In This Edition,

• Impact of the physical switch-off

• The risk of $1,000 game consoles (podcast only)

• We speak to Gamescom!

Hello there!

Welcome back to another bumper edition of The Game Business.

This week, we return to the topic around PlayStation’s decision to stop manufacturing PlayStation discs. Rather than debate the decision, we’ve turned to our friends at Ampere to highlight the PS5 games that still sell well physically, and the countries where boxed games remain a strong distribution channel.

And then we chat about how publishers can manage the transition, with just under 18 months to go.

We also interview Gamescom about this year’s show, democracy and the European games sector. You can listen to all this on today’s Show above (featuring Ampere’s Piers Harding-Rolls and Gamescom’s Felix Falk). Or check out the key data, analysis and quotes below.

Enjoy!

Publishers need to prepare players for an all-digital future

In January 2028, PlayStation will stop manufacturing discs.

The data shows that video games is primarily a digital business today. However, it can vary by title, location and platform.

Our friends at Ampere Analysis looked at five PS5 games for us: Resident Evil: Requiem, Assassin’s Creed Shadows, Astro Bot, Black Myth: Wukong and Helldivers 2. It analysed what percentage of sales were made via physical retail, and broke that down by territory.

This data covers PS5 game sales only, and is unit sales up until the end of June 2026.

Family games like Astro Bot, potentially because they’re often bought at Christmas and birthday presents, are very strong in the physical space. More story-driven action adventure games such as Assassin’s Creed and Resident Evil also have a large audience of physical buyers.

Meanwhile, more online-centric games, shooters and RPGs, such as Helldivers 2 and Black Myth: Wukong, have a much smaller audience that choose to buy the boxed version.

Things also differ significantly by territory. The US is a very digital-centric market, but France is still heavily into physical. Countries like Australia, UK and Japan also have a strong boxed games retail industry.

Publishers like Capcom and Ubisoft, which make games with a strong cohort of physical buyers, will need to start preparing their fans for the physical switch-off.

Grand Theft Auto 6 is an ally in this objective. The fact the game doesn’t come in a disc will help with the education process with a large base of customers.

Nevertheless, game companies will still want to work with physical retail, including creating digital code-in-a-box products, to limit the risk of losing customers during this transition. There will be an expectation on Sony to help publishers with this, and the platform holder will also want to protect its own games (such as Astro Bot and Spider-Man). Therefore, we should expect PlayStation to develop best practices to take physical players through the transition to digital.

Some publishers will be able to start encouraging its fans to switch to digital now. For example, Capcom has a new Resident Evil game out next year, before the physical switch-off. We know from the data that the last Resident Evil (Requiem) had a strong audience of physical buyers, so the publisher will want to develop incentives to transition those users to digital with this next release.

Ultimately, the aim for the industry is to get into a position where all PlayStation game buyers in 2028 are willing to buy digitally, and know how to do it.

You can hear more on the subject in today’s edition of The Game Business Show.

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Gamescom could sell more physical tickets, but doesn’t want to

Gamescom returns to Cologne next week, and the event is sold out of exhibitor space for the first time.

The firm is now looking to expand its space for 2027, but organizer Felix Falk says it isn’t expecting to increase the number of people coming into the show.

“We don’t want to fit too many people,” he told us. “Gamescom is not only about people on site. Last year we had 357,000 [footfall]. It doesn’t really matter if it’s 10,000 more or less, because most of the growth has been in the digital reach. We have massive reach in people tuning in from everywhere in the world, which is millions of people. That’s more important than people on site.

“Of course, we always try to find the good balance between as many people as possible, but not limiting the quality of stay. In 2019, we had a situation where we had too many people. The complaints were going up, and people were saying it was too full and too busy, and it starts to feel squeeze. So, we went down from there, and we give less tickets into the market. We could give more, we have two days already sold out, but it’s important for us that the day is perfect for everybody who is there, and it gets multiplied into the world by digital.”

Gamescom doubles down on democracy ahead of German president visit

German president Frank-Walter Steinmeier is heading to Gamescom next Thursday, as the trade and consumer show makes democracy a core theme for the 2026 event.

The event will promote democratic engagement via various events, fundraising activities, and the Gamescom Congress, which will feature discussions on the topic.

“For the first time, the highest represented of Germany, the president, is attending Gamescom,” Gamescom’s Felix Falk told The Game Business.

“That’s on the Gamescom Thursday, where we talk about the potential for games for democracy. In broader society and general media, there is a misunderstanding around games. You may remember how often there are articles about toxic behaviour in games, with a very narrow view on this community. We want to tell people that it’s especially gamers and the gaming industry who have a great potential for things like democracy.

“In our times right now, such as with all the problems GDC has, it’s so important to show where we are standing, and why diversity, and democracy, is so important for a successful game industry. And how we and our community can help with that democracy, because what studies have shown is that activism and engagement of the community is much higher than the rest of society. Gamers are more willing to donate, to collect donations, to sign petitions, to demonstrate, and to engage for things like democracy.”

Check out more from our interview with Felix in this week’s edition of The Game Business Show.

Meanwhile…

• Human: Fall Flat development leaders Sitara Shefta and Will Dudley have formed a new studio called Pretty Cool Games. The UK-based, fully remote studio received start-up money from Chinese developer Hypergryph, which is best known for the RPG Arknights: Endfield.

• As revealed yesterday, Arkane Studios leaders Harvey Smith, Ben Horne and Ricardo Bare have formed Black Pony Immersive. It is working on a single-player immersive sim game.

• Deus Ex, Thief and Epic Mickey creator Warren Spector has announced his retirement after over forty years in game development.

• The US Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Crime and Counterterrorism is investigating Roblox, accusing the platform of prioritizing ‘revenue and engagement’ over child safety. Roblox denies this.

• Netflix is closing Night School Studio, alongside Helsinki-based Moonloot Games. Night School made recent horror hit Unhinged.

• 2K Games has launched Small Axe Studios. The new developer is led by EA Sports veterans and is based in the same city: Vancouver, Canada. The team is building the ‘next blockbuster sports franchise’ and wants to ‘redefine the future of sports video games’.

• Nexon saw Q2 revenue rise 2% to $761 million, driven by continued success for Arc Raiders and MapleStory. Arc Raiders now has hit 16.3 million sales after selling a further 800,000 units during the quarter.

• Mattel has announced the formation of Mattel Game Studios, a global development organisation that will create games based on the company’s IP. It follows the acquisition of Mattel163 in February, which was previously a joint venture with NetEase. The new group will oversee existing mobile games, and upcoming titles coming to Roblox and Fortnite.

• Pokémon spin-off Pokopia has now sold five million copies worldwide.

• CD Projekt has made some cuts to its Project Sirius team, which is the new multiplayer spin-off to The Witcher series. Nine employees have been cut, with a further nine to be offered roles elsewhere. The cuts were to ‘reflect the project’s needs at this stage of development’.

That’s it for today’s edition of The Game Business. Next week, we have our big CEO interview with Unity, so join us for that. Until then, thank you for reading.

• Sticking with immersive sims

• Working on Redfall after being fired

• Optimism in the face of misery

• Building a modern studio

Is the ‘immersive sim’ dead?

It certainly feels that way. For those unfamiliar with the term, immersive sims are games like Deus Ex, Dishonored, Prey and Thief… action RPGs that let players approach the game in all sorts of ways. Critics love them.

But we’ve not had a new entry in those series for the best part of a decade. Arkane, the Microsoft studio famous for making them, has endured office closures and lay-offs over the past two years. And just this week, legendary immersive sim maker Warren Spector announced he was hanging up his keyboard.

However, today, a new immersive sim studio has formed called Black Pony Immersive. The US developer is made up of former Arkane veterans, including Harvey Smith, one of the genre’s most celebrated creators, alongside Ricardo Bare and Ben Horne.

The studio has been running for a year, it’s made up of 26 people, and it’s received funding from an unnamed publisher.

So, is the immersive sim really dead?

“At some point you’re worried… do questions like that create a self-fulfilling prophecy?” asks Smith in today’s episode of The Game Business Show.

“If you look back through those games, there are a lot of titles that people still talk about 10 or 20 years later. They have a lot of cultural cachet. And there are a few, if you look at BioShock or Deus Ex or Dishonored, that make a lot of money. If you look at Dishonored, for instance, the budget that we were working with was… I wouldn’t say tiny, many triple-I developers would envy that budget, but it was very reasonable. And our [return on investment] was four or five times the total spend.”

Ben Horne adds: “The industry is growing in such a way that there are a large amount of players with a really varied appetite. We don’t really know what turn the industry might take, and we’re probably not going to be very good at trend chasing. And so, our best shot is to rally around a creative vision that excites us as developers. It excites the audience that we know wants to play this kind-of game. That’s the best chance of making something great.”

Back to Smith: “Very well-paid people say things to me, going way back now, like, ‘First-person games don’t sell,’ or, ‘RPGs are a niche market,’ ‘If you’re not working on a free-to-play game now, in five years you’ll be out of a job,’ ‘MMOs are the future,’ ‘In the future, games will have live motion video sections with Hollywood actors in them.’ I’ve heard smart, good people, friends of mine in executive positions, say these things over the years, and sometimes they’re right. But what Ben said, going back to what you love with a strong vision, that often comes through for us, so that’s what we have got to do.”

Regular readers to The Game Business won’t be surprised to hear that I agree. We’ve seen huge success in recent years from games in what had been considered ‘niche’ genres. Games like Hollow Knight, Elden Ring, Arc Raiders and Dispatch. If you stay true to what you love,and satisfy a specific audience, there is a chance it could break out.

In fact, Dishonored came from such an approach.“I was at Arkane for 16 years,” he tells us. “Raphael Colantonio is a friend. We had an office together for years. And people would come tell us, ‘Man, to keep the business alive, you better take some contracts. You need to be working on whatever you can get.’ And for a while, we tried that, even though it felt wrong.

“There was a point in time when Arkane was about to go under. I think we had four months of money left. We were working on [Wii puzzle game] Boom Blox with EA. We were pitching to Ubisoft. We had a couple of guys on a zombie shooter. We were farming people out left and right. We were on nine projects at once. And at some point, we realized this is not the way. We are here to do a very specific thing, let’s focus on that, and let’s go under if that’s what is going to happen. Instead, the result was Dishonored, which was one of the big turnarounds of my career.”

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The Redfall lesson

The idea of not following trends has been a common topic on The Game Business over the past year, but Smith and Horne have first-hand experience of what can go wrong when you do.

The last project they both worked on was the ill-fated Redfall. This was another immersive sim, but one built for the live-service era. It was a critical and commercial failure.

“Redfall really came about when games-as-a-service was the prevailing strategy,” Horne says. “So, we got to figure out, how do we do this? There were many projects during the time at ZeniMax that were going that direction.”

Smith adds: “That was a difficult project. Arkane is very specialized, but the industry is growing, and there’s always more mouths to feed. And it’s great when you can reach a wider audience. We got swept up in the games-as-a-service thing, and I had the foolish chutzpah to assume that it always works out for us. We can do this. Let’s take what we love, and mix it with [games-as-a-service]. And do different mechanics by day and night. And have character classes. Then in the middle of all that, COVID happened. We also had the great resignation where everybody went remote and started changing jobs.”

And yet, despite the difficulties, and despite how the game turned out, Smith and Horne were surprisingly positive about the experience.

“We finished the game and it was very poorly received. We then worked on it for a year. We patched thousands of bugs. We then got laid off, but we had in the pipe version 1.4. It was the one that fixed tons of stuff. So, we went to Microsoft and said, ‘I know we don’t work here anymore, but can we please release this?’ And to their credit, they did not say no. They let six or seven of us sign forms that we could come back in the building. After being fired, we released 1.4, which I think if we had that on day one, it wouldn’t have set the world on fire, but it was a much, much better game.”

“The experience we went through on that long, troubled project where I was clearly out of my lane, and I was not working on the things that I should be working on… Some of my proudest moments was watching the team rally around incredibly difficult things. Politically, there were very hard things. There were fires. The government announced aliens at some point. There was a swarm of murder hornets coming toward Texas. We had an ice storm that put power and water out for like two weeks for some people. It was crazy. That development cycle, I’ll never forget it. And yet at the end of it, people came back together to release that patch even after losing their jobs. And some of them wanted to work with us again after that.

“You know the old cliche, it’s about the journey? Sometimes it’s about the golden ring. And you really want the golden ring. But sometimes it really is just about the experience of trying to do something really difficult together.”

Back to Horne: “It feels like an achievement unlocked for me in my career to release something after I’ve been fired and the studio closed down.”

What’s in a name?

If there was one thing that surprised me about Smith and Horne’s new studio, it was the name: Black Pony Immersive.

“It feels like a sea of doom and gloom the last few years, so many of our colleagues suffering, developers falling left and right, and everybody else doing everything they can to reach out or help…. Even on the publisher side, nobody’s happy to see the business in the state that it is,” Smith begins.

“I’ve heard you talk about various movements and trends. And one of your kick-offs to one of your segments, you mentioned Vince Zampella passing. Ben and I had dinner with him in Austin over a year ago, when we were starting to talk about Black Pony Immersive… there’s just so much bad news and it’s shocking, the state of the world, beyond video games. So, it feels like to do something optimistic in the face of that is to be a dark horse. We’re going to fall back on what we love. We’re going to work with the people we love. We’re going to have fun doing it.

“So, Black Pony Immersive is tongue-in-cheek for that, but also ‘immersive’ is right there in the title. We want to make immersive sims. We want to make single player, narrative driven, first person games where you explore and solve problems creatively. Think Deus Ex, think Dishonored, that’s what we’re doing.”

A modern studio

Smith and Horne are turning to the games they love, but that doesn’t mean returning to the old way of making them.

A common approach to starting a studio today is to have a small core team, and then scale up using outsource groups and contractors when needed. It’s ‘the Hollywood model’, and Black Pony is taking that approach.

“Being a small core of people who get the vision, have a lot of institutional knowledge, and importantly have a lot of creative chemistry, that helps,” Smith says.

“External partners are getting better and better […] If you give them a good enough brief, and you give them notes on how your animator likes to work, they can air drop in a bunch of people rapidly and do the job.

“And then at some point we need to be smaller again. At the beginning and end, you don’t want to be a giant team, because then you have animator number five asking, ‘What am I doing for the next project?’ It’s fraught talking about the Hollywood model, but look at film, they figured out a long time ago that there is a very delicate creative force here that’s also very powerful.

“You need the industry side, but I feel like games ran with the industry side for decades. And sometimes what gets crushed is this little core, because if that creative core just answers to layer upon layer of groups above, then its priorities become lessened. Being independent, having a contract between us and a giant partner, is a healthier model. Being small at the beginning and at the end is a healthier model. So, that’s the model we’re pursuing.”

Check out our full interview with Smith and Horne in today’s edition of The Game Business Show.

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Our next edition of The Game Business Show and Newsletter is with a game development and it’s out tomorrow!

And welcome to another week on The Game Business.

You may have noticed we’ve changed the name of our Monday morning edition. It used to be called ‘The Game Business Micro’, and now we’ve gone with the sillier (but more accurate) ‘Here’s The Dring’.

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We still do that, but it’s changed over time. Now, the bulk of the ‘Micro’ is original analysis, opinion and (sometimes) data. What’s more, although the podcast is still (relatively) short, the newsletter is actually quite chunky. So, I felt the name ‘Micro’ was both inaccurate and undersold what we were making. Hence the new name.

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There are load of stories in this week’s edition, and the two I’ve focused on includes Netflix’s surprising decision to close its best studio, and 2K’s equally surprising decision to open a new sports developer in the same city as EA Sports.

Let’s dive in!

2K opens a sports developer on EA’s lawn… is it making a football game?

In Brief: 2K Games has launched Small Axe Studios. The new developer is led by EA Sports veterans and is based in the same city: Vancouver, Canada. The team is building the ‘next blockbuster sports franchise’ and wants to ‘redefine the future of sports video games’.

What You Need To Know:

• The studio is made up of former EA Sports development leaders including VP and executive producer Aaron McHardy (EA Sports FC, Madden), head of design Gary Paterson (FIFA, NBA Live), head of operations Tom Pan (FIFA, UFC, SSX), head of engineering Mike Thompson (NHL, UFC), and technical art director John Cruz (FIFA, NBA, Skate).

• Other key hires include head of HR Trisha MacWan (Glu Mobile), animation director Brend Breedveld (Relic Entertainment) and art director Karl Gryc (Blackbird Interactive).

• 2K is already a major player in sports games, and is responsible for the NBA 2K, WWE 2K and PGA 2K franchises. Its main sports studio is Visual Concepts, which dates back to 1998 and was originally owned by Sega.

• Many of the people working for Small Axe worked on the EA Sports FC/FIFA series, giving rise to the expectation that this developer is creating a new football/soccer game.

• The company’s name is due to the belief that ‘with vision, drive, and focus, a small axe can take down a big tree’.

• The studio came out of 2K Sports Lab, which was set-up in 2023 to research and develop future sports games.

Read more

In This Edition,

• An industry state-of-play (podcast only)

• What is Stop Killing Games?

• Why is it losing?

• Can it win?

Hello and welcome back! How have you been?

We took a bit of a break last week, and it was a chance to reflect on what has been a really tough couple of months for industry news.

We’ve had to contend with huge price increases to consoles, the death of the disc and significant job cuts at the likes of Bungie and Xbox. The trust in the business, both from the outside and inside, appears to be at an all-time low. .

But… change isn’t always good, but it is inevitable, and good things can come from it. The video game industry remains a huge creative and commercial force. It’s what other industries look to when wanting to learn how to engage with customers. Hollywood is obsessed with games IP. And each new generation brings with it new players.

The challenges are real. No motivational paragraph is going to change that. But we will overcome them, and we’ll do It together. That’s what The Game Business is all about. Sharing, learning and being inspired by one another. We’ll tackle the tough subjects, but in a positive way designed to move the conversation on. And hopefully find a sustainable path for everyone.

This week, we’re tackling the challenging conversation brought about by the Stop Killing Games initiative, which wants the industry to make sure its online games remain available even when they’re no-longer financially viable.

It sounds simple, but it really isn’t. And in today’s Show and Newsletter, we speak to video game policy expert Dr Celia Pontin to explain why the industry is pushing against legislation on this issue.

You can hear our full chat, plus a whole lot more, in today’s edition of The Game Business Show. Alternatively, keep on reading for the highlights.

Enjoy.

The video game industry is taking Stop Killing Games very seriously

The Stop Killing Games consumer movement has had major game companies and trade bodies worried.

The campaign started in 2024 when Ubisoft ended server support for its racing game The Crew, which rendered the title unplayable. Since then, Stop Killing Games has prompted an official response from the UK Government and European Union, and is supporting court cases globally around the issue.

It wants legal protections that ensures games don’t suddenly become unplayable, and various trade bodies are fighting against that idea.

“The industry is engaging with it seriously and fairly intensely,” said Dr Ceila Pontin on today’s edition of The Game Business Show. Pontin is the director of policy and public affairs at Flux Digital Policy, and is an expert on the subject.

“The Stop Killing Games campaign has been very vocal across multiple jurisdictions, it’s not that this is just an American issue and we don’t hear about it in the UK, or it’s just an EU one, it’s being shared everywhere. It’s hard to escape, and it’s not something that you can really back away from. It’s also gaining momentum in the more general public consciousness, because it speaks to the move towards a digital-only culture, and that’s not just games.”

Of course, the industry doesn’t want to ‘kill’ games, but legislative or legal changes would prove problematic.

“One of the concerns is there’s a mismatch between what people might be calling for and what is possible, not necessarily just technologically, but also when it comes to how existing legislation works, whether that’s consumer protection or IP law, as well as the practical implementation of it,” she told us.

“So, there might be some ideal solution being touted, but that might not actually work out. And if that were to be legislated for, then you could have this real tension of [the industry] having to deliver something that might not actually really work in practice. That can be a real concern to them.”

Currently, the EU and UK have pointed to existing consumer rights laws.

“Are consumer rights being violated? Well, they already exist to be violated,” Pontin noted. “There is already a framework for dealing with these sorts of things about contracts having to be delivered as laid out in terms of service and things like that, and whether what you have been provided as digital content or service, whether that matches up to your expectations, and to what was promised. There are aspects of those that already exist and actually already provide what’s being asked for.”

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There’s no ‘one solution’ to the Killing Games debate

The Stop Killing Games goal is to make it so that games remain playable after they’ve been discontinued. It sounds simple, but it isn’t.

A situation like the one with The Crew, which is primarily a single-player game, is comparatively easy. But what if a company is running a promotional game for a specific event? What about free-to-play games where there are no up-front costs? And what even is playable? Is an MMORPG still playable if you can walk around in the world but are unable to meet any other players or partake in most of the quests?

There are many varying situations that need to be considered, and so a blanket rule simply wouldn’t cut it. And then there’s the potential impact on smaller teams.

“A lot of this is complicated, particularly when you are trying to apply a solution across a really diverse industry, and diverse in terms of the types of game, not just genres, but whether they’re multiplayer or single player or require lobbies or the server architecture and the technology that lies behind that,” Pontin explained. “But also the sorts of companies that you have, from one or two people studios, through to multi-billion dollar companies with thousands of staff. Trying to get to a point where you have a solution that works across that, and including the diversity of what people think it means to play a game and be able to access it, that’s a really tall order.

“I’m not sure there is one solution that would work even if there were a legislative appetite to do so.”

She continued: “When a big company says that something can’t be done, there’s a level of cynicism in people to think, ‘Well, you would say that because it’s commercially convenient for you to say that.’ And there are times when something that may be commercially convenient may also be true.

“We need to make sure that [small studios] don’t get lost in the mix. And that you’re not going to end up putting out suggestions that would perhaps work to get what you want for a big game, and then stifle innovation because a small studio thinks that they can’t engage with that process [because they don’t know] what their game needs to do if it comes to the end of its life. You want to make sure that you’ve got an ecosystem that is going to support new talent.”

Letting the players take over is really complicated

One suggestion is that when a game is discontinued, developers should make it so the fans can take control. But that comes with all sorts of difficulties.

For one, just because someone owns an IP, you can’t simply compel them to make it available. But even if it became standard to let players take over a game, it potentially runs into numerous challenges, including around IP law, online safety and GDPR requirements, plus maintaining third-party tools and integrations.

“[IP law] is not straightforward when it comes to video games because instead of being one single item that has one kind of intellectual property right associated with it, it is this bundle and cloud miasma of interconnecting different tiny bits of copyright works,” Pontin told us.

“It’s not just one thing. It is the script and the voiceover and the graphics, sometimes even frame by frame. It’s this big old bundle of different things that are put together, unlike a film or unlike a book. And that means that if you are talking about handing over a game to the fans, that’s not really a very straightforward way of thinking about it. It is genuinely something that adds a lot of complication, because you might not actually, as a company, be legally able to hand that stuff over even if you wanted to, because it might not all be yours.”

There are technical barriers, too

“If I, as a game creator, want to sunset my game and I hand it over to the fans, I might have this web underneath of different third-party services to do things that I haven’t done myself. And I could maybe hand over the arrangements if I could get that worked out. But then if one of those services goes under, or they’re bought out, or they just cease to exist for whatever reason, then what happens to the game that was dependent on them? That means the game still might not be persistently available, and does that third-party service have any obligations in this? It starts to get quite complicated.”

New legal rules around age verification and online chat protections can also make things complex. And then there’s a reputational issue to consider. If a player group takes over a game and does something wrong, or adds something controversial, it could impact the original owner.

There will be cases where players can take over a game, but it won’t work all of the time.

Is Stop Killing Games a win for consumer awareness?

Even before digital, if you bought a game, you had a license to play it, you didn’t actually own it.

Of course, that’s in the legal sense. In practicality, unless a publisher was going to come to your home and take the game off you, you effectively owned it. Now in a digital world, that legal reality is proving an issue for users. And they’re becoming aware of something they perhaps didn’t realize before.

“If nothing else, the campaign has highlighted that when it comes to digital media of certain types, it’s not about whether you’re purchasing the media, it’s you are purchasing access to it, and how that functions,” Pontin said.

“And you’ll see that some platforms are saying quite clearly that you’re purchasing a license, and it is becoming more and more well-known and well-understood, particularly as a result of this.”

Do check out our full chat with Pontin in today’s edition of The Game Business Show above.

Meanwhile…

• Square Enix had a strong Q1 with profit rising 175.5% to $83 million. This was driven by Final Fantasy 7: Rebirth coming to Nintendo Switch 2 and Xbox formats in June. The firm also saw an uptick in users for the MMO Final Fantasy XIV MMO.

• Bandai Namco’s Digital segment, which includes games, saw sales drop 15.6% to $573 million, while profit fell 30.9% $94.5 million. This was due to there being no major PC or console release. In the corresponding quarter, it released Elden Ring: Nightregn.

• Sega’s entertainment division, which includes games, did better than expected during Q1 with a slight increase to $432 million.

• Remedy’s Q2 revenue hit €10.2 million, which is down 40% year-on-year, with an operating loss of €3.9 million. Part of the decline is due to the game FBC: Firebreak launching in the corresponding quarter last year.

• NC (formerly NCsoft) will take over the global publishing of Throne and Liberty. The MMO was developed by NC and its studio FirstSpark Games, and had been published by Amazon Games globally. Amazon is shifting away from MMOs and towards more mainstream games better suited to its Luna streaming platform.

• Indie hide and seek hit Meccha Chameleon has now sold 20 million copies.

• Co-op adventure game Big Walk has sold 1m units worldwide. The game is by Australian studio House House, which is famous for Untitled Goose Game.

• Supermassive Games, the UK developer of story horror titles such as Until Dawn and The Dark Pictures Anthology, is laying off a further 75 employees, which is its third round of job cuts.

• UK charity GamesAid has raised £82,000 that will be distributed among four charities: AFK, Autistica, Rays of Sunshine Children’s Charity, and Solving Kids’ Cancer UK. Each received £20,500.

• Electronic Arts has appointed Cam Weber as chief studios officer and David Tinson as COO after the completion of its $55 billion leveraged buyout.

• Nintendo saw its operating profit jump nearly 151% thanks to higher software revenue and a $300 million US tariff refund. However, Q1 sales were down 9.5%, mainly due to unfavourable comparisons with the Switch 2 launch in June 2025.

• PlayStation’s sales income rose 0.6% to $5.8 billion. Operating income rose 37%, boosted by a US tariff refund. However, the cost of next-generation platforms and restructuring has hit the company’s overall earnings.

• Xbox Series S will increase by £130 and €150 in the UK and Europe, while Xbox Series X will increase by £170 and €200. Xbox announced it would be raising prices in June due to higher component costs.

• Devolver Digital wants to go private again. The firm intends to delist from UK’s AIM market, with shareholders set to vote on the matter on September 8. Devolver went public in November 2021 with a valuation of nearly £695 million. Today, its market cap is £34.6 million.

• Secret Mode has opened an internal development studio in Sheffield, UK. The studio will support the publisher’s games by creating add-on content, as well as porting titles to other platforms.

• Unity now has dedicated engine support for Netflix. This means that developers can more easily release titles on the streaming giant’s platforms. Netflix has used Unity for its internal games, including the recent horror game Unhinged.

That’s it from us today, we have a number of big Shows scheduled for next week as we gear up for Gamescom. Until then, thank you for reading.

• The ‘race to the bottom’ in outsourcing

• Cutting jobs in the UK, not India

• UK tax relief reforms

• Plus, AI, Sackboy, AAA games and more

Five years ago, Sumo Digital was a BAFTA-winning developer and publisher that Tencent bought for nearly $1.3 billion.

It had become the home for the Sonic racing series and the stewards of PlayStation’s Sackboy/LittleBigPlanet franchise. It was aggressively developing its own IP, and had acquired and set-up studios around the world.

Five years on, and Sumo has scaled back significantly. It’s no-longer in charge of the Sonic racing games. There’s no sign of a new Sackboy title. It’s sold off its publishing label, and returned to working on third-party brands and franchises.

“Nine years ago, around 80% of our revenue was two or three clients,” explains Sumo Co-CEO Andy Stewart. “The Microsofts and Sonys of the world. And obviously after the Tencent acquisition, it’s no secret that large publishers started reining in on what they were spending.”

He adds: “The appetite for risk and investment for large, big budget AAA games, the sorts of games that we were doing five, six, seven years ago, those $50 million budget games… we haven’t seen one of those come through the door for a long time. But what we are seeing is an appetite in that AA space, with a $15 million budget.”

Fellow Co-CEO Gary Dunn continues: “Five years ago it was $50 million games, you just don’t see an RFP [request for proposal] for anything like that anymore. It literally does not exist. So, it’s about making great games at a lower price point.”

In today’s edition of The Game Business Show, Dunn and Stewart talk us through where Sumo is today. It is still making full games, but at a $15 million level rather than $50 million. And that involves finding ways to make things cheaper.

“There’s a bit of a race to the bottom in the development industry at the moment,” Stewart says.

The UK studio hasn’t completely abandoned developing its own IP, either.

“It’s a bit of a misconception that we’re not doing our own IP still, and that we’re not doing full games,” Stewart tells us. “Sumo’s definitely very much in the full game, business and we’re also doing our own IP. What we’re not doing is fully funding our own IP. That’s the key nuance, and that’s where co-funding comes in.”

Sumo is actively looking to identify legacy brands that might be viable for a new title. And if the IP owner is not able to fund a new project, the company is able to take on some of that financial risk.

“Remember, we were a publisher, so we have a lot of market data, and we’ve used that to start analyzing which IPs we should proactively pitch for,” Dunn explains. “There is a whole package of work that we’re doing now where we’re analyzing an IP and saying, ‘right, this is an IP that’s done these sales in the past. There’s no known development for it, and it interfaces with our excellence.’ That could be horror, family, platforming, adventure. And where we can see that intersection, we’re happy to co-fund. We’re happy to create that commercially viable win-win proposal for the publisher.”

You can hear more about Sumo’s attempts to navigate the current game industry, the challenges facing outsource companies, the role of AI and more in our full interview above. Alternatively, check out some selected stories below.

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Sumo Digital has made no job cuts in India

Sumo Digital is based in Sheffield in the north of England, with other offices scattered across the country. Sheffield isn’t a particularly expensive place to run a business (it’s certainly not California) but it’s more expensive than some countries, particularly in Asia and Eastern Europe.

This is a challenge for a co-dev and work-for-hire studio like Sumo, which can find itself being undercut by similar studios in more affordable parts of the world. This is particularly an issue today, with publishers and developers trying to drive down the cost of development.

Sumo Co-CEOs Gary Dunn and Andy Stewart insist that going the cheaper route isn’t always the best option for clients, and they point out that not all of their teams are UK-based.

“Sumo’s second oldest studio is our Pune studio in India,” Dunn says. “It’s 20 years old next year. They’re literally part of our fabric. They’re integrated. Our developers in Pune sit alongside our UK-based developers as absolute equals and do the same workflows and production methodologies.

“We’ve downsized a lot In the UK. I don’t think we’ve lost any heads in Pune in the last two years. Maybe some attrition, but we’ve not made any redundancies in India because they’re so valuable. And low-cost geo is part of staying competitive.”

Stewart adds: “We approach games in a different way than we used to. So, keeping the development team lean until you’ve found the fun. Not scaling too big too quickly.

“Go back 18 months, we were being asked to compete and race to the bottom on price. We tried to hold on there and we were largely successful with it. But nowadays we’re seeing a lot less of that. First, because we’ve become cheaper and more agile, but also we’ve had clients come back to us and say, ‘Yeah, okay, that project that we went cheap with didn’t work out.’”

Sumo has four or five full games coming over the next two years

Part of our conversation with Sumo focused on where it was six years ago, when it was making big budget award-winning full games.

The firm still works on big IP. It is currently working across 30 projects, including Warframe, which is the popular shooter from fellow Tencent-owned studio Digital Extremes.

And Stewart and Dunn repeatedly told us there were exciting projects to be revealed… just not yet.

“In terms of full games, over the next two years, I can think of four or five full games across different platforms that you’re going to see coming out where Sumo is the developer,” Stewart says. “A lot of people are desperate to see what the Texas Chainsaw Massacre team are going to do next, and you’re not going to have to wait too long for that. And what the Sackboy team is doing next. You’re not going to have to wait five years for that.”

60% of Sumo’s work didn’t qualify for UK tax credits

As a UK studio, Sumo is eligible for the Video Games Expenditure Credit (VGEC), which is a UK tax incentive that offers developers a 34% taxable credit on qualifying development costs.

However, there’s a set of criteria that companies need to meet to receive the credit, and most of Sumo’s projects don’t meet that criteria.

“I still think the UK is a jewel in the crown of global gaming,” Stewart says. “We have so much talent here. We have so much pedigree. We need to do what we can to protect that.

“A lot more of the work that we do no longer qualifies for the UK tax relief. Part of our strategy is to support these evergreen titles from a co-dev capacity. That doesn’t always qualify, because they’re existing titles with a non-UK-based publishers. Around 60% of the work we did last year didn’t quality. So, that puts us at a huge disadvantage globally.

“Reform to VGEC is definitely something that, through our industry bodies, we need to tackle with the government. As more and more players play fewer and fewer titles, it’s only going in that direction. The tax relief should support the whole spectrum of video games, right down to those indie developers.

“But the larger companies that drive employment in video gaming in the UK, and the work they’re doing, needs the same level of support that they get in Canada. In Canada, in some states, you can just put your payroll through and get the tax relief. In the UK, you’ve got to jump through so many more hoops and you often find that what you’re doing doesn’t qualify.”

You can watch our full conversation with Sumo’s Gary Dunn and Andy Stewart above.

Thank you for reading. We’ll be back on Thursday as we dive into the Stop Killing Games debate!

Did you miss us? We had a little break last week. After 136 episodes, and with Gamescom and Tokyo Game Show on the horizon, we thought we should sneak in a little rest.

Of course, we weren’t to know it would be a week filled with this much industry news, including interesting Q1 financial results, Rockstar’s Netflix partnership and EA officially being going private.

So, we best dive straight into all that.

Netflix and Rockstar team-up to showcase GTA 6. Could more Netflix reveals follow?

In Brief: The first extended look at Grand Theft Auto 6 will debut on Netflix on Thursday, August 27 at 3pm Eastern Time. The video will be available via YouTube six hours after its Netflix debut

What You Need To Know:

• This is the first big look at GTA 6, which has so far received two trailers (excluding a box art reveal) over the past three years.

• This is the first time Netflix has showcased a video game, although it does prominently feature and distribute its own video games, as well as third-party titles, via mobile and the Netflix app.

• Netflix says this GTA reveal represents “the next generation of storytelling and content” on the streaming platform.

• GTA 6 is expected to become the biggest entertainment launch of all time, and launches on PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series S and X on November 19.

Read more

Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick says he’s “not in the least” concerned that a row with ex-Rockstar employees could negatively impact the launch of GTA 6.

He also shrugged off online debates round the company’s decision not to have a physical disc version of GTA 6 when it launches on November 19.

GTA 6 is expected to be the biggest entertainment launch of all time when it arrives this November. Currently, all major companies have avoided going head-to-head with the game, which arrives more than 13 years after GTA 5, a game that has now sold 230 million copies worldwide.

However, Rockstar is currently handling a labour dispute after it dismissed more than 30 employees over leaking information online. The Independent Workers of Great Britain has accused Rockstar of discriminating against staff that were looking to join a union, and the case is currently going to tribunal in the UK.

We’ve seen media coverage increasingly consider wider issues in their critical reviews for new games. Last year, one major website awarded a lower score to the game Arc Raiders for using AI technology.

“[We’re] not in the last [concerned]. How you develop the game is different from the nature of your labour relations,” Zelnick told The Game Business.

“We are very proud of our labour relations. We have an extraordinary work force, 13,000 colleagues around the world. And we are proud of how people are treated and how people are compensated. We have the lowest attrition rate in the business by half, and Rockstar’s attrition rate is half of that. That’s vastly the lowest in the business. As I say, we are proud of our labour relations.”

Meanwhile, Zelnick has played down concerns that the lack of a disc version for GTA 6 might negatively impact the launch of the game because “everyone is online. You can’t play new video games without being online.”

We mentioned that historically retail has been a key marketing channel for games like GTA. Zelnick responded: “That’s a good point, which is why we offer code-in-a-box. But ultimately, our business is well over 90% digital.”

GTA 6 will receive its next major reveal on Netflix on August 27, which is the first time the TV streaming giant has hosted a game reveal.

“Rockstar is known for trying new things and innovating. And I am hopeful you will see more innovations,” Zelnick said.

Linked to Grand Theft Auto is the current challenges facing video game consoles. PlayStation, Xbox and Nintendo have all had to raise the price of their machines, which has resulted in an initial slowdown in sales. This isn’t just a challenge for GTA, which launches only on PlayStation and Xbox this year, but some of Take-Two’s other major franchises, including NBA 2K.

“The install base of this generation at Christmas time will be roughly the same as the install base was when we launched GTA 5,” Zelnick noted. “We’re not concerned about selling to a smaller audience.

“But we do think the intersection of the growth of PC as a format within console and PC releases from 1% to 50% of the last 20 years, combined with our optimism about streaming services over the next three years, we think the audience for our console and PC games could be 10X or more the size of the business today. Now that does not mean we think our revenues will grow by 10X, but we do think the install base will grow materially.”

Zelnick was talking after Take-Two’s 2026/2027 Q1 results, which beat guidance due to strong revenue from NBA 2K26 and Grand Theft Auto. It says it will hit $8 billion to $8.2 billion in net bookings for the full year.

Every month, exclusively for paid subscribers, we dive into the key charts, statistics and facts from the previous month in video games, including some exclusive data and analysis from us.

Interested in becoming a paid subscriber? You will find the link below.

The State of Games: June 2026

After a busy May of big AAA releases, June was much, much quieter. Nevertheless, there were a couple of notable games (including the best-selling game of the year so far). Also, a major sporting event had a significant impact across the charts.

It was also the month of Summer Game Fest, with a whole bunch of different games in the trailer and article charts.

However, we have now reached the point where Nintendo Switch 2 had released this time last year, and that comparison has immediately ended the growth we had seen in the console hardware market.

Let’s dive in.

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In This Edition,

• The biggest games of 2026 (not GTA)

• Zelda old vs new

• Call of Duty fights back

• Sony’s big Wolverine bet

• Plus, Blood of the Dawnwalker, Star Wars, Gears and more

We have a bit of a fun one for you this week. That’s right, no lay-off chat, nothing on the death of discs, or the rising price of consoles. Today, we are all about video games.

And the question we’re asking… what is the biggest video game still to come this year?

We know GTA 6 will be No.1, and we know sports games like EA Sports FC, Madden and NBA will be competing for the top places. But what of the rest?

Because we’re The Game Business, we naturally turned to data for the answer.

Analytics company LevelUp gave us statistics on the best-performing trailers this year, the games generating the most video views, and the titles that the press are writing about the most. Meanwhile, our friends at IGN gave us the games their audience has wish listed the most, while those clever folks at GameDiscover supplied us with its Steam Wishlist chart.

As you can see, Nintendo’s The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time remake has been a standout performer. The game received a short teaser trailer in June and it shot to the top of the trailer charts, even beating out the likes of Marvel’s Wolverine and Call of Duty. It’s also comfortably generated more press coverage than any other game. It’s also No.3 in the IGN’s most wanted list, and No.3 in terms of overall video views (despite the lack of details about the title).

Zelda is a game that has a large, die-hard audience, which lends itself well to this data set. But could it really be one of the biggest games of the year?

In 2017, Nintendo released Breath of the Wild, a sandbox-style open world Zelda that became a huge hit. It’s sold close to 35 million copies, and its sequel, Tears of the Kingdom, has exceeded 22 million. Both are by far the most successful Zelda games ever made.

Before Breath of the Wild, Zelda games were a little more linear and prescribed. They are popular, but on a different scale. The best-selling Zelda game of this type was the 2006 Wii and GameCube game Twilight Princess, which sold just short of nine million copies. The original Ocarina of Time was just below eight million. Outside of those, ‘old-style’ Zelda games typically sold between four and six million copies.

Nintendo has released some of these older-style Zelda titles since Breath of the Wild. In 2019, there was a remake of the Game Boy game Link’s Awakening, in 2021 there was a HD remaster of Skyward Sword, and in 2024 it released Echoes of Wisdom, a new 2D Zelda. All three games sold in that four to six million sales bracket.

Nevertheless, none of them are a remake of the ‘greatest game of all time’. Our thinking at The Game Business is it could be one of the best-selling ‘old-style’ Zelda game, but it won’t come close to the performance of the newer games.

But, as of right now, we know so little about it.

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One of the games that has a lot of pressure on its shoulders is Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4. Its YouTube and video stats are positive (Call of Duty doesn’t get too much press coverage these days), but the series is at a low point, so there’s a lot riding on this year’s game.

Call of Duty had this strategy of releasing a big game and quickly following it up with a sequel. We had Modern Warfare 2 in 2022, followed by Modern Warfare 3 in 2023. Then Black Ops 6 in 2024, followed by Black Ops 7 in 2025. Those ‘quick sequels’ all performed poorly by Call of Duty standards.

In particular, 2025’s Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 was a disaster. Its launch sales in Europe were 50% lower than its predecessor. In the US, Call of Duty is typically the best-selling game every year, but in 2025 it was No.5. According to Ampere, Call of Duty’s active players are down nearly 40% in June 2026 vs June 2025.

If the patten holds, this year’s Modern Warfare 4 should be a stronger game, and the early buzz is positive. But not only does it need to turn around a tough situation, it needs to do it in the shadow of Grand Theft Auto 6. Call of Duty does arrive a month before, and I do expect it do have a much stronger launch than Black Ops 7. But can it sustain good numbers once Rockstar’s epic has launched? That’s a tough challenge for Activision.

Over on the IGN chart, Mavel’s Wolverine leads the way. It’s the big PS5 exclusive from Insomniac, which is also responsible for the mega-selling Spider-Man games. But this is not Spider-Man. It’s more liner and ultra-violent, and so it’s hard to predict exactly how well this will do. Wolverine is a big IP, Insomniac is one of Sony’s most consistent developers (this is its fourth PS5 release), and other violent first-party Sony games, such of God of War and The Last of Us, are very major sellers. Therefore, we should anticipate this being a sizeable hit for Sony.

The Steam chart is an eclectic one, with all sorts of unique games, including a game where you’re a DIY handyman trying to make a quick profit. Some of these games are due soon, hence why they’ve charted so highly.

Wuxia game Phantom Blade Zero continues to generate a lot of buzz, and could well be the next Chinese game to break big in the West. But also of note is The Blood of The Dawnwalker. The RPG is by former The Witcher devs, and it has also done well in terms of video views and press coverage. It also has very little competition, particularly following the delay to Fable. Whether it can generate the sort-of success of other European RPGs like The Witcher or Baldur’s Gate will depend on if it’s an 8/10 or a 9/10 game. Either way, it should do well.

Capcom’s return to Onimusha after 20 years is also trending well. It was never the biggest series for the Japanese publisher, but Capcom is on a hot streak right now, and the buzz around it is strong. As is excitement for Beast of Reincarnation, the new IP from Pokémon developers Game Freak, which lands next week.

Elsewhere, Star Wars Galactic Racer is doing very well in terms of press and media attention, while the other Star Wars game, Zero Company, isn’t generating quite so much excitement (although does make the Steam charts).

Gears of War: E-Day also hovers around most charts, although its popularity is skewed towards the US market. The decision not to put it on PS5 may impact the title’s performance in Europe.

One of the big question marks for me is around Control: Resonant. The action game has generated lots of press coverage, and it’s done well in terms of Steam Wishlists. However, it launches at a very competitive time. Can Remedy finally end the curse of releasing excellent games that struggle due to a congested release window? Let’s hope so.

You can check out our full conversation on the big games still to come in 2026 in today’s The Game Business Show, where I am joined by former GamesIndustry.biz editor James Batchelor.

Meanwhile…

• Krafton saw record second-quarter growth. Revenue shot up 94.9% to $889.1 million, while operating profit also rose 67% $283.1 million. The Korean games giant had a strong quarter due to the launch of Subnautica 2 and the expansion of the PUBG IP.

• Double Fine Productions has reduced its workforce by 23 people (which is 25% of the team), following its divorce from Xbox.

• Capcom’s Q1 profit and revenue jumped on the back of strong sales for Resident Evil: Requiem and Pragmata. Income rose 69.2% to $177.5 million, while profit hit $250.1 million, which is up 67%. Resident Evil Requiem has now reached eight million sales, while new IP Pragmata is on 2.5 million.

• Wizards of the Coast boss John Hight will step down from September 1. The former Blizzard exec oversaw Magic: The Gathering, Dungeons & Dragons, and upcoming video games Exodus and Warlock. However, Wizards owner Hasbro recorded a $56 million impairment charge last week due to its video games investments, with ‘several’ games cancelled.

• Atari has signed a deal with Universal Pictures to develop ten of its IP into games. Those titles are Asteroids, Adventure, Berzerk, Breakout, Centipede, Crystal Castles, Millipede, Missile Command, Pong, and Yars’ Revenge.

• PlayStation has announced God of War Laufey, is coming February 16. Other big February games include the Fable reboot, which is due February 23, and Tomb Raider: Legacy of Atlantis on February 12.

• Ubisoft’s Q1 net bookings reaching €255.8 million for its financial year. This was ‘slightly above guidance’, despite being down 9.2% year-on-year. The decline was due to the comparison with Assassin’s Creed Shadows, which launched in March last year. The firm is bullish about the performance of Assassin’s Creed: Black Flag Resynced, which has now sold 3.5 million copies.

• The EU Commission has approved the $55 billion acquisition of Electronic Arts by a consortium of investors, led by the Saudi Arabia Public Investment Fund.

• Human: Fall Flat has now sold 60 million units worldwide. The title from No Brakes Games and Curve released ten years ago.

• Xbox is making classic games available on PC and via Game Pass. The first four titles are Blinx: The Time Sweeper, Fusion Frenzy, Crimson Skies: High Road to Revenge, and Conker: Live and Reloaded (which is the remake of the greatest game ever made)

That’s it from us today, and what’s more, we will be taking a short break next week as we recharge ahead of Gamescom, Tokyo Game Show and some of the biggest interviews we’ve ever done. Have a great week!

• Warframe’s ‘massive’ growth

• Soulframe’s careful development

• The death of Destiny

• ‘Trust-based development’

Bungie’s ‘looter shooter’ Destiny was a real thorn in the side of Warframe.

The Digital Extremes game had launched 18 months earlier, and found itself facing off against a better resourced rival.

“There’s a lot of overlap between the two games,” says Digital Extremes president Sheldon Carter.

“Destiny 1 really hit us when it came out. It’s a looter shooter with tons of marketing and really great developers on the team. Destiny 2 as well.”

In May this year, Bungie announced the end of Destiny. It would no longer be making updates to the series. And since then, most of the Destiny team has been laid off.

“For a while we thought about [Destiny] as competition and we were aggressively wanting to compete with what they’re doing. But over time, developers from their team come onto our team. New people who we started, they learnt what looter shooters are because they’ve put thousands of hours into Destiny. And so, at our studio, it was a bit of mourning with that news. The mood was pretty dour.

“The budgets and the competition to keep putting updates out… it’s really difficult and every studio has its own culture and different way of doing things. I can’t imagine [what it’s like] with a studio as big as Bungie, which also had Marathon going on, and a lot of different things pulling them in a lot of directions. Honestly, for me, it’s more sadness that it’s over. I hope the best for all the people there.”

Warframe is in a very different position. Five years ago, Digital Extremes felt that the game had peaked and it began work on a new game, a multiplayer RPG called Soulframe.

“Some people in the company were like, ‘Oh, Warframe’s peaked. And as it gradually goes to the West, we will have to start something new.” And while we did start another project, we changed our focus about how we were developing Warframe, how we were promoting it, and we’ve had a few years of straight just massive growth.

“Now we’re in this happy position where Warframe’s really thriving, and that gives us the ability to give Soulframe a tone of rope to try stuff out.”

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‘Trust-based development’

Although Warframe lacks the profile of Destiny, the game and its studio is still a significant operation. Digital Extremes, which is owned by Tencent, now has over 500 staff.

So, what’s the secret? The answer is a boring one, and one you’d expect any live service developer to say: it’s about community.

Digital Extremes says it has a “trust-based development philosophy”, which involves continued communication and reacting quickly when mistakes are made. It’s not something that comes naturally to most studios, but it’s something that the Warframe team has mastered. It no doubt helps that the game’s creative director Rebecca Ford was previously its community director.

And when you have the trust of players, they can do “great things” for you, says Carter.

“Warframe has always felt like a bit of an underdog story. It’s one of those games that’s been big for a long time, but not a lot of people know about it. That makes our players really want to bring other people into their hobby. And when you know that you’re taken care of and you’re excited about it, you want to share it with others.”

‘There’s still growth on consoles’

Warframe is now on most platforms, and Digital Extremes is eyeing up new markets in which to push the game. However, it believes there is plenty of growth in some of the more mature areas.

“The last two years of Warframe have been our biggest growth period,” Carter says.

“Of course, we look at new geographies. We just launched on Android a few months ago, and Android opens a whole bunch of geographies and a whole set of players that we’ve never been able to interact with. A lot of people in the mobile space… our version of fair free-to-play is totally foreign to most mobile monetization schemes. So, there’s a bit of an education piece there, but I do see that as a growth [area].

“But honestly, even in our core markets, there is a lot of room for Warframe, both on the consoles and PC. And I know there’s a feeling of the decline of consoles, but there’s a huge segment of people on them. We see our player base is there, and we know there’s lots of growth to be had.”

Even with hardware pricing continuing to rise?

“That’s not going to help,” he admits. “We have this amazing optimization team, so you can play Warframe on your PS5 Pro and it looks cutting edge, and you can also play it on a four generations old Android phone. So, if people need to look at older hardware because the new stuff is so expensive, they’re still going to have Warframe to play. That’s potentially a huge opportunity for us as well.

“We laughed. As soon as we did Android, we started saying, ‘Hey, you’re going to run this on a Samsung fridge now’.”

The very careful development of Soulframe

As Warframe continues to do well, the pressure has come off Soulframe. Digital Extremes has made the RPG available to play via its website in a pre-release state. It’s not currently on Steam.

The studio is being very careful when it comes to the game, partly to give it the time it needs, but also to ensure the firm doesn’t lose focus on the core part of its business.

“We wanted to really carefully grow [the Soulframe] team without hurting Warframe,” Carter says. “We wanted to transition people slowly. That literally took two years, and it was not easy. Warframe updates are incredibly ambitious. They have huge cinematics. Geoff Crookes is the creative director of Soulframe and he’s also just a fantastic cinematic animator. So, it’s like, ‘Oh, Geoff has to come back and animate a few things.’

“And that’s at a high level. That trickles down to the whole company as the teams have to jump in, and I think that’s good. It’s good because the teams aren’t competitive with each other when they can work back and forth. You see your colleagues coming in to help. There’s camaraderie. I’ve heard of studios where the two teams can become competitive, and that’s definitely the opposite of what we wanted.”

Soulframe is not the same genre as Warframe, so they don’t directly compete. However, Carter says there is a ‘DE audience’ that moves between the two games.

“But the majority [of Soulframe players] are just people who are more into action RPGs. Maybe they liked Elden Ring, but they don’t want something that’s so punishing and precise.”

Nevertheless, Warframe does bring benefits to Soulframe. For one, it has helped it secure attention and coverage it might not have had otherwise. Soulframe is also benefitting from the studio’s deeper understanding of community.

“One of the things you learn as you do a second game is that expertise doesn’t necessarily mean you don’t make the same mistakes as you did before. It just means you can recover from them a little bit faster,” Carter says

“The journey of Soulframe has been relearning a few of the things that we forgot after so many years. But at the same time, using that core that I was talking about earlier, which is just establishing communication, building trust with the audience, and taking our time to get it to a point where we feel like there’s enough content, enough story, enough gameplay that when we release it to a wider audience, it’s going to have its core [fans]. And that’s all we’re looking at right now. We’re building the core of the audience before we go wider.

“We’re really excited about it. The numbers that we’re seeing, in terms of retention and engagement, is looking really promising.”

Carter isn’t naïve. He knows that Soulframe launches into a far more competitive space than Warframe did. But he remains confident that, in five years, Digital Extremes will be a significantly bigger company than it is today.

“[It won’t be] double where we are now, but maybe we’ve added a couple hundred people,” he concludes. “That’s our five-year vision, to have both these games neck and neck with totally different audiences.”

That’s it for today’s newsletter! Join us on Thursday as we reveal the biggest games still to come in 2026… which aren’t called Grand Theft Auto. Until then, thank you for reading.

Sometimes, when someone calls me a ‘video game journalist’, I will correct them. I’ll say, ‘well, more a video game business journalist’.

This isn’t because of some snobbery towards games journalism. It’s because after 20 years of doing this exact job, my brain has become twisted by it. Even when a game I love gets announced – like Resident Evil Veronica or the new Ocarina of Time remake - I’m immediately analysing commercial potential, the competitor landscape, distribution strategies… rather than gameplay features. I can’t help it. It’s a curse

And it’s not always to my benefit. Take last week’s interview with Amazon. In that interview, the company let slip that Tomb Raider Catalyst is scheduled for launch in 2028. The game was previously announced for 2027. I noticed it immediately. But I also didn’t feel it was much of a story. The game had a vague date anyway. It isn’t impacting TGB readers, is it? And is it a surprise? The Tomb Raider remake (Legacy of Atlantis) had been delayed out of 2026 and into 2027… and that likely had some impact on the next game. Does Amazon really want two Tomb Raiders in one year?

So, I didn’t run a story on it. It’s not even referenced in the newsletter. It’s a very brief, off-hand moment in a podcast. But, of course, the consumer media did spot it. And soon there were stories on all major websites about the Tomb Raider delay.

There’s a part of me that’s annoyed with myself. How much traffic did I miss out on by not running that as a standalone story? But then, that’s not what The Game Business is all about. I guess it’s nice that folk are paying that much attention.

The stories that got me most excited last week were all around game streaming. The Amazon chat was about its ambitions for its game streaming platform Luna, which can now be found within the Prime Video app. And just hours after that went out, Xbox announced it was experimenting with a new advertising-based business model related to its own streaming service.

So, let’s talk about that, shall we!

Can Xbox’s big advertising experiment make game streaming work this time?

In Brief: Xbox is testing a new business model for game streaming, where players can stream their game library for free with ads. The two-minutes of ads will appear before the game starts and run every hour. Previously, game streaming was limited to Xbox Game Pass subscribers.

What You Need To Know:

• This test is for Xbox Insiders and is very much an experiment.

• The premium subscription option via Game Pass remains.

• The ads won’t interrupt gameplay, but sessions are limited to one hour in length.

• The firm insists the ads should ‘create value’ and will be held to ‘the same quality bar as the content’.

• Xbox Chief Strategy Officer Matthew Ball is intrigued by the advertising business model. He spoke with us about it in February before he joined Microsoft. We discussed it again after he joined last month.

• In other game streaming news, Amazon has added its Luna streaming service to the Prime Video app. Now Prime members can stream games directly through Prime Video.

• Both moves follow the launch of two big streaming games from Netflix: The horror story game Unhinged and the FIFA World Cup game.

Read more

In This Edition,

• Amazon Luna comes to Prime Video

• Can it replace consoles?

• Amazon talk Unhinged, Bond and Clutch

• … and reaching ‘tens of millions’ of players

Hello there. How is your summer going?

Last week we had a lovely chat with Netflix about its new streaming hit Unhinged. The horror game is aimed at an audience that may or may not exist: people that want a narrative video game, but aren’t interested in a console or gaming PC.

Netflix is trying to reach these people through the Netflix app. And today, Amazon Luna has announced it’s doing the same thing. The game streaming platform is now available directly within Prime Video.

Luna is a slightly different proposition to Netflix, as it features AAA games such as Indiana Jones, EA Sports FC and Hogwarts Legacy (with Tomb Raider to come). But the goal is similar. And for this week’s edition, I had a chance to find out more from Jeffrey Gattis, who oversees both Luna and Amazon Game Studios.

The full conversation is worth watching above. But I’ve also selected some key stories below.

Enjoy!

$1,000 game consoles could drive people to Luna, says Amazon

Amazon isn’t targeting console players with its Luna streaming platform, the company says.

However, with the prospect of $1,000 video game machines, it might prove a viable alternative for gamers who are unwilling, or unable, to afford such devices.

“Our business isn’t predicated on replacing consoles,” said Jeffrey Gattis, Amazon’s general manager for games.

“Historically, cloud gaming has been a little bit of a solution in search of a problem. Consoles, for the most part, have been relatively inexpensive until now. So, our business is more about reaching more players and expanding the market, not trying to get people to give up their consoles or gaming PCs.

“The world doesn’t need another one of those. They don’t need a fourth entry selling the same games and competing for the same pie of players. It really isn’t growing.

“Having said all that, we saw the Steam Machine opening at $1,000. We hear rumors about consoles, because of the RAM crisis, pushing up over $1,000 in Gen 10. So, I do think you get to a point at which more people will be in the consideration set for a cloud gaming solution, just because of the sheer cost of buying dedicated hardware.”

Gattis was speaking to The Game Business following the news that Luna is being added to the Prime Video app. Now Prime subscribers can access games like EA Sports FC 26, Hogwarts Legacy and Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, directly via the app.

Amazon hopes this will help it find an audience who might be interested in console-like games, but isn’t interested in buying a console.

“There’s three billion people in the world who play video games, yet there’s only, depending on how you do the math, 300 million to 500 million dedicated hardware devices out in the wild,” Gattis said. “So, there’s a lot of people who have some sort of affinity for video games. Maybe they’re playing on mobile. Maybe they’re playing through a browser. But they’re not having the highest fidelity experience.

“And when you start to unpack a little bit about why they don’t do that. We’ve just talked about hardware getting increasingly expensive, and games can be big investments to go buy a $70 game, to go through the download experience, to pair a controller, and then spend hundreds of hours, in some cases, to complete them. So, we see an opportunity to serve a group of people who haven’t really been well served because the console and PC companies are mostly focused on those hardcore players.”

He continued: “For the first time in a long time, I feel like we have a single gaming strategy. We understand what we’re doing, we understand what we’re not doing, and we’re executing against it. And time will tell how well we can execute and how right we are about our thesis.”

Because Luna is targeting new players, Gattis hopes he can convince more publishers to get involved.

“The scepticism you’ll hear is, ‘Well, if I put my games on Luna, particularly if we push it into Prime, I’m going to cannibalize all my sales on these other platforms.’ And the reality is, at least the pitch that we keep making - and it is the truth - is that this is about reaching players that a lot of those games are never going to be able to reach. Particularly in a world of $1,000 consoles.”

Gattis says the aim is to reach tens of millions of players within Luna.

“We believe we can build a net scale gaming platform that’s serving that two and a half billion audience that I think is a little underserved. Obviously, there’s a lot of work we have to do to get our content portfolio right, to get our product right, to get our messaging and awareness in the right place. Things like integrating with Prime Video, things like trying to figure out how to go deeper with Fire TV… there’s Twitch. Those are all the pieces that we have to work with, and what I’d love to say five years from now is that we’re much more deeply integrated across the broader Amazon, and we’re serving tens of millions of players.”

Amazon hails Netflix’s Unhinged

Amazon’s games boss Jeffrey Gattis ‘loved’ Netflix’s hit cloud game Unhinged.

The horror game, which we covered last week, is aimed at a similar audience to the one Amazon is after: people who don’t necessarily own consoles, but are interested in interactive stories.

“We share a similar vision to Netflix,” Gattis said. “I love to see what they’re doing in this space, because we both have the same thesis about making games available to more people.”

He continued: “I actually played [Unhinged] last night. We want to do more of these things, too, where you start to push the envelope a bit in terms of new types of creative endeavors. There’s an opportunity to create a lot of these newer experiences that are not traditional video games, but think of them as almost extensions of the video viewing process. I love it.”

Amazon is interested in Maverick’s Clutch game after all

Amazon has cancelled a number of projects over the past 12 months, including the MMO New World and a Lord of the Rings online project. It also stopped operations on co-op game King of Meat, and sold the unreleased MOBA March of Giants to Ubisoft.

The firm is instead focusing on big IP, cinematic experiences, and games with simple mechanics that are easy to jump into.

“That’s where we’ve found a sweet spot since our relaunch in October,” Gattis said. “And maybe not trying to compete for the hardest of hardcore who are playing multiplayer competitive shooters, at least not today.”

There is one game that Amazon dropped that did seem to fit with this vision. Clutch is a new cinematic racing game by Maverick Games, which is a studio formed by Forza Horizon veterans. Amazon was funding the project, but as we revealed in February, the company abandoned it and handed it back to the studio.

“That decision actually was made before I took over,” Gattis explained. “I can’t speak to all the mechanics behind it. I can tell you that I too like the game. We’ve reached out to them recently and we’re trying to see if it’s a fit for Luna. So, it’d be a different business relationship than the one we had before, but the game looks great.”

Gattis said that AAA games are still part of the Amazon Games remit.

“We range from what we call Game Night games, which are those phone-as-a-controller games - single A titles that are in the single millions of dollars to develop - all the way up to AAA. We have announced the two Tomb Raider titles. [Legacy of] Atlantis comes February 12 next year, and then we’ll follow on in 2028 with the next one. We’re excited about those. There are some other AAA things that are in various stages of discussion right now.

“Ultimately, we want to build an identity with Luna, where we have a content portfolio that resonates with people, where they think, ‘Oh gosh, that’s the place that has Tomb Raider, and maybe Bond, and they have these other things.’ And that takes time to go build. But, for us to be the platform we want to be, and the one we believe we can be, you very much have to have original content.”

Amazon excited by 007: First Light future

Amazon had some involvement in the development of 007: First Light, the hit James Bond game by IO Interactive that launched in May. However, the company wants to be more involved in any potential sequel.

“IO did just a tremendous job,” Gattis said. “I don’t think it was a surprise. They did it so well that it just shows that these single player action-adventure narrative-driven games really resonate with a lot of people, and that’s shown up in the sales that we’ve seen.

“We’re excited about the franchise and where it can go from here. The game’s two months old, so we’re going to let it breathe for a while before everyone wants to ask about a sequel. It’s an awesome game. Those games really do seem to work on a platform like Luna. So, when I think of Tomb Raider and some of the things we have on the roadmap, I get excited that that’s where we’re going to find real audience.”

Meanwhile…

• The US games market generated $4.5 billion in June 2026, according to Circana. That’s a 21% decrease compared to June 2025. The decline is due to the fact that Nintendo Switch 2 launched in the previous June. Switch 2 sales are 79% lower than during its launch month. PS5 sales are also down 19%, while Xbox Series S and X revenue doubled.
  
  UFC 6 was the best-selling game of June (revenue), whereas Meccha Chameleon was No.2. Meccha Chameleon sold four million units, Circana says. The indie game costs just $6.
  
  For the first six months of the year, the US games market hit $27.5 billion, which is 1% down on 2025.

• Nintendo has asked the court to dismiss a lawsuit that demands it refunds players if it receives a tariff refund from the US Government. Nintendo raised the price of the original Switch last year, which was attributed to tariffs imposed by US President Donald Trump. After the Supreme Court found that Trump didn’t have the power to do this, Nintendo (along with other companies) have sued the US Government for refunds. Two consumers have opted to sue Nintendo, saying that any refund should go to players. Nintendo lawyers said: “Those who bought Nintendo’s products received exactly what they bargained and paid for”

• After a wave of brutal lay-offs, Bethesda has moved to reassure fans (and the industry) that it is working on some major projects. The developer said that The Elder Scrolls 6 is progressing well, that Starfield remains an important part of its future, and that it is remastering classic Fallout games, namely Fallout 3 and Fallout New Vegas. It also confirmed the existence of a new Fallout title from developer Obsidian (which went through its own wave of lay-offs). There will also be a big update to online game Fallout 76, and Fallout 5 has just entered pre-production.

• Gamescom 2026 has completely sold out of exhibition space for the first time in its history. As a result, the organizers are looking to make the event bigger for 2027. This year’s Gamescom runs August 26 to August 30.

• London Games Festival will run April 12 to April 19, 2027, with most of it taking place at a new central venue. The New Game Plus showcase event, the Games Finance Market, plus other networking and conferences, will take place at the Business Design Centre. Other events, including the BAFTA Game Awards, the Ensemble exhibition and Screen Play conference will take place at different venues.

• Direct-to-consumer commerce specialist Neon has closed a $13 million Series A funding round, led by Krafton with participation from a16z, Griffin Gaming Partners, and Renegade Partners.

• Joe Ziegler, the director of PlayStation and Bungie’s Marathon, has left the studio four months after the game’s launch. Marathon will now be led by Del Chafe III, who was previously assistant game director, alongside creative director Julia Nardin.

• GameStop told Bloomberg that Sony killing disc-based games from January 2028 was ‘irrelevant’. CEO Ryan Cohen told the publication: “Software today makes up less than 12% of the business, and collectibles makes up over half the business. So, it’s totally, totally irrelevant.”

• Assassin’s Creed Black Flag: Resynced has now sold three million copies worldwide

• Esports communications agency The Story Mob is expanding its remit to cover game publishers, consumer brands and tech companies. It’s also launched a consultancy called Play Makers, which will help brands understand gamer culture.

That’s it from us today! We’ll be back next week with more big interviews and stories. Until then, thank you for reading.

• Taking on World of Warcraft

• Old School’s surprising fanbase

• The ‘pain’ of changing monetization

• The console opportunity

• Winning China

There’s a complaint on the RuneScape subreddit about a graphical bug.

There’s a fence that has impaled the edge of a barrel. It’s a pretty minor issue. Nevertheless, one person on that subreddit has made it their mission to get it fixed.

“He made a post every day saying: ‘Day 112 of waiting for this barrel to be fixed,’” says Jagex CEO Jon Bellamy.

“So, I sat with one of the lead designers and I asked, ‘Look, I’ve seen this Reddit post for the last 129 days. Are we going to do something?’ And he said, ‘What if we moved it further into the fence?’ I said, ‘That’s such a good idea.’ We then spent about a half a year moving it an inch further into the fence every day, and this guy responded every day with ‘day 400 of waiting for this stupid barrel thing to be over’.

“Now it is out of the fence with a hole where the fence was, leaking water forevermore. I think that playfulness is really who we are at our best. It makes this place turn over. It makes players happy.”

I enjoyed that story. Not only does it showcase the distinctive British whimsy that’s made RuneScape famous, but it also highlights how engaged Bellamy is with the franchise. He’s on the subreddits, he’s religiously playing the game (he was fishing in Old School RuneScape before our interview), and he’s at all the events (signing babies!).

And Jagex is RuneScape. There’s no other IP. No third-party publishing. It’s rebranded itself as Jagex: The RuneScape Company, and sold off its one non-RuneScape game, Scum, alongside its developer, Gamepires, to fellow UK studio Splash Damage.

“Never say never,” Bellamy says. “But I have no intention of going beyond RuneScape with this business.

“Our team size is less because we have fewer studios and products, but focus is through the roof. It’s really liberating to be able to do one thing better than anybody else in the world.”

That focus has manifested itself into three goals: Turn around its declining RuneScape MMO, invest heavily in the successful Old School RuneScape product, and fully release the survival game RuneScape: Dragonwilds.

We spoke to Bellamy about all this at Jagex’s offices in Cambridge, UK. And you can watch the full interview above (it’s a good one). Or check out the selected highlights below.

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Jagex wants RuneScape to be the world’s No.1 MMO brand

RuneScape is the second biggest MMO brand globally, Jagex claims.

There’s bound to be debate over how you measure ‘biggest’, or indeed what is classed as an MMO, but regardless, Jagex sees itself as No.2, and it has its sights set on No.1: World of Waracraft.

“The dream is that we’re not the number two biggest MMO brand in the world,” says Bellamy. “We’re number one. There’s a big old gap between us and number one, but if we get it right, we know we can make headway. It’s lofty and ambitious, but if you’re going to set lofty and ambitious goals, why not swing for the top? So, that’s the number one goal.”

RuneScape monetization changes have stopped the decline (but it’s been painful)

Last year, Jagex changed how it monetizes RuneScape. It removed the unpopular (but lucrative) Treasure Hunter microtransaction, which gave players XP boosts, gold and gameplay-skipping items.

We spoke to Bellamy last year, who admitted that the company would likely take a financial hit by doing this, but change was necessary to get RuneScape back to growth.

Nine months later, has the company taken a financial hit? And have players come back?

“It has impacted revenue, not positively,” he says. “RuneScape revenue is down quite a large chunk. The reason why I took [this decision], the reason why we got the backing above me, is because I don’t think there was [any other] legitimate way to reset the standards for the game that would allow us to have a shot at coming back to growth. It has been painful, exactly as we thought it would be.”

Bellamy says that membership has stabilized for the first time in nearly four years, but user growth will require more than just changing monetization.

“Setting the table for growth is not the same as expecting growth to come as a result of setting the table. You need to put something on the table to bring people in. We’ve set the table, we’ve spent the last year not just removing that monetization layer, but overhauling so much of the clunkiness and the pain within the game.

“The guy who runs our RuneScape studio has been here for 13 years. He’s been a RuneScape player for 20. The person calling the shots on how to bring this thing back to life was a player in its golden age. He’s done a great job on getting the game into a healthy position. So less daily, less FOMO, less of the rubbish.

“I’ve been told very clearly not to give anything away, but on October 3 at RuneFest, we’ll be announcing our equivalent of putting a feast on the table, to really actively win people back, and that’ll be happening much sooner than many people expect.”

It may be retro, but half of Old School RuneScape players are new to the series

The core RuneScape game may be having a tough time, but the reverse is true of Old School RuneScape. “We broke just about every record we’ve ever had across every major metric in the last 12 months, and multiple times,” Bellamy says.

The retro version of RuneScape (it’s based on the 2007 version of the game) is growing, and Jagex will invest a further £200 million to turn it “into a stalwart product rather than a scrappy underdog.”

And it’s not just for older fans, either. In fact, half of Old School RuneScape’s active audience had never played a RuneScape game before.

“They’ve chosen to play the 2007 version as their first RuneScape experience,” Bellamy explains. “I think most people assume that this is something for the old-timers who’ve always been here. It’s not true. It stands alone.”

Why does he think that is?

“The easy answer is it’s great. But I think it’s a bit like some of the metal bands from the late ‘90s. You’re starting to see the Kylie Jenners of the world wearing Iron Maiden and Metallica T-shirts, and there’s a bunch of kids that I see that have no idea what Metallica is, but they love the font and think it’s a cool shirt. I have mixed feelings about that, but there is a bit of a resurgence, and we have that same feeling a bit with Old School.

“We have captured a portion of time that even those who weren’t there in their formative teenage years still long for. There’s a collective nostalgia for the simpler days before all the madness of social media.”

The game has even shown up in a new music video from artist Phoebe Bridgers.

“It’s like a real cross-cultural moment where in the middle of this like super poppy, very zeitgeisty music video, there’s a guy in a gas station playing Old School RuneScape,” Bellamy says. “It so well encapsulates what Old School is for so many people.”

Runescape: Dragonwilds is on 1.3 million sales and doing well in China

The third game in the RuneScape franchise is the survival game Dragonwilds, which launched into Early Access last year.

“We thought it was going to sell about 200,000 units in Early Access. We’re at about 1.3 million,” Bellamy says. “Since the beginning of this month, we’ve sold about another 100,000.”

That boost follows the game’s launch in Southeast Asia, including a version for Chinese players.

“RuneScape had zero presence in those countries. And part of that is because of what we make. [Our games have this] Monty Python-style, very British humor. It resonates really well in Finland. It resonates very well in Japan, as we’ve recently learned. It resonates very well in the Netherlands and the US. It’s very Western-centric. Or at least that’s what we’d assumed. And then we release a product in China for the first time, and in our first week following the release, 41% of sales have been to Chinese buyers. And since then, it’s evened out at about 15% to 20% a day.”

“So, maybe our long-held suspicions about cultural fit aren’t as true as we thought.”

Jagex thinks there’s 12 million former RuneScape players on Nintendo Switch

Dragonwilds will launch on PlayStation, Xbox and Nintendo when it exits Early Access in September. It will be the first RuneScape game to ever launch on consoles.

“It’s a testing what we’ve always assumed to be not right for us,” he says. “Over the last 25 years, somebody somewhere looked at consoles, said it wasn’t going to be possible, probably not even worth it, and the upside isn’t that much. And that has just hung around in the walls of this place. This is our first legitimate ‘we’re actually going to do this thing’ moment. A new RuneScape product, tons of resource invested, tons of time invested, tons of heart. We’re going to bring it to new platforms where historically we’ve never been, and therefore it will be hard to get off the ground.

“We’ve done some numbers on this. We think there’s about six million of our historical players on each of the main platforms, so Xbox and PlayStation, and then about twice that on Switch. So, when we’ve been speaking with the platforms, I’ve been saying, ‘Look, you don’t need to create an audience for us. We have one. They’re there. Let’s bring them a game.’”

‘It’s not worth worrying about rising console prices and GTA 6’

Jagex faces a few challenges with Dragonwilds. It’s coming to consoles at a time when that sector is facing severe headwinds due to rising prices.

It also launches in a hyper congested September as publishers seek to avoid the launch of GTA 6 in November.

“September is congested, and yes, we’ll have to fight for our place,” Bellamy says. “But it is genuinely very good, and secondarily, we have this unique advantage of 300 million RuneScape players that we can really lean in on. That helps to de-risk a bit. But you’d be foolish to say that it isn’t harder today than it was six months ago.”

He continues: “It’s a control the controllables thing. I speak with my Board and my team and say, ‘Look, some of our expectations might need to shift a bit because GTA is launching in November. Everybody else is launching in September. Console prices are going through the roof. There’s a bunch of things changing around us that we can’t control.’

“Our job is to come to the places where players are, do our very best interpretation of giving them what they want, and carry on. The rest of it that is outside of our control isn’t really worth worrying about.”

Thank you for reading! We’ll be back Thursday with a special edition of The Game Business featuring Amazon. You won’t want to miss it.

This is our little chat about the previous week’s big news stories. It’s supposed to be nice and concise, and gives you all you need for that Monday morning meeting.

Some weeks are chock full of stories to share and analyse. And other times, well, we need to get creative.

Last week was in-between the two. There were lots of small stories, but not many big ones. However, there is one I wanted to chat about… the retirement of Call of Duty and Dead Space legend Glen Schofield. We spoke to Schofield last year about his struggle to find funding for his next project, and I felt compelled to discuss the subject… and why I wish Schofield will change his mind.

Plus, Bethesda tries to convince us everything is fine after those Xbox lay-offs, there’s a bunch of appointment news, and GameStop insists it isn’t too bothered about PlayStation’s abandoning the disc.

Let’s dive in.

Dead Space creator Glen Schofield retires after failed attempts to attract funding

In Brief: Dead Space creator and Call of Duty veteran Glen Schofield is retiring from making video games. In a video posted on LinkedIn, the video game executive thanked fans of his games: “You supported me, you invited my team’s games into your homes, you told me when I was good and you told me when I wasn’t so good, but you made me better.

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In This Edition,

• EA discusses the in-game ad opportunity

• Should we develop for adverts?

• Gaining trust of marketers

Hello and welcome back to The Game Business. I hope you’re having a pleasant week.

Today, we’re discussing advertising within PC and console games.

It was back in February when Matthew Ball (in his pre-Xbox days) pointed to in-game advertising as a potentially big opportunity for PC and console titles. On the mobile side, in-game advertising generated around $55 billion of revenue in 2025 (excluding China), whereas very little is generated from PC and console titles.

Ball told me: “If we say that audiences in the eight major markets [US, UK, Germany, Japan, Korea, Canada, Italy, France], which are 60% of all PC/console sales globally, are not spending more, the costs are going up, we don’t want layoffs, we don’t want fewer games, we don’t just want the same games… we don’t want price increases…. The money needs to come in one way or another.”

Then just last month EA revealed EA Advertising, a new platform to simplify in-game advertising for marketers, and also create standardize practices around tracking, measurement and targeting of ads within PC and console games.

With Ball’s words still ringing in my ear, this felt like a significant development. And so, we invited EA’s advertisement and sponsorships boss, Alexander Dao, onto our Show. And he accepted.

You can listen to our full chat above. Or alternatively, we’ve selected a handful of moments from the conversation below.

By the way, if you’re enjoying reading The Game Business, why not consider becoming a paid subscriber? Not only do you support us doing our twice-weekly free newsletters and shows, but you will receive a weekly bonus ‘Micro’ podcast on a Monday, and a monthly market report, too. TGB paying subscribers also get free access to our annual Summer Game Fest event.

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PC and console game studios should consider in-game advertising during development, says EA

Video game makers should plan for in-game advertising during the development process, says the boss of EA’s ad division.

Alexander Dao, VP of advertising and sponsorship at Electronic Arts, joined us on today’s episode of The Game Business Show. He discussed EA’s new advertising platform, and the “huge opportunity” around in-game advertising within PC and console games.

And one of the key opportunities is with game developers planning for advertising during the creation process.

“That’s a huge opportunity, not just for EA but broadly, because most of the games that have been around for a while, building the advertising experience is really retrofitting it in,” he explained. “But as you think about new games that are coming out, as you think about free-to-play experiences that are happening on the console side… like our Skate game. Those are opportunities where if you actually design them with the right advertising and brand experience in there from the get-go, it just makes it easier. It makes it feel more native and it creates more flexibility in the types of brands that can come in and out. So, I do see a big opportunity there.

“Part of the reason why we launched our ad platform is because as we create new experiences in addition to the existing titles, it allows us to bring brands in in a much more flexible, creative and dynamic way.”

EA’s new advertising platform is primarily aimed at the firm’s sports titles. It’s linked to the company’s Frostbite engine and allows advertisers to place ads in various spots within the games, and they can even use existing assets and have them converted into 3D. What’s more EA has worked with the Interactive Advertising Bureau and Integral Ad Science to help standardize how in-game advertising shows up and is measured.

Dao said that this investment is something that could bolster the entire in-game advertising sector.

“We are working with third parties to try to standardize some of this. So, when we think about in-game 3D assets, how do we start to standardize what that looks like for a brand? When we think about in-game measurement and viewability standards, how do we make sure that’s consistent so that when other publishers and platforms also do this, and we share back reports to the brand or the marketer, they’re seeing consistency? And they know that it’s showing up the way that it should be showing up, and it’s being measured the way that it should be measured. Some of the things that we’re doing here, I believe, will drive a bit more consistency and standardization [across the industry].”

Sponsored Message

Gamescom’s indie showcase event returns

The Gamescom Awesome Indies Show will return next month, and Gamescom exhibitors can submit their title for inclusion today.

The Awesome Indies Show is a digital indie showcase featuring new announcements, world premieres, exclusive trailers and new gameplay footage from upcoming indie titles created around the world. What’s more, this year’s event is produced by media giant IGN to ensure a strong selection and global reach.

The submission deadline is August 2, and indie exhibitors can submit through the link above. There are also sponsorship opportunities for those that want to showcase their brand in the best way, and you can find out more about that here.

Can in-game advertising work outside of sports games?

In March we asked Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick about in-game advertising. And he seemed relatively downbeat on the revenue stream’s potential, at least for premium games.

“We have limited advertising inside games like NBA 2K because it fits with the vernacular,” he told us. “You want to see advertising in a stadium, because you would if you were there in real life. But that’s not a big economic contributor.

“It’s difficult for me to believe that we would want to have interstitial advertising in a game that someone paid $70 or $80 for. It would seem unfair.”

EA is more optimistic on the potential, but much of what the company has shared is around EA Sports FC, College Football, Madden and Skate. Is there really much potential here for games outside of sports?

“It has to make sense for the game,” Dao answered. “It’s easier to imagine what that looks like with sports because what you’re really trying to do is mirror the real-world experience. But if we pull on the thread of… how do we actually understand what the players want? The progression? And can brands be a part of that experience?

“Take the activation we did in The Sims with Coach. The Sims is not a sports game, but we understood what The Sims community wanted. We did some surveys to understand what type of brands would they actually want to see in the game. Where is there good overlap in audience? And if a brand were to come in, what’s the right way for them to do it? And what we did with Coach was democratize access to their products to The Sims community. [Coach] didn’t want it to be a paid product [in the game]. They just wanted to drop their entire product line, put it in front of the community, and surprise and delight them. When we did that, the socials blew up. Everybody was talking about it. A bunch of our gaming creators were talking about it. They were all really surprised and happy that it was made free. And then the media and everything picked it up, too.

“If done appropriately with the right brands, with the right title and understanding what the players ultimately want, it can drive that type of experience. But it is a bit nuanced title-by-title to make sure that you’re getting it right and it doesn’t feel random.”

He acknowledged that there are examples where in-game advertising has frustrated players, but that EA is ready to react to those situations.

“If something isn’t working and isn’t landing the way that we thought it would, quite frankly, we just pull it,” he told us. “We’ll say, ‘Hey, you know what? We tried it, it didn’t work, maybe we’ll try something different.’”

Meanwhile…

• Compulsion Games, the former Xbox studio that is responsible for the BAFTA winning South of Midnight, is looking for work. The Canadian studio says it wants to collaborate with studios across games and entertainment. It said in a LinkedIn post: “With deep experience in creating acclaimed original IP, we bring our artistry, technical expertise and collaborative approach to every project. We are excited to support the development of memorable experiences that engage and entertain players around the world.” Xbox announced that Compulsion would become independent last week.

• Video game veteran Glen Schofield is retiring after 35 years. He was a director and producer across three major Call of Duty games, and was also the creator of Dead Space and The Callisto Protocol. He’s struggled to find funding for his recent AAA project pitches, and has decided to back away from the business.

• Steve Allison, the former Epic Games VP in charge of the Epic Store and Epic’s third-party publishing business, has joined Saber Interactive as chief business officer. Allison also held senior publishing positions at Midway, Telltale and Atari.

• PR veteran Jonnie Bryant has joined Team17 as communications director. Bryant spent the last nine years at Bethesda, most recently as global PR director. He previously held senior PR roles at The Pokémon Company, Jagex, Blizzard, Take-Two and Vivendi.

• Former employees of Build A Rocket Boy protested outside the company’s offices on Saturday over a large fan playtest event. The Independent Workers Union of Great Britain says that these playtests are usually carried out by professional staff. Build A Rocket Boy has laid off around 400 employees after poor sales of the 2025 game MindsEye.

• The Entertainment Retailer’s Association, which represents major video game retailers in the UK (including Amazon, Game, Sainsbury’s and HMV) has criticised PlayStation’s plan to stop manufacturing game discs from January 2028. The trade body said: “Consumers deserve the freedom to choose how they buy their entertainment. Removing discs doesn’t represent progress – it simply removes choice. That’s bad for gamers, bad for retailers and ultimately bad for the long-term health and preservation of our games industry.”

• Investment bank Aream and Co says that $2.3 billion was spent on 54 merger and acquisition deals in Q2 2026. This is the highest number since 2022. This figure was mainly driven by Scopely’s $1 billion acquisition of Loom. Other key deals included the sale of Balatro publisher Playstack to Integrated Media Company, and the management buy-out of Eve Online developer CCP.

• Assassin’s Creed: Black Flag Resynced has sold two million copies in 24 hours.

• And stylized animated first-person noir shooter Mouse: P.I. For Hire has now surpassed one million players.

• Finally, Summer Games Done Quick 2026 has raised $2.4 million for international humanitarian group Doctor’s Without Borders.

That’s it for today’s Show. We’ll be back with three shows next week, featuring the likes of Jagex and Amazon. Until then, thank you for reading.

• The success of Unhinged

• Netflix’s story game dream

• Developing for non-gamers

Last month, Netflix surprised released Unhinged.

It’s a horror thriller starring Sadie Sink (Stranger Things, Spider-Man), Zoë Kravitz (Mad Max, The Batman) and Troy Baker (The Last of Us, Indiana Jones). It tells the story of Ava, who is trapped in an abandoned apartment building during a storm with a killer on the loose.

Oh, and it’s a video game.

But rather than something aimed at fans of Resident Evil Requiem, Unhinged is specifically targeted at some of the 700 million people who watch Netflix.

“This could’ve been a big swing and a miss,” admits Sean Krankel, who is head of narrative games at Netflix and studio director at developer Night School .

“It was a hypothesis that was not based on any data. It was based on our gut. Well it was based on some data, we know there is a massive audience who loves horror and/or thriller films and series. We’re seeing this amazing horror renaissance happening. I believed that there are folks who love that type of storytelling, but may be intimidated by certain mechanics that are very difficult, or an experience that’s 30 hours long, or one that is rooted in achievements and dying over and over and over again. The thought here was: can we make it so that the mechanics and the way you interact with the story are extremely novel and immersive, but the skills that it takes are super approachable.”

Unhinged is 30 to 40 minutes long. It’s played on the TV (or computer) and uses your smartphone as the controller. It’s effectively a point-a-click game, where players must choose directions or investigate objects. But your phone is also an extension of the experience. Ava uses a flashlight from her phone to navigate dark rooms, and she will receive calls and text messages, and all of that happens through your actual phone.

It reminded me of the found phone genre, which is a type of smartphone game that mimics the experience of finding a lost phone, and users need to go through it to uncover the story. Unhinged developer Night School made one such game ten years ago as a tie-in to the TV series Mr Robot.

“We have talked about this as a spiritual sequel to that title,” Krankel says. “Nobody brings that up, and I don’t even think you can get it on the App Store anymore. It’s one of our favorite titles. You find a phone from the hacker group fsociety, and they puppet you to participate in major events from the first season [of Mr Robot]. And what we found, because it was just text and photos and interactions that felt more intrinsically understood than some esoteric input of going around and doing combat, it closed the gap on the uncanny valley. It just felt real to people. We wanted to tap back into that.”

Unhinged took 18 months to create, but it was the result of numerous experiments, which explains the surprising number of names in the credits. And some of those earlier versions included more complex versions of the game.

“The title does not have branching dialogue, but in the beginning it did, and it felt cumbersome,” Krankel said. “And giving the player too much ability to navigate freely, it felt weird. The refinements of the language of the game were some of the biggest challenges, In the beginning it was… we have a phone, we have this crazy story, we could do everything. We could do a fake full phone interface with dating apps and all these other things. And if it’s a narrative game, of course it should have branching dialogue. And we went, ‘You know what? No, the agency the player will have will be more about whether or not they’re making calls or accepting calls, or whether they go to a certain place and reveal a certain thing.’ And that actually branches the story under the hood. But it took a while to get there.

“And it took a while to get there because the ability to do a lot of player verbs was in direct competition with the pacing that we were trying to keep, and so we had to be very subtractive as we went. We wanted the pacing to be quick. We want you to be stressed and moving. And if you have 30 little toys on your phone, it kind-of boxes with that.”

It also simplified the experience for the wider, non-gaming audience that Netflix is hoping to reach. This isn’t about competing with PC and console.

“A lot of the time when people talk about the elusive non-gamer that we’re trying to bring into our industry, sometimes people extremely oversimplify, or lower the bar too low, on all the other aspects of what makes a story or experience interesting,” Krankel says. “Like, to get a non-gamer, it has to be a Fisher-Price baby toy. I don’t think we need to look at it that way. And for our team, it’s really more looking at what is the emotional depth and core, and what’s exciting about either a particular franchise or a world or a genre, in this case thriller and horror. The game goes places. It’s just, how do we let you touch that easily? It’s a hard mind shift to take because it is easy to conflate complexity with more “elevated” types of stories or worlds, but I don’t think you need to do that. I think we can shave off a lot of the mechanical roughness, or the turn-offs of video game language, and let people access those types of stories pretty well.

“This game being out and this now not being a theoretical conversation anymore, but rather us seeing that it’s resonating, feels really good because it can lead to the next ones.”

Ah yes, the next ones. Krankel couldn’t share numbers, but the response to Unhinged has been so strong there are active conversations on what comes next.

“[A lot has] come out of Unhinged, from the base level mechanics and input to: is horror going to resonate? Could this turn into something linear? What is the right length of the game? Should we sequelize it or anthology-ize it? There’s a lot of those things that we’re looking at right now.

“It’s not just can we turn this IP into a film or a TV show… which certainly is being talked about, but nothing is remotely real yet. But [we’ve found] a phone as a controller doesn’t actually have to be a hindrance and it can be something extremely cool and novel. And if you can deliver it to players in an elegant way that feels pretty painless, you can tell all kinds of stories. Doing a 30 or 40-minute thing is not something that will be gospel. It could be anything from episodic to… what could a multiplayer version of this look like? There are a lot of really interesting things that we’re learning.”

He adds that Netflix Games is still learning: “At a business level, each one of our titles will serve different things. Some of them will be to key up a new IP. Some of them will be to try a new type of interactivity and be the bleeding edge of what the platform can be if we’re thinking about it through the lens of a first party studio. Some of it is longer engagement, so that might mean different release models. But each one, we’re still in the learning mode.”

There are four verticals within Netflix Games: Mainstream, Kids and Family, Party and Puzzle, and Narrative. Krankel leads the latter division, and that involves working with numerous teams outside of Netflix.

“I think of it as a bunch of mini publishers. We have some other internal development stuff that’s kicking up, but it’s very early. And then we’ve got third-party developers and second-party developers that we’re working with as well. So, it’s exciting because now we get the opportunity to work with all kinds of different, talented folks. There will definitely be more of that you’ll be hearing about in the next six months to a little longer.”

So, what does success look like for these narrative Netflix games?

“That’s another thing that is evolving, and it’s very similar to the early days of Netflix,” Krankel answers. “The success metrics change and have changed. Right now the thing that we’re so thrilled by, without giving specific numbers, is this has been a very big top of funnel for people who have not tried a game at all on Netflix, let alone a cloud game, and then let alone an experience rated M as this is. Getting lots of players is a great success story.”

What’s exciting about Unhinged, and similar experiences, is the potential to expand the industry. It’s quite a leap to go from watching a horror movie to playing Resident Evil. But what Krankel’s team is building is a smaller step. Unhinged doesn’t require a console or a controller, it’s on a service they already subscribe to, it’s mechanically simple, and there’s even an option to play the game without dying

This is about finding an audience that may not exist. One that wants to play a story, but doesn’t want to navigate skill trees or combat or complex controls.

“I would love to see these experiences seeming less experimental and more natural,” Krankel concludes.

“I would love, in a year or two, for people to be going: ‘This is naturally the place that I would go to play a story’. And that ‘playing a story’ doesn’t sound weird.

“The ambitious thing here is that we create a new way of interacting with story and character that doesn’t feel like you have to be trepidatious or worried about trying it, or, ‘am I going to be good at this?’ The same way that somebody’ll go to Disneyland and jump on a ride or go into an escape room, and it just becomes a new form of entertainment. That’s where I’d love to see this go.”

That’s it for today’s edition of The Game Business. Join us on Thursday when we will be joined by EA’s new in-game advertising boss Alex Dao. Until then, thank you for reading.

Last week was incredibly brutal for the video game industry, with Xbox slashing 1,600 jobs… and there’s more to come.

We have covered that story extensively, and we recap the latest facts in this week’s Micro. But our main focus today is on the continued backlash to PlayStation’s plans to discontinue physical PlayStation discs from January 2028.

Plus, there have been big sales for the new Assassin’s Creed remake, Mario Kart Tour is no more, and people sure do like Meccha Chameleon.

Let’s go.

“Removing discs doesn’t represent progress,” insists retail group

A retail trade body that represents video game retailers has condemned PlayStation’s plan to stop manufacturing game discs from January 2028.

The Entertainment Retailer’s Association represents most major video game retailers in the UK, including Amazon, Game, Sainsbury’s and HMV.

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Every month, exclusively for paid subscribers, we dive into the key charts, statistics, facts and stories from the previous month in video games, including some exclusive data and analysis from us.

Interested in becoming a paid subscriber? You will find the link below.

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In This Edition,

• Xbox staff despair

• Eurogamer editors launch new site

• State of video games media

• Atari plots ‘IMDB for video games’

Hello there,

Welcome back to The Game Business.

On the Show today, we are joined by journalist, media entrepreneur and former Eurogamer editor Alex Donaldson, who has just launched a new publication called Respec. Alex and I chat about the video game media, including some troubling statistics around the number of journalists. Plus, we spend a bit of time on this week’s distressing Xbox news.

Elsewhere, Atari’s new European president Andreas Deptolla chats to us about what’s going on at that company, including turning MobyGames into the ‘IMDB for games’.

You can listen to the discussions in full via the links at the top. But if you prefer to read, we’ve picked out some of the key facts, stories and quotes below. Enjoy!

Confused Xbox staff ‘living in fear’ after first round of brutal lay-offs

Xbox employees fear they’re next as the company butchers its teams after five years of failure.

Speaking to The Game Business, more than a dozen Xbox marketing and development staff say they were “stunned” by some of the cuts, particularly citing the way the firm had butchered Doom and Quake developer id Software.

“Dear God,” said one senior leader. “If that team wasn’t safe, then who is?”

One leader at id Software told me that if they had known the level of cuts facing the team, they would have tried to explore alternative options, such as a sale of the studio. “Although being independent can be out of the frying pan and into the fire,” he said.

The other staff we spoke to said they were “living in fear” about where the axe might fall next. One studio leader admitted they didn’t know what Xbox expected from them right now, and whether there was anything they could do to avoid job cuts.

Another told us they were finding it hard to focus on the job in front of them with the threat of redundancy looming overhead.

Earlier this week, Xbox announced it would be shedding 3,200 employees over the next 12 months, beginning with 1,600 staff. The worst affected teams include the Xbox platform team, id Software (Doom), ZeniMax Online (Elder Scrolls Online) and Obsidian (Avowed, The Outer Worlds 2). Meanwhile, the firm has divested of the studios Compulsion Games (South of Midnight), Double Fine Productions (Psychonauts), Ninja Theory (Hellblade) and Undead Labs (State of Decay).

The cuts follow multiple years of missed targets and failed games, many of which were commissioned to bolster the Xbox Game Pass subscription service. Game Pass has struggled to reach its initial goals and has seen its audience decline by four million over the past two years.

Game Pass was billed as the ‘Netflix of games’, but even from its early years, third-party publishers were sceptical about the concept. In numerous interviews, including one with me in 2022, Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick said that a subscription service built on new games didn’t make sense for publishers or consumers.

Number of journalists continues to decline as former Eurogamer editors launch new website

More than 250 specialist and over 90 mainstream video game journalists have left the industry this year, according to latest Press Engine data.

Press Engine is the PR tool that developers use to send out press releases and media invites, and it tracks the number of journalists in the industry. The latest data shows:

Despite the results, a number of new media outlets have emerged from established names, ranging from newsletters to podcasts to full websites. This week sees the launch of Respec, a new media outlet by former leaders of Eurogamer and VG247, including Alex Donaldson and Tom Orry.

“One of the things we looked at when starting this website, is that there’s tremendous talent out there,” Donaldson told us on today’s edition of The Game Business Show. Donaldson also runs the specialist publication RPG Site.

“I am not particularly scared about Google AI, because we serve an audience who specifically wants what we think, rather than a chewed up and spat back out version of what we think. It’s been a difficult year for games media, but we’ve seen really strong growth on RPG Site over the last 12 months. One of the things that’s beginning to change over the last 12 months, is that games PR and marketers are starting to realize that you can get more with a placement at a smaller, more dedicated outlet, which also has an audience that can evangelize, than you might get from a brand with the biggest Similarweb number.”

Respec, like RPG Site, looks to target a specific audience and build a dedicated community through a more playful take on industry news and reviews. That will mean the site isn’t too reliant on search traffic, which is where some of the bigger outlets has struggled.

“A good media brand can feel a bit like a club,” continued Donaldson. “If you can build that club, you can survive search apocalypse.”

He added: “That’s a diminishing battlefield, and it costs you a piece of your soul. Absolute rubbish headlines. A headline like ‘Bethesda game has completely shut down’, ‘Assassin’s Creed Black Flag Resynced officially confirms popular feature’. It works for Google Discover, but it just disrespects the intelligence of the reader and it makes your website look crap.”

Check out our full chat with Donaldson in today’s Show above.

Atari wants to build the IMDB of games

Retro games giant Atari wants to turn MobyGames into the‘IMDB of games’.

That’s according to the firm’s new European president Andreas Deptolla. The website, which Atari acquired in 2022, is famous for its detailed list of video game credits, and the firm is now expanding upon that with a Pro service akin to what IMDB provides the TV and movie industries.

“IMDB is the comparison, where people can outline their portfolio and get opportunities in the industry,” Deptolla told The Game Business.

“When we acquired MobyGames, the first thing was all about preservation. So, we looked at how we make the site more usable and improve search and a few other things. We then did a lot of surveys among the current users. And the feedback that we got was like, “Hey, it’s really interesting for me to show others which games I worked on.” Moby is world-class in the credits area, but then also seeing with whom did they work on those games? Who are other industry professionals that they worked with? What is the news about them?

“And then people said, ‘Hey, can I use my Moby credentials for applications for jobs?” And then over time and with all of that feedback, our product team realized there’s a gap in the market. And that led us to build Moby Pro.”

MobyGames will remain reliant on a network of contributors and approvers, although Atari has hired a product manager for the website alongside “a very small but mighty development team.”

And Deptolla feels such a service will prove important in a modern video game industry, with the rise in freelancers and contractors.

“The industry is changing. It’s a lot now about freelance work and smaller gigs. And the question becomes: how can I get recognized? How can I find opportunities? And how can I showcase my portfolio and the value that I’ve created? That’s the foundation. Now, if you can use Moby as a way to network into the next [job], because you know you’ve worked with a couple of people in the past… that’s essentially a nice add.”

There’s more from Deptolla and Atari Europe in today’s The Game Business Show.

Meanwhile…

• Project Fantasy – the multiplayer RPG made by James Bond and Hitman studio IO Interactive – has been returned to the developer. The game was being funded and published by Xbox. IO has the capability to publish the game itself, but losing that funding means it has had to close its Istanbul studio. The company said: “we had to find a new balance for the long-term future of the studio, focused on the success of our main internal core titles instead of external projects and potential mobile game derivatives’. IO told us in May it would be returning to its Hitman series next after finishing development of the acclaimed 007: First Light. It’s still not clear if the team will work on more James Bond games beyond its current DLC plans.

• Nintendo is discontinuing the original Nintendo Switch in Europe. This is likely due to new EU legislation that requires devices have easily replaceable batteries. The Switch 2 is getting a redesign to comply with the new rule.

• Sticking with Nintendo, Mario Kart Tour will shut down in September. Sensor Tower data says the game was downloaded 300 million times and generated $261 million.

• Elsewhere in mobile, Scopely has rebranded the Niantic games team, which is responsible for Pokémon Go, Pikmin Bloom, and Monster Hunter Now. The developer will now be called Scopely Explore. Scopely bought Niantic for $3.5 billion last year.

• Cyberpunk 2077 has now sold 40 million copies worldwide.

• Meccha Chameleon has now hit 15 million sales, less than a week after reaching ten million. The hide and seek indie game was released in June.

That’s it from us today. Join us next week when we’ll be talking to Netflix’s Sean Krankel. Meanwhile, paid subscribers can look forward to our next market report and TGB Micro, where we’ll look more at Sony’s decision to abandon the disc.

Until then, thank you for reading.