• 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.”

Sponsor Message

Game Development, built to scale

Keywords Studios is the games industry’s end-to-end partner, with over 13,000 people across 26 countries helping studios build, launch and grow games at global scale. Supercharged by technology and shaped by long-term partnership, Keywords Studios connects specialist expertise around the player experience.

For game development, that means flexible production support that scales with ambition. From co-development and engineering to live operations and technical delivery, Keywords Studios helps teams move faster, solve complexity and keep production connected, without losing sight of the game players are waiting for.

‘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.

Sponsor Message

Wehype – Empowering Games and Creators to Grow Together

Wehype is the cutting-edge creator marketing platform for games and leaders in the industry for 10 years. Our platform covers everything from building and executing strategic campaigns, support-a-creator programs, community rewards, data and intelligence, ongoing live service support, sentiment analysis and more. We’ve powered campaigns for the largest games and publishers in the world, supporting partners such as EA, Supercell, IO Interactive and ArenaNet throughout the entire game lifecycle - including mass-scale launches activating tens of thousands of content creators annually.

Beyond launches, we solve the hard problems: keeping creators engaged, preventing creator migration, and enabling creator commerce: turning creator content into direct game and in-game sales. We don’t just get creators to play your game; we give them reasons to stay and reward them long-term.

Whether planning your next launch or looking to grow your live service through creators, make sure to grab a chat with the Wehype team. Get in touch at partnerships@wehype.com or meet us at Gamescom.

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.

Read more

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.

Subscribe now

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.

Read more

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.

Read more

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.

• Making games on a budget

• Sticking with licensed IP

• Turok, Hellraiser, Road Kings and Stuntman

• Industry optimism

I couldn’t escape Saber Interactive at Summer Game Fest.

The firm was there showcasing and announcing games such as Stuntman Hollywood, Turok Origins, Clive Barker’s Hellraiser: Revival and a classic collection of remastered Hitman games.

It sounds like a lot, but it’s just a slice of the games Saber is working on. There’s also a Star Wars remake, a Jurassic Park title, a John Wick project, a game based on Avatar: The Last Airbender and Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 3.

“We’re big,” says Chief Creative Officer Tim Willits. “We have 3,500 employees. I don’t know if this is actually true, but I like to say it, we have more licensed products in development than any developer in the world.”

I’ve wanted to talk to Saber for a while. It’s an interesting company. It works on an eclectic bunch of licences, from major brands to forgotten classics, to trucking simulators. But it’s also built a reputation for making good games at a reasonable cost. Six months before Clair Obscur became the template on how to make AAA-like games on non-AAA budgets, Saber had already shown the way with Warhammer 40:000: Space Marine 2.

“We’re very good at making sure that we scope our projects to focus on the fun and to focus on what really needs to happen,” Willits says. “I play these other games, and I can see these virtual dollars flying out of the screen, and I can see how much money they spend on the dumbest stuff, and I’m like, ‘Oh, God, that’s expensive.’

“We also have a culture that allows all of our employees to work on the titles where they’re most needed. There are big development studios where teams get siloed. They’re like, ‘I’m Team A, and I only work on this game.’ And you have these North American developers with 200 employees working on one title. That’s not going to work. Because everyone knows you don’t need all 200 people in the very beginning and at the very. So, you need to work on other projects. You need to expand. That’s one thing that we’re very good at.

“And then we also are very smart when it comes to where we do our development. We find super talented people in places that are honestly a little more affordable. But we have experience grabbing resources where we need them, moving people where they are most useful, and the employees love it. People can work on everything from John Wick to SnowRunner to Space Marine 3. So, it’s really been a culture and a philosophy and a business direction that has made us successful.”

It’s an agile approach to making video games, which is quite remarkable when you consider the number of developers.

“Sometimes I feel like the guy spinning the plates,” Willits admits. “And I’m spinning it up and then I see one starting to wobble and I run over. That’s kind-of how we work. We’re a little crazy, but we seem to pull it off. We find the right leads that have the right vision and passion for a project, and then we give them the time they need. Sometimes we get games done really fast, sometimes it takes a little longer. So be it. But we focus on what’s really important. We focus on the quality experience.

“And we’re not afraid to take risks. We’ve had huge success with small games. I mean, look at MudRunner and SnowRunner. SnowRunner was literally made by a handful of people, and it has made hundreds of millions of dollars. And then you have Space Marine 2, which is a huge AAA game. I know how much that game costs, and I know how much other games have cost that have been made by big AAA teams, and we can just do it smarter.”

At Summer Game Fest, it was showing three very different games: Stuntman, Turok and Hellraiser. But what would Willits say is a ‘Saber game’?

“We have that conversation internally all the time. There really is not a Saber style. Yes, we do great with action games. We do great with mature content. We do great with IPs. But look at [our simulation] games like SnowRunner, RoadCraft, Road Kings, we’ve had success there, too. We do Saber them up a little bit. Like in our Road Kings game, you can be a hero and there’s some natural disasters that you can drive your truck through… but it’s still a trucking simulator. So, we have a little DNA flavor, but we don’t have just one type of game.”

I must confess that one other reason I was eager to talk to Saber is because of Turok Origins. Turok was a series of dinosaur shooter games from the late 1990s and early 2000s published by Acclaim, and based on a comic book franchise. I am a fan of the original N64 games, and I’m excited to see it come back.

Nevertheless, I also found it surprising. The last proper Turok game came out in 2008, and there’s not really been a successful Turok since 1998.

“We had an idea for a video game,” Willits said plainly. “Our game director had a vision. And we have a good relationship with [IP holder] Universal, so we’re like: ‘Maybe we can build a Turok game with this idea?’”

Willits knows there will be some original Turok players that will be interested, and he expects that will bring a younger group into the IP, too. In fact, a lot of Saber’s games skew older, whether that’s with IP like Hellraiser, or remastering classic Hitman games. He says he thinks there’s an opportunity for Saber to bridge “the generational gap” with these legacy franchises.

But licensed games are no guarantee of success. In fact, in recent times, we’ve seen titles based on Indiana Jones, Avatar and even Star Wars fail to meet expectations. Nevertheless, Saber remains committed to these licensed experiences.

“It’s just something that we’ve done well,” Willits says. “We have a good reputation. And with a licensed game, it does help open the door. Let’s talk about Hellraiser. If we wanted to make a survival horror game and it was our own IP, it would be more of an uphill battle. But people have heard of Hellraiser. People have heard of Space Marine, and Space Marine 2 was a huge success. World War Z, a great book, okay movie, and a super good video game. We’ve had over 30 million people in World War Z. I don’t know this for a fact, but I’m pretty sure that the reason Paramount is looking into making another [World War Z] movie is because of the success of the video game. They have told us that it was one of their most successful licensed properties in their history. That just goes to show you the power of a really good video game.

“The IP can open the door, but the game has got to be great to get people through it.”

Saber is building a reputation as a strong developer. There are fans of Saber games. So, could there be a time where licensed games are scaled back in favour of original Saber properties?

“Not necessarily,” Willits answers. “We have some great brands that belong to us. Toxic Commandos is us, Road Kings is us, RoadCraft, SnowRunner… we have a number of our own IPs. But we’ve done so well with licensed IPs. We have great relationships with everyone. We work with Lionsgate, we work with Universal, we work with Paramount. And that’s going to continue.”

Saber is certainly in-demand, and Willits says that a lot of that comes down to the success of Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 2. In fact, that game has “literally changed everything,” he tells us.

“It not only changed the way that the team looks at making games, it changed how people look at us. I’ve seen this in my career, when you have a huge hit, when you go to make the next game, everything has to be awesome. It’s like, “This has got to be the most awesome toaster ever.” And it fuels success. And because we have a reputation of really doing well with licensed IPs, every major license holder wants to make a video game. It’s just the way it is. Everybody. So, we are in a very fortunate position to turn down more than we can accept. I can’t say the name, but… you know you’re successful when you’ve turned down those guys. It’s really nice to be in that position.”

It sounds like Saber might need to expand further.

“We are still open to growth,” Willits continues. “We’re still open to acquisitions. We’re still open to organic growth. We want to be smart, of course. We have some great partners. We don’t want to do anything foolish. We just need to be measured. We need to take the opportunities where we have them. And again, if you’re the popular one in the room, you’ll always be turning people down. It’s a good position to be in.”

When we spoke to Willits last month, he was clearly excited, and it was hard not to be during Summer Game Fest. There were so many promising games being shown to press and public alike. In the weeks since then, the industry has gone through a miserable period of cuts and price rises. SGF feels like a lifetime ago.

So, I’ll finish today’s newsletter with a reminder of some of that optimism.

“I do believe this is a good time for video games,” Willits concludes. “It’s been difficult for some people, but if you look at the showcases, and you look at some of the announcements, there’s really great products.

“And creative people will always find a way to make something amazing, and those games will be found, and people will enjoy them. The video game industry has been up and down. I’ve been around forever. You’ve been around forever. And really great entertainment will always win out.”

That’s it for today. We’ll be back on Thursday with our latest news analysis, plus a chat with a brand new video games website. Until then, thank you for reading.

Double Fine Productions (Keeper) and Compulsion Games (South of Midnight) will return to independence. Both studios have been given runway funding by Microsoft to help begin their next projects while they seek additional financing. These studios will retain all their IP and their back catalogue.

Developers Ninja Theory (Hellblade) and Undead Labs (State of Decay) have higher financial requirements and have found new owners. However, the deals have not yet closed. The new owners will get the IP and the back catalogue. Both studios have games out next year (Senua and State of Decay 3).

Meanwhile, Arkane Lyon (Dishonored) will today enter the same process as the studios above. Microsoft hopes it can avoid closure for this team, too.

In terms of the 3,200 planned redundancies, these cuts will take place across the whole Xbox business, including other first-party developers. Some studios will barely see any cuts, while others will see much larger reductions. Microsoft didn’t detail which studios will be the worse affected.

One area that will be hit hard is the Xbox platform team, which covers hardware, software services, xCloud and Game Pass. Xbox hopes these cuts will simplify the business and allow it move faster.

The lay-offs will begin with around 1,600 cuts as of today, with an additional 1,600 expected by the end of Microsoft’s 2027 financial year (June 30, 2027). This number includes the divested studios.

On the studios front, Xbox will be shifting from its previous decentralized studio model to a more centralized approach focused around its big franchises. Mojang (Minecraft) and King (Candy Crush) will now report directly to Xbox CEO Asha Sharma.

Xbox has also announced the appointment of a Chief Operating Officer in Helen Chiang, who previously ran the Minecraft business. Meanwhile, corporate vice president of Xbox product services Dave McCarthy is retiring after 17 years with Xbox.

Sharma wrote that she wants Xbox to reach one billion players daily. The company currently reaches 500 million a month.

“These changes are about a bigger future for Xbox, not a smaller one,” Sharma said. “The next decade of gaming will be larger, more global, and more creative than anything we’ve seen before. This year, we’ll invest as much in Xbox as we ever have, but we’ll invest with greater focus, greater discipline, and greater clarity, all in service of making Xbox where the world plays and creates.”

Everything You Need To Know About The Changes at Xbox

No studios are being closed today. Double Fine (Keeper, Kiln, Psychonauts) and Compulsion (We Happy Few, South of Midnight) are becoming independent once again. Meanwhile, Ninja Theory (Hellblade) and Undead Labs (State of Decay) are being acquired by a currently unnamed parties. Microsoft has entered terms with these new owners, but the deals have not yet closed.

All four studios will retain their IP and their catalogue (plus future revenue from that catalogue). Double Fine and Compulsion are even receiving some runway funding from Xbox.

Arkane Lyon (Dishonored, Deathloop) will start the same process as the other four studios as of today. Xbox hopes for a similar favourable outcome.

Yes. In total, Xbox plans to make around 3,200 redundancies as a result of this restructure. This begins with 1,600 job cuts today, with the rest coming over the next 12 months. Most studios will be affected by the cuts, although some more than others. No further details of impacted teams were shared.

Xbox will also be cutting significantly from its platform business, which oversees console, xCloud, the Xbox Store, Game Pass and more.

The 3,200 job cuts include the 350 employees of the four studios that are leaving the Xbox business.

Ninja Theory announced its next Hellblade game, Senua, last month during the Xbox Showcase. It is scheduled for release in 2027 and has achieved over 100,000 Steam wishlists since its reveal (GameDiscover data). Undead Labs showcased State of Decay 3 at the same event. That game has nearly 930,000 wishlists (it’s had a Steam store page since June 2024) and is also due next year. Both projects are expected to be completed.

Arkane Lyon is working on the upcoming Marvel’s Blade game.

Xbox says all of its announced projects remain in development.

Xbox’s accountability margin (similar to a profit margin) is just 3%. And despite spending $20 billion on making games over five years, annual revenue has declined by half a billion dollars in that time (excluding Activision Blizzard King). Put simply, Xbox has seen revenue, profits and players decline over the past half a decade, despite all its investment. The company needed to make changes.

The Xbox strategy over the past five years has focused on growing Game Pass (the Netflix-like subscription service), and building a strong business on PC and mobile (plus streaming). This strategy has not met expectations, and it’s this strategy that many of the studios were acquired for.

“To grow, we bet on Game Pass, multi-platform, and a broader portfolio of content. While those businesses have created meaningful value, they did not grow at the pace we expected,” says CEO Asha Sharma. “As that happened, our core business weakened, and we added more teams, more investment, and more time, hoping for a better outcome. And now the industry is facing the most severe hardware crisis in its history. We must reset Xbox.”

In addition, Xbox’s investment in smaller studios and indie games has come at a time where that market has expanded significantly, with a number of new competitors. Xbox has decided not to compete against these companies, and that it will instead support smaller teams in a publishing capacity.

“We now find ourselves competing not only with the largest publishers, but also with smaller independent studios,” Sharma added. “It is neither possible nor desirable to own every great independent studio. We have also learned that we are not the best home for every type of studio; in a typical year, we lost 64 cents for every dollar we invested.”

Xbox has invested heavily in its platform team over the last six years, across Game Pass, xCloud, console, PC and other areas. Since the start of the pandemic, this division has seen its headcount rise 40%. However, despite this investment, the number of players on Xbox platforms has declined.

Xbox CEO Asha Sharma has prioritized speed for its platform business, and believes the team needs to be closer to both developers and gamers. As a result, the company is reducing the number of managerial layers within this part of the organization. Previously, work would pass through 14 layers of management. Xbox says it will reduce management layers to no more than five, and where possible, three.

The hope is this will lead to a faster and more reactive platform team.

Yes, Mojang (Minecraft) and King (Candy Crush) will now report directly to Xbox CEO Asha Sharma. The company is also moving away from its decentralized model, where the studios operated largely autonomously, to one that is more centrally integrated. Xbox had previously adopted a ‘limited integration’ approach to the studios it had acquired, which was something that worked well with Mojang.

Actually, no. Xbox says it will spend as much on content this coming year as it did the previous year. The company feels that it has spread itself too thin, and needs to focus on its franchises that it believes have been underfunded and malnourished. This includes some famous IP, such as Halo, Gears of War and Fallout.

The company is prioritizing its biggest franchises. However, it is still developing new concepts, which includes the upcoming Clockwork Revolution. These new ideas will be more ambitious in scope compared with some of the smaller indie-like experiences that it’s produced in the past.

Over a four-year period, Xbox spent nearly $100 billion acquiring studios, and they were acquired for a strategy that hasn’t delivered. What’s more, some of the bigger game bets failed to meet expectations.

But there are also wider industry trends and challenges, which has seen video game growth stagnate.

Following the COVID-19 pandemic, video game spending and engagement fell as people were no-longer locked down. But it wasn’t all because of this. There’s been a sharp rise in the number of games being released (over 21,000 on Steam last year), while big online games like Roblox have become entrenched, dominating playtime (and by extension, revenue). Furthermore, other entertainment sectors such as TV streaming (Netflix) and short form video (TikTok) have taken a larger share of people’s time.

Meanwhile, the cost of making games has increased significantly, and for Western game companies, there’s been increasing competition from developers in Japan, China and South Korea.

Xbox CEO Asha Sharma says there are one billion people who play Xbox games or use Xbox services every year, or 500 million every month. The aim is to get that to one billion players daily.

Xbox has a number of big challenges. Component costs for its consoles have risen substantially. By the end of this year, the cost of storage will have increased five-fold compared with two years ago, while memory prices are broadly similar. As a result, the company has raised the price of its hardware three times over the past 18 months (PlayStation, Nintendo and other hardware rivals have also had to raise prices).

Its Game Pass user base tumbled after a significant price increase in October last year. Things have stabilized and improved since a price reduction in May, but Xbox says the subscription service is in need of a rethink.

Meanwhile, outside of May’s Forza Horizon 6, it’s not delivered many breakout software hits. Last year’s Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 didn’t deliver the sales results of previous games, and it was outsold by rival Battlefield 6. It’s the first time Battlefield has outsold Call of Duty in its history.

Xbox hopes that by focusing in, it can overcome these challenges and deliver growth in 2027. But games take a long time to develop, and it will be some time before we will see if this plan is going to work.

That’s it for today’s The Game Business Newsletter. Join us back here tomorrow for our interview with Saber Interactive COO Tim Willits.

It’s likely to be a tough week for the industry with news of job cuts set to take place this week. We will, of course, be across it. And we hope for the best for everyone involved.

Today, we are not talking about that. Instead, we will dive into the Stop Killing Games campaign, which is the consumer battle over the right to play premium online games after they’ve been discontinued.

Plus, Amazon hires a publishing veteran, and IO Interactive seeks a new partner for Project Fantasy.

Let’s dive in.

Publishers score another win against popular game protection campaign

In Brief: A US bill designed to stop premium online games being shut down and made unplayable in the future, has failed to pass a senate vote. The Protect Our Games Act, which was proposed by California Assemblyman Chris Ward, had made it through the California State Assembly, but has fallen at the next hurdle. The consumer campaign Stop Killing Games has vowed to try again with more funding.

Read more

In This Edition,

• Xbox leaders unsure about direction

• Is PlayStation right to kill discs?

• Ben Kvalo on the future of publishing

Hello, and welcome back to The Game Business.

It’s been a nightmare couple of weeks for the console business. Prices rises, job cuts, the death of discs… it’s hard to be optimistic in the face of such unrelenting, unpopular decisions. And it’s not even over.

But it’s important to keep a level head. The price rises are frightening, but there are smart people trying to solve the issue. The job cuts are heartbreaking, this is a dark time, but the industry is shifting (I hope) to a more sustainable future. The journey to that future is clearly paved with misery, but we have to believe we can get there. There are signs, if you look for them, that we will.

In today’s Show and Newsletter, we discuss how people at Xbox are feeling about these imminent changes. Plus, analyse PlayStation’s decision to end disc production. And on the Show, we are joined by Midwest CEO Ben Kvalo, who has a vision for where the business is heading that I find hopeful.

Enjoy!

As huge cuts loom, Xbox is divided over its future

“They’ve done it backwards.”

I had a cup of tea with one of the most senior PR leaders in video games just a week ago and we discussed these imminent cuts coming from Xbox.

“You start with the bad news, take a pause, then you give people the good stuff,” they said.

Sharma’s first 100 days felt successful. The scepticism that greeted her appointment was rapidly turned around by a series of fan-pleasing announcements. There were small things like changing the logo and altering the company name, and more significant shifts, such as cutting the price of Game Pass and making some first-party games console exclusive. To Xbox’s (let’s call them enthusiastic) fans, Sharma was the second-coming.

Throw in the critical and commercial success of Forza Horizon 6, and there was strong positivity around Xbox for the first time in years, both outside and inside the organization. One Xbox manager told me at the time: “Asha has really brought hope back to Xbox.”

Today, the mood is different. Xbox is looking to reallocate where it spends money. The company wants to invest in its big franchises, and to do that, it needs to cut from elsewhere. Studios such as Compulsion, Ninja Theory, Double Fine, Undead Labs and others are deep in negotiation with Microsoft to avoid closure. The impact of this will likely reverberate across the business.

There is frustration, and even division, within the Xbox ranks. Sharma has brought in a start-up mentality into Xbox. Speed is a priority. Teams that are used to weeks of meticulous planning (and countless meetings) are being asked to turn things around in days, even hours (the price rise announcement last week was pushed out earlier than planned after Apple announced its price increases earlier in the day). It is reactive and gets the business moving. But it can also feel messy and chaotic. And not all of leadership is behind every call. This is particularly true on the development side, where certain studio heads feel Sharma is listening too much to the consultants, and not enough to the people building the games.

What’s more, Sharma’s love of speed is going to run head-on into the time it takes to build hit games. You can adapt business models and distribution strategies quickly, but you can’t just rush out an industry-defining Elder Scrolls. Whatever plan gets put in place by Sharma’s new leadership team will take years to deliver.

That studio frustration comes partially from the belief that things had been improving. The teams were getting stronger game-by-game. And if we take the Xbox Game Studios business for a moment (which is the division most under threat) it actually delivered a broadly decent year. There’s a real sense amongst some teams that they’re being punished for the poor performance of Call of Duty.

That is the reality. Even if Obsidian had delivered an incredible year, even if The Outer Worlds 2 and Avowed had performed five times the numbers that they did, it wouldn’t have offset the drop on Call of Duty. A game like that, and Candy Crush, and Minecraft, and Warcraft, make a lot of Xbox’s output seem almost insignificant.

That’s why some people think getting rid of studios like Double Fine is a pointless exercise. “If they think they can take that budget, stick it on Halo, and suddenly turn it into a 95 Metacritic smash hit, they’re delusional,” said one development expert who was asked to advise the business.

But, of course, it’s not just about budget. As one other Xbox leader told me: “We’re spread across too many projects, platforms and business models. We need to focus.”

Xbox says it’s pushing back towards the console (alongside PC and mobile). ‘The return of Xbox’, they call it. And they’re putting more resources behind its biggest brands. That’s the focus. It’s what they know, after all.

But this is where opinion is split. Numerous people I’ve spoken to at Xbox feel there’s too much “listening to Twitter”. With the component crisis and the overall market decline in console players, why is Xbox choosing to reinvest in hardware? The people I spoke to have low expectations that the newly exclusive Gears of War is going to have any real impact on Xbox Series S and X sales. They also point out Xbox has tried to rejuvenate Halo and Gears in the past, and tried to develop a mega game in Perfect Dark, too. What will be different this time?

“We’re chasing a declining market with franchises that are past their prime,” said one studio boss.

Growing those big brands is more about who they bring in and the leadership they have, rather than the money they can spend. Can Xbox attract the talent that can turn Halo into a world beater once again? That’s the objective.

I suspect there will be dissent whatever route Xbox chose to go down. There are those that are happy it’s gone back to a console-first approach, and there are those that feel the third-party publisher route was the right one (a plan they’d all bought into two years ago). The question is what does the leadership of Microsoft want out of Xbox? I asked another Xbox studio boss how he felt about the decisions, and he simply shrugged and said: “After Activision, this is Amy [Hood] and Satya [Nadella]’s Xbox now.”

Of course, emotions are high. Sharma said the current Xbox couldn’t continue as it was. Change was needed. And that change was inevitably going to let some people down. Xbox had told its studios it was behind them. It promised they could build what they were passionate about and they’d support it. It told them there were different to all those other tech companies.

But as Sharma says: “The plan’s the plan until it’s not the plan”.

And that’s not the plan anymore.

Update: Obsidian was listed as a company in negotiation with Xbox over potential closure. This was incorrect.

Do people even buy PlayStation discs?

PlayStation made the surprise announcement this week that it will stop manufacturing PlayStation discs in January 2028. That’s not just for first-party games, but for all titles being released on PlayStation consoles.

Fans have taken to social media in dismay. There are those concerned about game preservation, there are collectors who lament the pivot to downloading, and there are those that like to share and sell their games after finishing them.

But outside of the social media noise, do people actually buy physical PS5 games?

There’s no hiding the fact that the physical market has declined significantly. For the 12 months ending May 2009, physical disc-based games generated $11.5 billion in the US (Circana data). For the 12-months ending May 2026, that number is just $1.6 billion. Digital is now dominant, although it varies by platform.

However, $1.6 billion is still a lot of money. And actually, that represents a 3% rise over the previous 12-month period.

For the first six months of this year, over one million physical PS5 games have been sold in the UK (Nielsen IQ data). That’s a drop of over 5% compared with the year before. But again, that’s still a lot of games.

To dive into a specific example, 007: First Light sold just over one million units in its first three weeks in Europe, and nearly 230,000 of those games were sold in a physical box. 78% of the game’s sales were sold via digital stores, but that 22% still represents a large number of players.

Of course, if people can’t buy physical, many will just buy digital. And we can expect that digital/physical split to become even more pronounced by the time January 2028 is here. Nevertheless, there is a risk of losing some customers by dropping the disc.

Now, PlayStation says it will continue to provide choice for players over where they can buy games, including from traditional retailers. This might involve the ‘code-in-a-box’ option that Grand Theft Auto 6 has adopted.

This is important for PlayStation to do. The firm is facing multiple class action lawsuits in the UK, Netherlands, Portugal and Australia over whether the PlayStation Store is a monopoly. The lawsuits argue that PlayStation is able to charge an ‘excessive’ 30% fee on games sold via its store because of a lack of competition. PlayStation argues that there are many alternative options for players.

Ultimately, for more than one reason, it’ll prove important for PlayStation to continue engaging with other retailers as we look ahead to the PlayStation 6.

Why flexible publishing might be the future of video games

On today’s edition of The Game Business Show, we welcomed Ben Kvalo, the CEO of Midwest Games.

During our chat we discussed where the future of the business is heading, and somewhat in relation to the new of Xbox cutting studios.

Kvalo discussed how it’s becoming harder for the big companies to justify the smaller and mid-sized projects, particularly if they need to increase focus on their more important brands that might be struggling.

“Understanding the ecosystem you’re operating within is such a huge key to understanding where you rank on things, and what needs to succeed for you to be able to continue to do what you’re doing,” he says.

Kvalo says we’re seeing the rise of a new middle in video games, mid-sized publishers who can fund mid-sized (or AA) games. But a challenge for a lot of these businesses is the inability to react when something big happens. Because these companies are often publishing multiple titles, it’s not easy to quickly pivot if something suddenly breaks out. This is also true of AAA and indie publishers, particularly as it’s hard to judge how well a game is going to do ahead of release.

Kvalo spent nearly five years at Netflix, and he believes the game industry can learn from how the streaming giant handles surprise hits.

“We couldn’t really build a lot of hype for a Netflix film. It was really tough. A lot of the marketing had to be the really quick ramp-up and in the moment, and then very reactive. And in order to build a reactive system, you have to be flexible in everything that you do,” he says. “We were putting out over 100 films a year, so the scale was just massive. We had to build a flexible system that took bets, but then also reacted when something else blew up.

“[In games] you might take 20 bets as a portfolio, as a traditional publisher, you have to put your resources towards what’s showing is going to likely be the biggest hit. Except you never know what might blow up, and you don’t necessarily create flexible systems to be able to quickly support that thing that’s a surprise. Whereas we did at Netflix. Something like Bird Box, which has been seen by over a billion people at this point, we reacted in the moment. Of course, we took a lot of bets. It was Sandra Bullock. But it was a medium level title. It was not the biggest priority, but then we reacted.”

Kvalo feels that a more modular approach to publishing, with external teams that can be scaled up and down when needed, will allow for more risk taking. This is something mid-sized companies need to do.

He observed that increasingly we’re seeing these smaller companies working on big licensed IP, which was previously something only large AAA publishers would handle.

“If you look at the higher end, it’s really tough to justify one of the giants doing a big IP play, considering the amount it’s going to cost them, and they aren’t going to own the long-term value of that IP,” he says.

“Whereas the middle can play in that space, can experiment in that space, can do something a bit edgy, which we know is what the audience wants right now. They want something that is a big IP they know, but in a very different way, and the middle can do that. And you’re seeing it.

“Fireshine has been killing it from the middle publishing level. Hooded Horse has been killing it. That is a really interesting space. Now, the ones that are succeeding are very disciplined in how they operate, they have good structures in place, and they’re smart about everything they’re doing, and they’re not over-scaling how they’re building their operation.”

Check out the full conversation on today’s The Game Business Show.

That’s it from us today! Please join us next week for more big interviews and insight. Until next time, thank you for reading.

• Discovering games

• Building Crash Bandicoot

• Trying to save THQ

• Life at Meta

Since launching The Game Business, we’ve spoken to numerous legends and veterans from the industry’s past.

We’ve chatted to Peter Moore (twice), Reggie Fils-Aime, and even covered the history of PlayStation’s European launch with the likes of Jim Ryan and Chris Deering. We love hearing about the industry’s history as much as we enjoy predicting where it’s all going.

But we’ve not done one like this before. On stage at The Game Business Live, we told the story of Jason Rubin, the man who co-founded Naughty Dog, who tried to save THQ, and then attempted to establish virtual reality at Oculus and Meta. And we did it with the help of a few other industry legends and friends.

We think it’s a pretty special session, filled with fascinating stories and insight. It’s one of those editions of The Game Business where I really recommend listening or watching the full Show. There’s only so much we can squeeze into a newsletter.

If you enjoy this, please let us know. It was a big undertaking, but we loved putting it together and we’d really like to do some more.

So, please check out the video or podcast above. Alternatively, here are some stories I didn’t know about Jason Rubin, from getting his first computer and abandoning Crash Bandicoot, to working with the South Park creators and Mark Zuckerberg.

Enjoy.

In 1977, Jason Rubin saw Star Wars and his world changed.

“My friends were smacking each other with sticks,” remembers Rubin. “They wanted to be Luke Skywalker. I was seven, and I was like, ‘I want to be Lucas.’ It touched me. Lucas did the thing that I wanted to do, which was put people in another world and make them go ‘Wow.’”

Rubin’s parents didn’t give in to his request for a movie camera, but he eventually convinced them to buy a computer.

“They bought me a computer at 13 when that was two and a half months of my father’s salary. And that was the last computer my father ever bought because every computer subsequently, up until the time we sold Naughty Dog, was bought based on the success of my work on that computer,” Rubin says.

“So, my parents created this opportunity, and it wasn’t a cheap, low-risk thing for them to do. At the same time, they subsequently started taking away the monitor cables from me as a punishment because they thought that could get me to clean my room or do whatever. And the whole time it was like, ‘This game thing is neat, but you’re going to be a lawyer, right?’ So, fundamentally my parents gave me the opportunity to sit on this stage today, and at the same time tried to take it away from me.”

Andy Gavin and Jason Rubin began making games under the name JAM Software. The two released a number of games for the boutique publisher Baudville, before signing with EA. And it was EA that informed them that the name JAM Software had been taken. So a new company identity was needed.

“Jason was drawing this comic in like maybe 1985 of this dog character,” recalls Naughty Dog co-founder Andy Gavin. “It was like a teenage dog party animal cartoon character that he named Naughty Dog. And we’re like, ‘Oh, why don’t we just use that for the game company? It’s a great name.’”

After a brief hiatus following a frustrating end to their partnership with EA, Rubin and Gavin were coaxed back to games by former EA leaders Trip Hawkins and Bing Gordon, who were now launching a new game console called 3DO.

With Mortal Kombat and Street Fighter proving popular on Nintendo and Sega, Naughty Dog wanted to make 3DO’s answer to those games, so started building Way of the Warrior.

“We funded it ourselves,” Rubin says. “At one point during Way of the Warrior, the light bulb went out in my room. I had moved to Boston, where Andy was in MIT, and it was this expensive $15 bulb, so I lived in darkness in my room for the next six months. We were broke.”

But they soon wouldn’t be. 3DO wanted to publish the game, but so did a famous Hollywood studio: Universal.

As part of the deal with Universal, Naughty Dog was able to set-up offices within the Universal Studios lot, alongside sister developer Insomniac.

Over the course of five games, Naughty Dog would generate big money for Universal, particularly with Crash Bandicoot.

“We were the second highest grossing product in the entire 1997 Universal slate after Jurassic Park 2,” says Gavin. “And we had cost $2.7 million, of which Sony had prepaid them $5 million. So the ROI was like infinite.”

But Universal didn’t really appreciate games. The firm moved Naughty Dog into an office that Andy called “awkward.” He says: “It didn’t even have enough power. We had to buy extension cords and run them and plug in under the lawyers’ desks and draw power back from other circuits in the building just to keep our section running.”

Rubin didn’t hold back.

“The relationship with Universal was abysmal. To give you an idea, at one point, one of the people there put a target that he had gone and shot with real bullets on the wall, went to Andy and said, ‘Your partner ought to look at this. I’m not a bad shot’ about something. Andy didn’t mention that most of our desks were in a hallway. At night, on the 34th floor, the heat would rise, but they turned the AC off at 6pm. Our normal hours ended at 4am. That was the Crash Bandicoot hours. So, by 4am on a summer day on the 34th floor, it was over 100 degrees in the building, and I’m not exaggerating. I know that because our servers would shut down at about 105. They wouldn’t let us bring in air conditioning on our own. So, we had to bring in ice and a fan to keep Crash Team Racing going.”

Rubin says that Universal offered nothing outside of the Crash IP.

“[After producer Mark Cerny left] There was no value we were getting,” he says. “They were openly hostile to us.”

He said he recently took his daughter to Universal CityWalk, and saw all the Sonic and Mario merchandise, plus the fact there’s a Mario area within the Universal theme park.

“We built Crash 500 yards from that point, and they are now borrowing the other IP, when Crash was bigger than both for five years running,” Rubin says. “Had the relationship worked out better, there might be a Crash Ride at Universal. But they just didn’t see it.”

One famous moment in the history of Jason Rubin was his Tara Reid talk at DICE.

The talk centered on the treatment of game developers, and how they were being pushed aside by publishers. He cited stories around developers not being invited to their own company’s parties (where celebrities like Tara Reid were given VIP treatment), or even having their names on the screen at events.

During the talk, he showed two planes. He said one is full of the industry’s marketers, and the other is full of the game makers. If the marketing plane goes down, the industry would move ahead with minimal impact. If the development plane crashed, it would set the industry back decades.

Suffice to say, PlayStation was not happy.

“I’m very passionate. And I say things that sometimes are stronger worded than the intention, and that was one of the cases where I probably should have looked into the language,” says Rubin.

“There was a moment where there was a wrestling match, and the question was, ‘Were developers going to have any place at the table?’ And to give you an example, there were companies that were sending people to DICE and GDC, who were not allowing the people’s names to be put on the screens as they were speaking. They didn’t want the people to be the power.”

He continues: “I was not suggesting that anyone should be harmed in any way. It is that the talent making the games is the value here, in the same way that it is in film and in music. It’s not that distribution isn’t important, it’s not that the hardware isn’t important. What is easily quotable as me wanting to harm the marketing department… it was absolutely never that.”

After Naughty Dog, Jason Rubin worked on a number of start-ups before taking up the challenge of trying to save troubled game publisher THQ.

It proved an impossible mission, but it wasn’t without its fun moments. Rubin naturally threw himself into supporting the studios. This involved having regular meetings with South Park’s Matt Stone and Trey Parker, who were working with THQ and developer Obsidian on the RPG South Park: The Stick of Truth.

“We were in one of these meetings and Trey was really quiet,” recalls Kathleen Nicholls, who ran production at THQ. “We went through all of our administrative things, and then he goes, ‘I had this great idea. We’re totally redoing the fight mechanic. We’re going to change it all, and it’s going to be a fart mechanic.’ Almost every meeting, it was like, ‘I had this great idea, and I’m going to completely blow up the schedule.’”

Rubin recalls talking to Stone and Parker about the game’s script.

“It had been in the works for two years at this point. I asked, ‘how long do you think this game will be?’ It was pretty linear. They said, ‘about 20 hours’. ‘Okay, best I can tell you, you have nine minutes.’ And there was just silence in the room. Matt is a mathematician by training. He did the math on that, and he’s like, ‘Oh, boy.’

“I’m like, ‘how many scripts worth is this to get to the full thing?’ ‘It’s [the equivalent of] two and a half seasons.’ ‘Okay, I’ll give you a month and a half to write that. Because I can’t take this any longer. THQ doesn’t have the money.’ ‘Well, we’re doing this Book of Mormon thing right now. You’re seeing them actually rehearse behind us as we’re talking.’ ‘Yeah, I get that. You got a month and a half.’

“They did it.”

Rubin and Insomniac founder Ted Price are firm friends. There was some professional rivalry (Insomniac made Spyro The Dragon and Ratchet & Clank, while Naughty Dog had Crash Bandicoot and Jak and Daxter), but in truth they were very close.

“On the court, competitors to the end. Off the court, best friends,” Rubin said.

In 2014, Insomniac released Sunset Overdrive for Xbox. It was well received, but sales were low and Xbox didn’t commission a sequel. The studio was in trouble, and Price got on the phone to Rubin, who had joined Oculus and Meta.

“I said, ‘Hey, Jason, we’ve been talking about virtual reality down here. We now have a fairly large team that is ready to move on to something different. What do you think?’ Jason flew down, I think it might’ve been the next day, to hear pitches that we had for the Oculus platform. He was fantastic. And because of our long relationship, there was a lot of mutual trust there, and he said, ‘Let’s go for it.’ The Oculus games, working with Jason, was crucial to our survival within the industry and our later success.”

Jason Rubin spent 11 years at Oculus and Meta trying to drive forward the VR business. He would frequently put together presentations and work with Meta boss Mark Zuckerberg on what the future of VR, and the metaverse, might look like.

Meta has since pivoted away from virtual reality. But Rubin feels that Zuckerberg’s vision for where things are heading is correct.

“I love Mark. I loved working at Meta,” Rubin says. “I loved the people there. I left because I didn’t feel that what they were working at the time was interesting to me.

“When I read the press saying the metaverse failed… Whoa, whoa, whoa. Look at Matthew Ball and what he said about Roblox, and what Roblox is doing to the business. Roblox is a metaverse. Mark was right about the metaverse. Was he right about VR as part of the metaverse? That one is a little bigger stretch.

“If you look at this as a social media company, my daughter is not that interested right now in texting. She texts her friends, but it’s mostly to get into Roblox. My 12-year-old is not that interested in Instagram. She’s not that interested in video. And if you think of where that’s going, Roblox is going to be a greater and greater percentage of their future. So as a social media company looking at that, I think he got it all right. Where we failed was the actual implementation.”

Gavin and Rubin began making games together when they were barely teenagers. For decades, they were side-by-side building a studio, before working on other start-ups. Gavin described their relationship as “like brothers”, while fellow collaborate Jason Kay said: “They are like Scotty and Kirk.”

But it didn’t last forever. Ultimately, Gavin didn’t join Rubin at THQ or Meta.

“I’m 56 and I’m at the point where I’m starting to say, ‘Do I have regrets in life?’” concludes Rubin. “One regret I have is I didn’t spend more time with more companies with Andy. There have been periods I haven’t, and I should have.”

That’s it for today’s edition of The Game Business. Do check out the full interview above if you have time. We’ll be back with more big legend interviews, including a chat with ‘the father of PlayStation’ Ken Kutaragi, later in the year. Until next time, thank you for reading.

Welcome to The Game Business Micro. This newsletter is usually only for paying subscribers of TGB. But for this week, we’re making it free for all. If you like it, and want to get this every week, why not consider subscribing?

Subscribe now

This week, it’s more troubling news. Just a few short weeks ago, during the height of Summer Game Fest, things looked - dare I say - positive. Ever since, we’ve had massive cuts at Ubisoft, the warning of big job losses at Xbox, a major reduction at Bungie, plus eye-watering prices for the Steam Machine and Xbox Series hardware.

It’s been a rough start to the summer.

This week, we dive into two of those stories – the cuts at Bungie, and the price rise of Xbox consoles. Plus, we round-up the rest of the news. Let’s take a look.

PlayStation lays off ‘most’ of the Destiny team at Bungie

In Brief: PlayStation is laying off ‘most’ of the Destiny team and some of the Marathon team at its big live-service studio Bungie. The developer said in a statement: “We recognize Destiny 2 fell short of expectations these past several years. Following our final content update to Destiny 2, and with our future projects still in early incubation, we unfortunately could not continue operating at our previous size.”

What You Need To Know:

• Around 292 roles have been cut, according to a filling at the Washington State Employment Security Department.

• There have been numerous redundancies at Bungie since PlayStation bought the company for $3.6 billion in 2022, with more than 700 jobs cut or moved.

• Bungie studio head Justin Truman is stepping down as a result of the latest news.

• It all follows the end to major updates for Destiny 2. Bungie released the Monument of Triumph expansion on June 9, ending its full support for the shooter.

• Bungie released its latest game, Marathon, in March. The extraction shooter peaked at around two million players in March (Ampere data), but that has fallen to just over 800,000 in May. However, the fan reception has been strong, and Bungie is now fully focused on trying to drive success for this game.

• As a point of comparison, PlayStation’s other big live service bet, Helldivers 2, had 3.7 million players in May (Ampere).

Xbox hikes console prices again as component misery continues

In Brief: The price of Xbox Series S and X is increasing by $100 for 512GB models and $150 for 1TB models. The 2TB model will be discontinued.

What You Need To Know:

• The price increases begin from August 1.

• The cheapest Series X 1TB model without a disc drive will retail for $749.99, while the disc-drive model will set players back $799.99. The 512GB Series S model now costs $499.99, with the 1TB model priced at $599.99.

• Xbox expects memory shortages to continue for at least two years.

• Xbox consoles rose in price twice last year. The Xbox Series X (with a disc-drive) now costs $300 more than it did at launch in 2020.

• Xbox has added new programs to help make its consoles more affordable, including Buy Now, Pay Later options through Microsoft Stores, and interest-free financing for up to 12 months via Amazon.

• Xbox is also leaning into pre-owned, supporting retailers by offering deals on second hand Xbox consoles

• Back in March, PlayStation significantly raised the price of PS5, while Nintendo increased Switch 2 prices (comparatively slightly) in May.

Meanwhile…

• US game revenue reached $3.8 billion in May 2026, increasing 1% compared to a year ago, reports Circana. Year-to-date game spending remained 3% ahead of 2025 at $20.4 billion.

  
  007 First Light was the No,1 game by revenue in May, and is already the fourth best-seller of the year. Launch month revenue for 007 First Light was the highest for a James Bond video game in the franchise’s history.

  
  Forza Horizon 6 was the second best-selling game of May, followed by LEGO Batman: Legacy of the Dark Knight and Subnautica 2.

  
  Hardware revenue is up 38% over May last year, driven by Nintendo Switch 2. We’re now through the first year of Nintendo Switch 2, so expect year-on-year comparisons to be weaker from now on in. PS5 revenue in May was down 43% over the year before. In fact, PlayStation unit sales had its worst May since May 2000, while Xbox unit sales had its worst May ever.

• Nintendo’s new development building has been delayed again. The new office covers 49,305 square metres across ten floors and is designed to be the new hub for software and hardware R&D. It was initially planned to be finished by the end of 2027, but it was delayed until 2028 due to an increased scope. The building is now expected to be ready by March 2029. The whole project will cost $748 million.

• GTA 6 has a slightly higher price tag compared to other AAA games. It will cost $79.99 for the standard edition and $99.99 for the ultimate edition. The physical copy of the game won’t include a disc.

• Italian studio 34BigThings has spun out of Embracer Group. The company’s co-founder Valerio Di Donata has bought 100% of the studio’s stock.

• Kadokawa Corporation CEO Takeshi Natsuno has retained his position after an activist investor group tried to force him out due to the performance of developer FromSoftware. He held his position at the AGM, but his support dropped from 90% to just under 60%. Hong Kong-based activist investor group Oasis Management had pushed to have Natsuno-san replaced because it felt that the firm should have done more to capitalise on the success of Elden Ring. There’s already been an Elden Ring spin-off, a major Elden Ring expansion, while an Elden Ring movie is in production, so we’re not entirely sure what more they expected.

• There’s a new $50 million video game investment fund that targets ‘auteurs’. The Denmu fund will support AAA, AA, indie, free-to-play, PC, console and mobile games, but it’s specifically looking for ‘visionary game makers’. The funds organizers are also connected with the Chinese and Japanese games markets. The fund has already backed various titles, with a plan to invest in between 10 and 20 titles over the next two years.

• Atari’s MobyGames has launched a LinkedIn rival, where industry professionals can create profiles that record their career progress and achievements. There will also be personalized job listings, insight and tracking.

• One of the co-founders of French games giant, Ubisoft, Claude Guillemot, has been killed in a plane crash, aged 69.

That’s it for today. Join us back here tomorrow with our bumper interview with Jason Rubin, which we conducted at The Game Business Live. The Crash Bandicoot director and Naughty Dog co-founder looks back at his career, with a bunch of special guest appearances. Until then, thank you for reading.

In This Edition,

• Could we see console shortages this Christmas?

• Why is a Russian propaganda game on Steam?

• Fighting misogyny and racism in games

• Plus, a new $50m games fund emerges

Hello! It’s a bumper edition of The Game Business today.

We have some concerns from a major retailer around console stock this Holiday. Plus, we hear all about a new $50 million games fund aimed at ‘visionary creators’.

But our big chat on the Show today is with George Osborn, who is the author of the new book Power Play: Video Games, Politics and the Battle for Global Influence. He joins us to discuss his findings around Saudi Arabia, China, Russia and more.

You should check out the full chat above. But if you can’t, I’ve picked a couple of stories from the conversation, including one about a Russian propaganda game that is freely available worldwide on Steam, and what game companies can do to fight misogyny and racism in game communities.

Here we go.

Major retailer warns of console shortages ahead of GTA 6 launch

A major games retailer has warned that there won’t be enough consoles to meet demand over the Holiday period.

Game shops are expecting a surge in interest around PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series S and X when Grand Theft Auto 6 launches on November 19.

But a senior games buyer, speaking without the permission of his employer, told us: “We’ve been informed that because of the on-going issues around hardware component availability, we won’t be getting the units we want ahead of GTA.” He added: “Demand will likely outstrip supply during the year end period.”

We’ve contacted PlayStation and Xbox about the claim. Sony CEO Hiroki Totoki told investors in May that “for calendar year 2026, the necessary volume has been secured”

However, Xbox Chief Strategy Officer Matthew Ball told The Game Business earlier in the month that there are already supply issues.

“I can tell you definitively demand for our console exceeds the supply,” he told us. “We are putting them in as many stores as possible. We are producing them as quickly as possible. There is a severe limitation to how quickly we can do that, but it’s not a question of appetite. We need to do more, but there are constraints here. And so there are, unfortunately, a number of different markets in which we do not have supply. There are other markets in which we have inadequate supply. That is a privilege as a company it is a challenge for us to figure out.”

When we asked about the potential impact of Grand Theft Auto 6, he said: “It’s going to invigorate a lot of players. It’s going to move some additional devices.”

Rockstar announced this week that Grand Theft Auto 6 will come in two versions, a Standard version for $79.99 and an Ultimate Edition at $99.99. The game’s price is around $10 higher than other AAA games. The physical edition of the title does not include a disc at launch.

Why this Russian war propaganda video game is still on Steam

In today’s episode of The Game Business Show, we are joined be George Osborn, the author of Power Play: Video Games, Politics and the Battle for Global Influence.

The book launched earlier in the month, and discusses how certain Governments and groups – including Russia, China, Saudi Arabia and the alt-right – are using video games to control and influence people both within their countries and outside of it.

It’s a fascinating read, and one segment of the book focuses on the game Squad 22: ZOV, which has been made in partnership with the Russian armed forces. The game is a tactical shooter that highlights Russian narratives around the war in Ukraine. And it’s largely viewed as a piece of Russia propaganda.

However, it’s only been banned in Germany and Ukraine.

“Squad 22: ZOV directly promotes Russian narratives around the Ukraine war,” Osborn explained. “It is also officially used as a training manual for youth cadets in Russia to help them understand the basics of conflict. It contains very prominent pro-Russian propaganda. But one of the things I found out by speaking to a lot of officials, is that one of Russia’s big understandings around its information operations is how to stay within the rules within democracies. So, it has learnt how to intervene and interfere and disrupt the information landscape within democracies, which makes it hard for people to fight back.

“For example, the state department, when it was taking foreign disinformation a bit more seriously, essentially you had to prove that certain parts of the Russian state was directly funding or sponsoring an act for it to be essentially upgraded from something you suspect of being an information campaign, to something you can publicly identify as doing so. Russia learned extensively how you flush money through proxies.”

In the book, Osborn is critical of Steam’s involvement, or lack of involvement, in moderating content that he describes as “disinformation tools.”

“Steam is basically unmoderated,” he said. “It has incredibly low moderation standards. If you release games into there, you have global reach on your content, and if you go to the Steam page for Squad 22: ZOV, you see on the forums a full-blown propaganda war is going on underneath it. Ukrainians and Russians fighting over their perspectives, and the war more generally. The only reason it’s been banned in certain places is due to specific elements of Russian iconography, specifically the Z-symbol that has been painted prominently on the side of Russian tanks. In Germany and Ukraine it’s classified as a hate symbol, and therefore, it’s banned in those places.

“Steam knows this is a propagandistic piece, they know that it’s created by the Russian Government, they’ve had plenty of interactions with the Russian Government because they’ve got a strong relationship with Roskomnadzor, the country’s censorship agency. So, if they are willing to work with the Russian state to send content in Russia to keep Steam online, I think they should probably take Russian propaganda off its stores internationally if it wants to demonstrate it’s a responsible business.”

The Premier League is the template to follow in the fight against misogyny and racism

One of the topics in Osborn’s book looks at the rise of bad actors weaponizing video games on social and political issues.

On the Show, we discussed the apparent rise of misogyny and racism within video game communities. And in discussing what can be done to combat it, Osborn pointed to English football.

“In the 1980s, football culture looked like it was just football hooligans,” he said. “Violent men who were nihilists, who wanted to find reasons to fight one another. It wasn’t until the Hillsborough disaster, when 97 people who innocently went to a football match, were killed as a result of a major crush, which was exacerbated by policing incompetencies who treated everyone there as a violent hooligan.

“It wasn’t until that happened, that we emerged with this mixture of some regulation, but also evoking a lot of the standards that clubs wanted to live. We don’t want this to be a place for violent young men to go and beat the living daylights out of each other, we want to bring women into stadiums, we want the full racial mix of the UK into our communities, and we want them to feel welcome, safe and included. And the result has been the Premier League has become the biggest league in the world, the most commercially successful, the best attended, and now we’re starting to see a similar thing on the Women’s side.

“So, what do we do about it [in games]? Not tolerating things like misogyny, racism… it’s central to setting the standard across our communities. It says we don’t want it to be dominated by loud, noisy voices who have maybe either been weaponized, or are trying to weaponize our spaces for their own ends. We want to say what standards we want to follow. And we want to appeal to as many players as possible.

“Ultimately, making that decision about whether you want to run that bar where the windows are smashed in and the regulars are glowering in the corner and shouting at people, or do you want to run the bar that’s popular because it’s clean, and it’s welcoming, and the community is friendly and the staff are helping you out with things, and when something goes wrong, they notice it and report it to the right people. This might just seem like a wider safety thing, but it’s also about protecting our wider values, too.”

For the full chat with Osborn, check out today’s edition of The Game Business Show.

A new $50m games fund says finding money ‘brutally hard’

There’s a new $50 million video game investment fund that targets ‘auteurs’.

The Denmu fund will support AAA, AA, indie, free-to-play, PC, console and mobile games, but it’s specifically looking for ‘visionary game makers’.

The funds organizers are also connected with the Chinese and Japanese games markets, and are hoping to bridge the gaps between Western and Eastern companies and audiences.

But it’s been a challenge securing the money for the fund.

“It was brutally hard,” said general partner Michael Fan.

“We started it at the worst time possible: most major funds in video games wanted to get out of video games. Everyone wanted to talk about AI, defence, pharma, or robotics, and we just wanted to talk about video games. And not only that, we want to invest in PC/console premium games. Or indie games. We talked about looking for iconic games when everyone only wanted to invest in big genres and big categories. When we discussed having the artists at the center, everyone was talking about how to replace humans with machines and automation. And when we first talked about our thesis regarding the emergence of the Chinese premium game market, or the renaissance of the Japanese game industry, a few years ago, and connecting those scenes with the West, very few people were interested in East Asian premium games and looked at other regions.

“Nothing in our presentation was trendy.”

General partner Ryan You added: “Games are one of the defining cultural forms of this era and the largest entertainment market in the world. So, when capital rushed out of games and into AI, we saw a mispricing. Being contrarian isn’t the point, but being contrarian on something this large and enduring, with the right thesis and the right structure to capture it, is.”

Although Denum is about supporting auteurs, this is still a project-based fund. The firm is investing in games, rather than taking equity in studios.

“Equity sits at the bottom of the capital stack,” explains You. “It’s the residual claim, last to get paid, unsecured, carrying the full downside and long-term investment horizon. To compensate for that, equity has to price in a very high return. And because a fund ultimately has to exit through M&A or IPO, only a consistently fast-growing company gets it there. So, equity structurally forces the company onto a growth treadmill: chase the next big thing, make bigger and riskier bets, keep the growth rate up.

“The brutal part is that even a second hit at the same scale doesn’t grow the company. So, a studio can ship a great, profitable game and still be a failure by that math. That’s also why so many gaming companies, large and small, chase live-service: it’s one of the few models in gaming that can deliver the sustainable growth equity demands… but with a much lower hit rate. Some studios do compound organically through IP, but that usually plays out beyond even a five-to-ten-year horizon.

“That equity model was theright one when the industry was growing double digits, and it’s still right for startups genuinely chasing the next platform, technology, or distribution innovation. But for the vast majority of game companies the math doesn’t work that way, and we think that growth-at-all-costs, boom-and-bust cycle is a big
part of why the industry is seeing the layoffs it is today even with $200bn+ pie.”

Denmu said it offers developers a ‘meaningful share’ of the revenue from day one, so there’s no waiting for the investor to recoup. The fund will back beyond a single game, and will often take a minority equity, which it will pay for. DENMU will also get involved in the production and release of the game.

It’s already backed games such as The Hundred Line: Last Defense Academy, Blue Protocol: Star Resonance, Bleach: Soul Resonance, Labyrinth of the Demon King, MotorSlice and Silly Polybeast. It’s also backed a AAA title based on a major entertainment IP. Over the next two years, DENMU plans to invest in between 10 and 20 projects.

That’s it for today’s episode! Join us on Monday for the next edition of The Game Business Micro. And then on Tuesday, our final recording from The Game Business Live… our legend interview with Jason Rubin. Until then, thank you for reading.

Listen now on Apple, Spotify or YouTube

In This Edition,
EA’s Laura Miele on…

• Lessons from Command & Conquer

• How single-player games fit EA’s vision

• The story of Skate

• The Battlefield 6 launch, and more

At E3 2018, Electronic Arts announced its first Command & Conquer game in six years.

“There was a team at EA that wanted to create this really cool competitive Command & Conquer mobile game,” recalled EA Enterprise president Laura Miele, who was speaking to us on stage at The Game Business Live earlier this month. Miele began her video game career at Westwood Studios, the original creators of Command & Conquer.

“It was called Command & Conquer Rivals. I thought, ‘Oh gosh, what a great way to bring Command & Conquer to even more people. Given the reach of this platform. This is going to be really great.’ I was pretty excited about it. However, our long-term core fans were not. And they thought, ‘Oh my gosh, you’re taking Command & Conquer, you’re putting it to mobile, and you’re not remastering, or taking care of something.’”

The lesson for EA is that if you are doing something with an IP that might be outside the bounds of what fans want, you have to make sure you’re doing something for them, too.

“It was just such a valuable moment for me,” Miele added. “We didn’t really have permission to stray too far from what that core PC experience was. So, we immediately gathered together some of my friends who had left. Westwood wasn’t around anymore, but they had gathered together as a studio [Petroglyph Games], and I asked them to work on a remaster for us. So, we brought it back to life in a more contemporary way. Even since then, we’ve released open-source code for players to engage in. And then we put the mobile game out.”

“[Fans] have ownership over this. Players walk through our worlds and live our stories, and they become our characters, it’s so personal, and no other medium on the planet has that.”

This is why when Battlefield 6 launched, it was primarily the core Battlefield experience that fans know, and the free-to-play battle royale spin-off Battlefield REDSEC arrived later. The Command & Conquer story also influenced the company’s approach to the new free-to-play Skate.

“We had to make sure we delivered the core Skate mechanic, the cool tricks and the authenticity of being on the board,” Miele said. “That culture is so important. We couldn’t stray from it or we wouldn’t have permission to do something more expansive or broader. We had to nail that, and then we were allowed, in partnership with our players, to expand beyond that.”

Miele was speaking as part of The Game Business Live during Summer Game Fest earlier this month. You can watch the full interview above. Or read some of the key stories from the conversation below.

“Back in 2018, I took over the responsibility of running studios for EA,” Miele began. “It was a pretty big gig.

“Going into E3 that year, I asked our PR team to help me gather some creators and influencers around gaming, so I could talk to them. I always felt like, if we can just stay connected to our players, they’ll be our north, and we won’t stray too far from where we need to go.

“So, we had gathered together about 15 people, and I just remember it so vividly sitting in the conference room. And I said, ‘Okay. I’m the new head of studios for Electronic Arts. What do I need to know? What do you want me to hear?’ And people are going around the room talking about their favorite franchises and games. And this guy was sitting in a corner, and he raised his hand and just said, ‘I just don’t understand why you don’t make games that your fans are asking for?’

“And I looked at him and he said, “We’ve been asking for Skate, we’ve been asking for [EA Sports] College {Football], we’ve been asking for Dead Space.” It just resonated with me so much. We immediately green lit College and Skate and Dead Space.”

EA’s leadership loves to talk about the future. The company will talk about a community-focus and building out creator ecosystems and economies. And when you look at its franchises like EA Sports FC, or Battlefield, or Apex Legends, or The Sims, you can see how they all fit within that vision.

But what about Mass Effect? Or Star Wars Jedi? What about those single-player, story experiences where community, expression and creator economies are not so obvious?

“Maybe not directly obvious, but there’s a lot of culture and social connection that’s created around art and entertainment,” Miele responded. “You can go online and share fan art, speculate about the story, the characters.”

“I started in the industry 30 years ago at Westwood Studios. One of my first roles was to run Westwood Online, and it was such a gift to start my career. We had close to, wait for it, a million players. And we thought we were hot stuff. It was a pretty sizable group. And the reason why it was so valuable and so important, is because I quickly learned that players have the perception that the games we create are as much theirs as it is [ours]. When you understand that, you can create a sense of community around many experiences, whether it’s a multiplayer competitive experience or beautiful stories and characters and lands, where people can share what their experience was. You have to fundamentally understand the dynamics of community and how people come together and socialize. It is something we prioritize.”

Battlefield 6 was a monster project. A huge array of different modes, and built across multiple studios, including DICE, Motive, Criterion and Ripple Effect. It delivered huge success at launch last year and was the best-selling shooter franchise of 2025, ending the reign of Call of Duty.

Since then, the numbers have fallen, but it still attracts millions of monthly players. And Miele says a combination of “unblinking ambition”, fan engagement and strong leadership (including the late shooter veteran Vince Zampella), was behind the game’s blockbuster launch.

“This is a team of elites, and they are best in the world at creating a big shooter game like this,” she explained.

“We all were heading out to Stockholm. This was a couple of years ago. And we were going through the production and check on the execution, game design, player feedback… we were just going to have a big meeting. We’re in the office at DICE, and it was a full day, and we were just going through schedules and looking at the graphics, and everybody was getting really excited. We were supposed to go to dinner that night, but we ended up cancelling it, and we had food brought in so everybody could play builds of the game, because we were pretty giddy.

“It was a little after ten. I was going to go back to the hotel, and I go up to the conference room to grab my bag, and Vince Zampella was asleep on the conference room table. And when I think about the visual image of the passion, how hard people worked, and how excited they were to bring something to life, I just think of Vince being there. We were there all-day playing games, checking in on the teams, spending time with teams, and he was taking a nap on the conference room table.”

Advertisement

As we all know, video games are now a major source of content for film and television companies. From Mario, Fallout and Street Fighter to The Last of Us, Minecraft and Sonic, video game IP is proving immensely valuable to Hollywood.

EA is set to get in on the action, with a movie based on The Sims (by Margot Robbie’s production company), plus reports of a new Battlefield movie (“Wouldn’t that be fun? I’ve heard those rumors, too,” said Miele).

And Miele felt that we’re not yet at the peak of this relationship between the entertainment mediums.

“I’m hopeful that we’re entering into a phase where it goes beyond the bounds of a [licensing arrangement] where we just exchange stories and characters,” Miele said.

“I would love to see us co-create content together. I would love to see us have moments and events where it’s a vertical release of a movie and a game experience and a live service.

“All roads have led to today, and I do believe that we can create content together, to have players interact in linear and have it show up in their online experience. Plus, they can go see competition around it or go experience it in a theme park. We’re in this place where those things can come together more simultaneously. It has felt a little disconnected or disjointed in some cases where a game license is used, a movie or TV series come out, but there’s nothing really going on in the game. We’re in a new place.”

During our conversation with Miele, we talked about the future. For all the buzz of Summer Game Fest, there continues to be waves of redundancies, studio closures and project cancellations. These things have been going on within EA, too.

But despite that backdrop, Miele remains optimistic about where things are headed.

“There are over 100 million new gamers born every year,” she concluded. “That’s pretty amazing. And then the geographic reach is fascinating for growth.

“As Matthew Ball said earlier, there’s just more people playing on more platforms and more places than ever before. And we’re just getting started. We’re not done. Our best days and best years of gaming are ahead of us still. And it’s because of this social, emotional, human, creative expression, competition connection, that exists in our medium.”

That’s it for today. Join us on Thursday where our guest is Power Play author and video game political journalist George Osborne. Until then, thank you for reading.

This week, I discuss Epic’s State of Unreal address, and share some quotes from a recent interview with Kim Hyung-tae, the CEO of Stellar Blade developer Shift Up.

Enjoy!

Epic issues AAA and Roblox warning as it reveals Unreal Engine 6

In Brief: Epic boss Tim Sweeney called on the video game industry to connect together and change how it makes games to counter a future where “Roblox grows and eats gaming”.

During the firm’s State of Unreal Address, he said: “What you have [with Roblox] is a centralized platform that has a single gatekeeper that commoditises everything and takes more than 70% of the revenue generated by 450 million users. That’s a real challenge.”

He talked about how the next generation of gamers are more socially connected, and that modern AAA games are costing too much to make and not generating enough in return.

“We’re going to all need to change the way we build things,” he told the audience. “We’re going to need to build better games. We’re going to need to build them more efficiently. And we’re going to need to design upfront and build for connected games, where all of our player bases are connected socially and our economies are connected, so that players, instead of seeing these as isolated products, see them as part of a global ecosystem that all game developers participate in together.”

What You Need To Know:

• Unreal Engine 6 will allow developers to create games of all sizes and deploy them across Fortnite, traditional game platforms, and their own multi-product ecosystems. It will bring together Epic’s normal Unreal Engine with the Unreal Editor for Fortnite products.

• Epic said that Unreal Engine 6 will allow Fortnite skins (plus other assets) to be used in other UE6 games via a system called Smart Assets.

• Unreal Engine 6 will integrate Claude, Gemini, and others AI tools as ‘creativity and productivity multipliers’. UE6 will also move the gameplay programming model to Verse.

• Unreal Engine 5.8 has added a plugin that will enable developers to connect models like Claude directly into existing Unreal Engine productions.

• UE 5.8, which is expected to be the final Unreal Engine 5 update (but that may change), features a string of new additions, including improvements for games on Nintendo Switch 2.

• Since Epic launched Unreal Editor for Fortnite, the firm has paid out over $1 billion to creators.

• Having already added Star Wars to UEFN (where creators can make their own Star Wars games), The Simpsons is the next IP to be added to the platform.

• Meanwhile, the company reminds us that the Epic Games Store now has more than 6000 games from more than 3000 partners. Player spend on third-party PC games on the store is up 57% in 2025, reaching $400 million.

Read more

• What’s behind the Xbox reset?

• Summer Game Fest media boost

• And meet our new sister publication

Hello there.

We’re fresh from Summer Game Fest. And what a week. There were big blockbusters, excellent looking new IP, shock reveals and surprise announcements. It didn’t just get gamers excited, but us in the industry, too. Video games are back!

Wait, scrap that. Sorry. They’re not again.

Just as Nintendo closed Summer Game Fest with its Zelda teaser, Ubisoft announced nearly 380 job cuts and the closure of multiple studios. And this entire week has been dominated by Xbox’s plans to close or sell-off some of its teams.

Unfortunately, both companies need to focus, and this is what focus can look like.

In today’s The Game Business Show, we dive into the situation at Xbox, we look at some of the positive data coming out of Summer Game Fest, and Lucy James joins us on the Show to discuss her new newsletter, lookingfor.game.

Here we go.

Xbox’s Game Pass miss makes Asha’s reset necessary

What we’re seeing unfold at Xbox this week is an admission it got it very wrong.

Whenever one company buys another, my job is to explain how it fits a strategy. Nintendo bought Dynamo Pictures because it wants to expand its IP outside of games. Sony picked up Bungie because it wants a live-service business. Take-Two acquired Zynga because it wanted a stronger presence in mobile.

You might not agree with the strategy, of course. But from a company perspective, it’s about setting a goal and working out what you need to achieve it.

Where I get concerned is when the acquisitions appear frenzied or reckless. When you have to squint to see how they fit with the overall ambition.

So let’s look at Xbox’s spending spree, which began with numerous acquisitions in 2018, and concluded with Activision Blizzard in 2023.

Xbox bought these companies for a few strategic reasons. The first (and biggest) was about Game Pass. Third-party publishers were not putting new games into the subscription service, so Xbox needed to do it itself. In addition to this, it wanted to establish a mobile business, grow its PC presence and grow game streaming. All of this required games. Lots of them.

Now, I had opinions on this strategy, as regular readers will know. I believed Game Pass had a ceiling on it. It would appeal to hardcore players, but most gamers only play one or two new games a year, so why would they subscribe to a service with hundreds of titles in it?

I wasn’t the only one to question the approach. Even internally at Xbox, there were arguments around Game Pass. I remember speaking to one Bethesda leader just before Starfield launched, who said he felt like “the Joker in The Dark Knight setting fire to all the money”.

But regardless of the opinions, the Xbox leadership team, and Microsoft overall, believed in the plan.

And so, Xbox bought studios. And many of them seemed to fit, at least at the start. Playground Games was responsible for one of the company’s best-selling games in Forza Horizon, so it made sense to bring that in house. It picked up Obsidian and Ninja Theory, two good studios that had the potential to be great ones. Both teams would add strong RPG and action adventure expertise to the business.

I wasn’t quite so convinced by Double Fine and Compulsion. They’re great studios, but I wasn’t sure why Xbox needed to own these teams when they could have just signed the games. Of course, buying things was all the rage at the time.

However, as the acquisitions went on, I found them harder to fully parse. In June 2019 and July 2020, I spoke to former Xbox boss Phil Spencer who, on both occasions, talked about the need for more diverse content. He wanted games that could appeal in China and India. He wanted a Japanese studio. He asked: “Are we just the shooter box? Is it Gears, Halo, Forza, Gears, Halo, Forza?”

But two months later, Xbox acquired Bethesda, which is a publisher that’s famous for RPGs and shooters. This didn’t feel like an additive acquisition. Xbox already made games like these. And now that it owns Elder Scrolls and Fallout, where does that leave Obsidian? Or InXile? Or the new Fable team it was building?

Activision Blizzard King made more sense, because King and Blizzard boosted Xbox’s presence on mobile and PC. But this was still primarily a Western-based maker of RPGs and shooters (albeit ones that do appeal more globally).

Much of what Xbox was buying was just supplanting what it already owned.

As we know, Game Pass never did go beyond the hardcore, and it seems unlikely it will (at least for a while). Xbox hasn’t been able to build a big platform on PC, and it’s not even tried on mobile. Meanwhile, game streaming remains a very small, albeit growing, part of the industry. As a result, Xbox’s margins are tiny. In the words of new CEO Asha Sharma, “it cannot continue”.

Xbox had invested a lot of money in a strategy that hasn’t worked. It’s fighting on too many fronts and has too many games in similar genres. It needs focus. And focus isn’t just about what you do, it’s what you don’t do.

There will be many opinions on whether Sharma is making the right choices. Some think Xbox should become a full third-party publisher, but I’m not convinced that will satisfy the Microsoft leadership.

My take is that focusing on the console, at least for now, makes sense given where Xbox’s strengths are. As Matthew Ball said to us last week: “Do we need to get better at PC? Yes. Do we need to get better at mobile? Yes. But we can’t ask publishers and players to bet on us on other platforms where we are behind, where our technology is inadequate, before we shore up the platform we have.”

I also think investing in the bigger franchises is the right call. Xbox should look at re-establishing Halo and Gears of War as marketing leading franchises. It should try again with Fable. It does have challenges to face around Call of Duty and World of Warcraft and Minecraft. It ought to get more out of Fallout and Elder Scrolls. And there’s opportunity, both inside and outside of games, for IP like Sea of Thieves, Grounded and Ori.

That’s a lot to focus on. So, where does Kiln or Pentiment or South of Midnight or The Outer Worlds fit with all that? There are many games like these coming from independent and third-party teams, does Xbox need to develop them internally?

I am not saying new IP isn’t important. In fact, it’s crucial. But what you want from Xbox is ambitious new IP that speaks to different people. Not similar games speaking to similar demographics.

This focus, this pivot back to console, will mean cuts. It will mean studio closures (or studio sales, which might prove challenging in the current climate). And there is anger about this. This is Xbox’s failure. The studios just did what was asked of them. And it’s a failure many in the industry saw coming.

In 2022, Phil Spencer spoke to the Washington Post, where he expressed concern about tech companies pushing into games. He said: “Nintendo’s not going to do anything that damages gaming in the long run because that’s the business they’re in. Sony is the same and I trust them. … Valve’s the same way.”

He was right to be concerned. Google, Amazon and Meta spent a lot of money, bought up a bunch of studios, and have all pulled away again. Games isn’t their primarily industry. It isn’t an ecosystem they would, or should, care much about. Spencer argued that Microsoft is different. And it is. It’s been part of this industry since the beginning. However, like those other tech giants, it’s also spent too much money on a plan that didn’t work, has had to reverse course, and is causing significant damage in the process.

Sharma and some of her leadership team didn’t start this fire, but they are tasked with putting it out.

I hope the teams it chooses to drop can find a way to stay together. And for those that remain, I hope a more structured and focused organization takes its place. Perhaps Xbox could split the studios into disciplines. So, bring all the shooter teams under one division, the RPGs under another, family games under another… see if Call of Duty and Halo can support each other. See if Bethesda boss Todd Howard can support the launch of Fable. I am not sure how realistic that is, but it’s not too dissimilar to what Ubisoft is doing with its restructure. Or even how EA is set-up.

There are a few out there sharing the words of former Xbox leader Seamus Blackley, who suggested Asha Sharma was tasked with being “a palliative care doctor who slides Xbox gently into the night.”

But I don’t believe this is the end of Xbox. In fact, I think this is part of that ‘return’ it keeps going on about. It’s just that return requires more than just a new logo and a couple of exclusive games. It’s also about admitting it got it wrong, shifting course and actually playing the market it is in today, and not just the one it expects to come in the future.

And ,unfortunately, doing that is going to cost a heavy price.

Summer Game Fest 2026 delivered 30% more website traffic than 2025

The Summer Game Fest period delivered a strong boost to online video games media.

Multiple publications, including VGC, RPG Site, plus large outlets who weren’t able to go on-the-record, said they saw a 30%+ improvement in traffic for the Summer Game Fest period compared with the year before.

The results weren’t driven by any one announcement, either, with publishers citing the Zelda: Ocarina of Time remake, God of War Laufey, the Gears of War Xbox exclusivity announcement, Resident Evil Veronica, Kingdom Hearts 4 and even Spyro The Dragon as key traffic drivers.

“All the showcases delivered for us,” said one large media publisher. “It was clearly the strongest summer event since E3.”

Data specialist LevelUp tracked 168 game announcements during Summer Game Fest 2026, which was a 14% increase over the year before. This increase was boosted by the Nintendo Direct, which didn’t take place in 2025.

LevelUp said that for the two-week period between June 1 and June 14, there were 56,900 press articles written about those games, which represents a 15.2% increase on 2025. In terms of social posts, there was a 5.3% increase to 45,800. And in terms of social interactions, it was a big 57% jump to 17.4 million.

LevelUp tracked all references to the 168 games. Although for existing titles that had a new update announced, the firm only tracked references to that specific update (such as the new season for Street Fighter 6, or the DLC for Hitman).

George Corner joins The Game Business

We’re delighted to welcome George Corner to The Game Business as our new Commercial Director.

George just spent almost five years leading sales for GamesIndustry.biz. In his new role, he’ll be leading and delivering the strategy around sponsorships, subscriptions and some of our event partnerships, which include Summer Game Fest, GDC and Gamescom.

He can be found at george@thegamebusiness.com.

Meanwhile…

• Electronic Arts is launching EA Advertising, a new platform that allows brands to market directly to consumers via gameplay. This includes branded content, ads in digital billboards and overlays, and more involved partnerships. For example, Mountain Dew has its own playable team in EA Sports College Football 25 with a custom stadium, mascot and reward ecosystem.

• Epic Games offered more details about Unreal Engine 6. The new engine will enable developers to make games of any size and be able to easily release them via traditional platforms, Fortnite, or their own ecosystems. It will move to the Verse gameplay programming model and incorporate AI models such as Clause and Gemini.

• Xbox has announced its presence at Gamescom 2026, including the chance to play the new Gears of War: E-Day. Meanwhile, Gamescom Dev has announced that Amir Satvat, Tencent business development director and the founder of the industry career support network ASGC, will be its keynote speaker.

• The UK Government will ban social media for under 16s in Spring 2027. Platforms facing the ban included X, TikTok, YouTube, Snapchat, Instagram and Facebook, and could encompass the likes of Twitch. But video games are seen as distinct from this, a decision that was well received by UK trade body UKIE.

• Focus Entertainment has signed Bradley the Badger, the new IP from Day 4 Night. The studio was formed by the creators of Ubisoft’s Mario + Rabbids games.

• Liz Prince, the head of UK recruitment specialist Amiqus, has been awarded an MBE in the King’s Birthday Honours list for services to the Games Industry and Diversity.

• Treyarch studio head Mark Gordon is stepping down from his role, after 22 years at the developer.

That’s it for us today. We’ll be back next week with our big interview with EA’s Laura Miele. Until then, thank you for reading.