cultural attention spillovers, exploiting the release of Black Myth : Wukong as a quasi-natural experiment. Utilizing rich bilingual user reviews from the Steam platform, we deploy a supervised machine learning pipeline to construct a quantifiable metric of cultural utility attribution. Employing a difference-in-differences (DD) design coupled with coarsened exact matching (CEM) to address selection bias, we find that this profound cultural shock structurally recalibrates consumer attention. Robust to pre-trend validations and traffic controls, the incidence rate of culturally oriented reviews for incumbent games sharing Chinese cultural elements increased by approximately 11.9%. Crucially, these spillovers are highly directional and bounded. Pre-existing associative memory acts as a binding constraint for translating the technological shock into sustained cultural attention. Transforming heritage into interactive digital experiences offers an effective approach to activate dormant cultural assets. From a practical perspective, flagship digital spectacles can generate positive attention externalities that systematically reduce attention frictions for related digital goods.