Welcome back to another edition of The Game Business Micro.

Things are a lot busier this week, and one company that made a lot of noise (and is starting to dominate our Micros a bit) is Xbox, which detailed the beginnings of a strategy in a memo to staff this week, alongside making changes to its Game Pass offering.

Elsewhere, Circana reveals some pretty good US sales figures and the Warner Bros and Paramount deal overcomes its first hurdle.

And a reminder to all paid subscribers to The Game Business: You can come to our Live event as part of your subscription. The event will feature on-stage interviews with EA’s Laura Miele, games legend Jason Rubin and leading analyst Matthew Ball. But you do have to register. You can’t just turn up with a subscription, because we won’t have the room. You can sign-up below.

Let’s go.

Xbox charms fans and shows its thinking

In Brief: Microsoft Gaming will now be called Xbox going forward. The company has set ‘daily active players’ as its ‘new North Star’. In addition, it’s set out its ambitions around hardware, content, experience and services.

The firm’s Asha Sharma and Mat Booty wrote in a memo: “Xbox will be where the world plays and creates. We will build a global platform that connects players and creators everywhere. Console is at the foundation, delivering a premium experience, and cloud brings that experience to any device. You can play where you want, and your games, progress, friends, and identity stay with you across console, PC, mobile, and cloud.

“Xbox will be built to be affordable, personal, and open. We will offer flexible pricing so it’s easy to get started and keep playing. The experience will adapt to you, letting you customize how you play, helping you find what you’ll love, and connecting you with the right people. And we will be open to all creators, from individuals to the largest studios, giving anyone the tools to reach a global audience and keep their games growing over time.”

What You Need To Know:

• Microsoft Gaming was established in January 2022 following the acquisition of Activision Blizzard.

• In the memo, Xbox admitted that players are frustrated, its PC presence isn’t strong enough, pricing is hard for people to keep up with, and search, discovery and social have become too fragmented.

• It also said that a new generation of players are coming online with different expectations, and that half of the game industry’s revenue is outside of Xbox’s core Western markets.

• In terms of hardware, it wants to stabilize its current generation of consoles, deliver Project Helix as a device that plays PC and console games, and lead in high-performance accessories.

• In terms of content, it will grow its popular brands, evolve third-party partnerships, expand into China and other mobile-first markets, maintain and grow its live games, and boost ‘creator-centric platforms’ such as Minecraft, Elder Scrolls and Sea of Thieves (I’ve asked what they mean by ‘creator centric platforms’).

• In terms of experiences, the company wants to make Xbox the best place for developers to make games, and will overhaul discovery, customization, social and personalization.

• And in terms of services, it will fortify Game Pass with ‘clear differentiation’ and make cloud play ‘feel native, fast and reliable’. It may use M&A to accelerate slow growth areas in the services segment.

• Xbox also said it will re-evaluate its approach to “exclusivity, windowing, and AI”, which is generating lots of conversation online.

• Earlier in the week, Xbox reduced the price of the Game Pass Ultimate subscription service by over 23%, going from $29.99 to $22.99 a month. It also reduced PC Game Pass from $16.49 to $13.99 a month. As a result, future Call of Duty games won’t be included in either service when they launch, and will now arrive in the service around a year later.

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In This Edition,
- The troubled story of Samson
- We discover a cool card game for developers
- Plus, an abundance of news stories

Hello! And welcome back to The Game Business.

It’s a busy week for news. We’ve had Xbox price cuts, BAFTA winners (and losers), new game divisions, new title announcements, big sales numbers, more job cuts… a real mix. So, lots to go through.

Our guest is Christofer Sundberg. He is the head of Liquid Swords, the developer of Samson. The GTA-like game had a tough journey to launch, and its release has been marred by bugs and flaws. Sundberg tells us his story, and what to expect from the console launch in September.

Plus, I discovered a cool new card game aimed at video game studios.

You can watch all of this above, or read the key bits in the article below.

Enjoy!

Troubled Samson is being fixed and coming to PS5 and Xbox in September

GTA-style action game Samson will come to PS5 and Xbox in September, developer Liquid Swords told The Game Business.

The game launched earlier this month on PC, and has faced criticism for an abundance of bugs. The game’s current Steam rating is ‘mixed’.

“The launch has gone a bit so-so,” said Christofer Sundberg, founder and chief creative officer at Liquid Swords.

“The game suffered from way too many bugs and a lack of polish. We’re correcting it almost daily now. The reception is starting to become more positive. For us, it was just a must to get the game out. But any game released in this day and age is a success.”

Sundberg is a video game development veteran. He co-founded and was creative director at Avalanche, the developer behind Just Cause. He sold the company in 2018 and formed Liquid Swords in 2020. At that time, the studio had little trouble attracting investment, with NetEase backing the firm. But when it sought publisher funding in 2024 and 2025, the market had become more challenging.

“The publisher climate was terrible,” he explained. “We were quite far on in a number of discussions, but we felt that we couldn’t trust this game to be picked up. So, we decided to self-publish. We had quite a large budget ask as well.

“We had to adapt to the current state of the business. That led to lowering the ambition and cutting away at the meatier RPG aspect that we had.”

The firm also had to lower costs. The company had 96 staff working on the game, including contractors, and that dropped to just over 40 in February 2025.

“That was terrible,” Sundberg said. “Those were our friends, coworkers and great developers.”

With limited financial runway, Samson had to launch when it did. It was now a shorter, AA experience, and it wasn’t in a ready state.

“We’ve never pretended to be any bigger and better than we are,” Sundberg said. “We’ve been quite honest. It’s hard not to read all the comments. But what is heartwarming is that so many wanted it to be much bigger. They almost thought we were lying when we’ve been repeatedly saying, ‘this game is a bit rough around the edges. It’s not a 100-hour experience.’ But it’s almost like, ‘yeah, yeah, yeah. You keep on saying that. We know that it will be a new Just Cause in the end’.”

Liquid Swords is currently fixing those bugs on PC. And it’s also gearing up to release Samson on consoles.

“We are releasing new updates and patches weekly. It will be what most expected it to be. And we are releasing it on console in September. By that time, I don’t think we will have many new features, but we’ll definitely work on polishing.”

He added: “The plan from the very beginning was to deliver on PC and console simultaneously, but for financial reasons we couldn’t. We didn’t have the bandwidth. But now the game is out, we do. And the game is already running on consoles. It just needs to be optimized, and then we have to go through the submission”

The firm is targeting PS5 and Xbox, with no plans for a Nintendo Switch 2 version.

“It’s so graphics heavy that it wouldn’t run very well on Switch 2 without some serious compromises on the graphics side,” he told us.

Crucially, the console version will arrive before Grand Theft Auto 6 in November.

“I don’t see GTA as a competitor, it’s like a phenomenon,” said Sundberg. “Everything in entertainment competes with it. The next Taylor Swift concert competes with GTA. The next big Netflix show. When a GTA releases, it’s just Christmas for everyone. With all that said, there will always be room for games aside from GTA.”

Beyond consoles, the plan is to develop more Samson games. And Sundberg still wants to realize the original vision for the game.

“I see this as a sort of an endurance race,” he explained. “I’m a retired endurance athlete. I’ve approached almost everything I do in this business on the long term, not just trying to make a lot of money and retire.”

“It was great when Notch sold Minecraft to Microsoft. But everyone was just setting the bar at that level, without realizing it was a very unique deal.”

He concluded: “I don’t have any rush or even a desire to sell Liquid Swords to someone. I’d rather see us be successful on our own. We’ve gone through highs and lows. We know what we have in the bank. We’ll just keep on doing the work and focusing, importantly, on significantly improving Samson. And then create stability for the company as well.”

Check out this game leadership card game

I hosted a number of on-stage interviews during London Game Festival last week, and one of those interviews was with Melissa Phillips, the director of Games Leadership.

The company has just developed a new card game called Studio Situations, which is designed to help developers prepare for challenging leadership situations. Players pick a job role, a seniority level, a situation, an incident and a resource, and have to role play the best approach to a specific challenge, which could range from the game being overrun with bugs, the original vision holder leaving, the team suffering burnout and many more. There are more unique ‘wildcard’ situations that can be applied, too.

“Research has shown that if we talk about issues before they happen, you’re more adaptable, you’re more flexible, you’re more resilient… but only if you have plans in place already,” Phillips told me. “This gives you a really safe way, before the pressure is added and you’re in the middle of game making, to find a situation and talk about it. So, if and when it happens, you’re more prepared.”

The Studio Situations card game is available to pre-order now from the Games Leadership website.

Meanwhile…

• According to Circana, March US game revenue is up 8% thanks to strong sales of Crimson Desert, MLB The Show 26, WWE 2K26, Marathon and Pokémon Pokopia. Overall for the quarter, game spending is up 5% to $14.6 billion.
  
  Meanwhile, Video game hardware spending was up 69% in March to $500 million. Switch 2 was the best-selling console for both March and the year-to-date, with PS5 in second place. Nintendo Switch 2 sales remain 12% ahead of Nintendo Switch launch aligned.

• Capcom’s new IP Pragmata has sold over one million copies in two days. The publisher said an early playable demo, plus releasing the game on Switch 2, helped achieve the milestone. It’s the second breakout success for Capcom this year following Resident Evil Requiem, which sold six million copies in less than a month.

• Xbox has reduced the price of Game Pass Ultimate by over 23%, from $29.99 to $22.99 a month. It’s also reduced PC Game Pass from $16.49 to $13.99 a month. As a result, future Call of Duty games won’t be included in either service when they launch. New Call of Duty titles will now arrive in Game Pass roughly a year later.

• Two new games divisions have been launched by large Japanese entertainment companies. First, Hello Kitty creator Sanrio has opened a self-published game brand called Sanrio Games. It plans to release ten games over the next three years. The first is Sanrio Party Land for Nintendo Switch and Switch 2, which arrives in Autumn 2026.

• Second, Toei has established an in-house publishing label called Toei Games. Toei Animation is known for Dragon Ball, One Piece, Sailor Moon and Digimon. Toei Games won’t actually work on those properties, and is instead focused on developing new IP.

• Sticking with Japan, Koei Tecmo has raised its financial forecast for the fiscal year ending March 2026 due to strong sales of Pokémon Pokopia and Nioh 3. The company now expects ordinary profit to increase from $232.2 million to $345.2 million (up 48%). Operating profit is now due to rise 16.1% to $225.9 million.

• The Independent Workers’ Union of Great Britain is taking Mindseye developer Build a Rocket Boy to court over alleged data privacy violations. This follows the instillation of Teramind surveillance software onto employee PCs.

• Video game media website Kotaku has hired Rebekah Valentine as its new senior reporter. Valentine is a highly regarded news journalist who joins from IGN. Prior to that, she worked on GamesIndustry.biz (with me). She has also been a guest on The Game Business Show. Kotaku says it’s recently doubled its traffic and is looking to grow again.

• Nintendo has announced that single-player Splatoon spin-off, Splatoon Raiders, will release on July 23. This game has not featured in the Nintendo Direct broadcasts, and has instead been revealed via the Nintendo Today app.

• The Elden Ring movie, directed by Alex Garland, will come out March 3 2028, with production beginning this spring. The cast includes Kit Connor, Ben Whishaw, Tom Burke, Jonathan Pryce, Peter Serafinowicz, Nick Offerman, Ruby Cruz and Cailee Spaeny.

• Iron Galaxy has had to lay off more staff. The studio is behind top remasters and remakes including the Metroid Prime remaster and last year’s Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 3 + 4. The company said on LinkedIn it had hoped the industry would ‘get back to normal’, but has now accepted that the current market conditions are permanent.

• Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 picked up the big prize at the BAFTA video game awards. The RPG won Best Game, Debut Game, and Performer in a Leading Role for Jennifer English. Dispatch also won three awards, including Animation, Audio Achievement, and Performer in a Supporting Role for Jeffrey Wright. Ghost of Yōtei received two awards for Music and Technical Achievement. Other winners included Atomfall, Despelote, South of Midnight, Death Stranding 2: On The Beach, Blue Prince, Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2, No Man’s Sky, Arc Raiders and LEGO Party. Supercell CEO Ilkka Paananen won the fellowship award.

• Sticking with BAFTA. Upcoming indie game The Quiet Things, from BAFTA breakthrough winner Alyx Jones, was supposed to receive a trailer during the awards ceremony last week. However, its appearance was cancelled 24 hours before the event. BAFTA said it felt the trailer might be triggering for some (the game deals with childhood trauma and abuse) and so made the decision not to show it. Jones was “devastated” by the call. The trailer is out now.

• Oh and Apple is getting a new CEO. John Ternus will replace Tim Cook on September 1.

That’s it for today. If you’d love to come see us in person, and are in the LA area in early June, why not come and see us at The Game Business Live? You can find out more here.

Until next time, thank you for reading.

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In This Edition, Poncle’s Matteo Sapio on:
- Vampire Survivors spin-offs and tie-ins
- Opening studios in Japan and Italy
- Working on over 15 projects

During last week’s London Game Festival, I spoke with Matteo Sapio, the chief strategy officer at Vampires Survivors developer Poncle.

We were speaking in front of a live audience, and it was one of the most revealing interviews I’ve done since launching The Game Business. During out chat, Sapio announced:

• That Vampire Survivors has now surpassed 27 million players

• Poncle is opening studios in Japan and Italy

• It has over 15 projects in active development (and even more in earlier stages)

• It is licensing out its engine to other brands and studios to build ‘Survivors’ games based on popular IP

• It has paused its third-party publishing plans

“Vampire Survivors came from a solo developer,” Sapio explains. “It was Luca Galante, who made a game for him and his friends. Vampire Survivors exploded, and in two or three months, it sold more than one million copies. Luca’s yachts are video games. So instead of buying a yacht, he made the Emerald Beyond DLC [for Vampire Survivors] with Square Enix, which we released for free. Things grew organically from there.”

The Poncle strategy

Poncle is working on three types of games.

First, there are spin-offs to Vampire Survivors. This includes the deck-building card battler Vampire Crawlers, which is out this week.

“We [are using] the famous Vampire Survivors IP to experiment in new genres,” Sapio tells us. “We love card games, but we are not very good at card games. They’re complicated. So, we made the game that we wanted to play.”

Second, Poncle is working on original IP. Sapio says the company is currently developing two entirely original properties.

And third, there will be a range of new ‘Survivors’ games based on other IP. These are Vampire Survivors-like games set in other universes. Some will be developed by Poncle, whereas others – such as the upcoming Warhammer Survivors – are in collaboration with other studios.

“A lot of people came to us and said: ‘Let’s do a collaboration with Survivors’,” Sapio begins. “Survivors seems very simple, with simple graphics. But it’s actually quite complicated.

“If we have knowledge of the IP, we will [make the game] ourselves. But a lot of times we don’t. If you have an IP, for example Warhammer 40k, which has decades of story and lore, we don’t want to risk disappointing the fans. So, we made an engine called the Vampire Survivor Engine, which is a kind-of template with all the Vampire Survivor juice inside, and we then we’re giving it to people that we consider the IP guardians.

“We are a fan of Survivors games. Luca has 3,800 hours on Steam in Vampire Survivors. We want to play these games. With Warhammer 40,000, [developer] Auroch is the best guardians of the IP, so we gave the engine to them. We look forward to playing it. Obviously, we are giving them any help they need.”

Poncle has already worked with other IP via DLC for Vampire Survivors. It partnered with Square Enix on the Emerald Beyond DLC, featuring characters from the SaGa series. It’s also teamed-up with Konami to bring Contra and Castlevania to the Vampire Survivors world. And Sapio says that indie developers are proving attractive to IP owners.

“When you have big IPs there is a lot of responsibility, because player expectation is incredible,” Sapio says. “There’s so much money and expectation that it creates tension. But with indies, there’s the possibility to steam off a little bit of this tension. They spend less money, they manage the risk better, and they can even risk a little bit more. And when you have an important IP, indie people will give their life to do their best. And in the end, if the game doesn’t work, you still have ideas and passion. This is something IP stakeholders are taking advantage of.”

But is there really enough room for numerous Survivors titles?

“With Vampire Survivors, it’s been three years,” Sapio answers. “We want to close the game. We try to. We put in adventures, we put in time limits, but people want more. So, we continue to invest in the evolution of the genre.

“There are a lot of Warhammer people that never played Vampire Survivors. Vampire Survivors is big, but it’s still a niche. It’s still indie. We released the trailer for Warhammer Survivors, and we had 300,000 views in two days. There’s a lot of people that don’t know Survivors. That’s why I think there’s an angle, and that’s why [IP owners] want to work with us. But… if it doesn’t work anymore, it’s okay. We had a lot of fun. We made a lot of money.”

Opening new studios

Poncle is expanding as a result of all these games. The developer is based in the UK, but it’s now opening studios in Japan and Italy, too.

“We had interest from Japanese companies,” Sapio says. “They wanted to work with us. And you know, the Japanese like to deal with Japanese companies, in Japanese and with a Japanese contract.

“Then there’s the talent. In Japan, there are some unique views and unique creativity. We found nice talent over there. And maybe we could work with some Japanese IPs. So, we thought it would be efficient to have a base there. That’s why we are expanding. Obviously, we’re based in UK. We’ll be Italy, we’ll be Japan and then we’ll see.”

Sapio says that by opening smaller studios he hopes to maintain Poncle’s indie spirit.

“We are not talking about a gigantic remote studio. We are thinking about it like a federation of studios. Our idea is to have little teams of people - five, 10, 15 - working on different projects. The structure will be, we will have a designer, a bunch of producers, and this little team that’s agile and flexible. That is how we think we will maintain this spirit. Because what is the indie spirit? It is mainly freedom and taking risk with ideas.”

He continues: “We don’t want to be AAA or AA. We’re efficient with costs. We don’t take useless risks. We invest in people. So, with 15 projects, one can fail, one can go good, and you balance that.”

Sapio adds it is working with partner studios, too. For example, Vampire Crawlers is developed in collaboration with Nosebleed Interactive.

A third-party pause

One thing that Poncle isn’t doing is publishing third-party games. It launched its Poncle Presents publishing label and released two games last year (Kill The Brickman and Berserk or Die). But the firm has decided to pause this… for now.

“It was a learning experience,” Sapio admits. “We did publishing because we wanted to give back to the community, and to release games that maybe no-one else was able to release. Berserk or Die is a game that you play [by bashing] a keyboard. It was very strange. We wanted to help. But we found that we weren’t able to give the right support. We didn’t do the best for this game. So, we’ve paused a little bit. At the moment, profit is not a priority. We’re trying to build a community. And we will continue to do publishing in the future.

He adds: “We thought, a little bit naively, that with love and money we would be able to support these projects, but it maybe needs more structure.”

Even without publishing, Poncle has hugely ambitious plans. After three years of Vampire Survivors, 2026 will see numerous new titles, including Vampire Crawlers, Warhammer Survivors and more to be revealed. I ended our on-stage interview with a question I always ask… where does Sapio see Poncle in five years?

“40 projects in parallel development at all times everywhere in the world,” he laughs. “I mentioned before about the federation of studios. If we can have this beautiful machine that is able to have so many projects that can go good and can fail, some are in collaboration, some are for money, maybe some moonshots… that’s what I want to see. We don’t want to do a gigantic studio working on a gigantic game.”

Update: The original story said Poncle was working on 15 games. They’ve clarified that this might include DLC.

That’s it for us today. There are lots of stories, interviews and data coming from The Game Business this week. So, stay tuned to your inboxes. And remember, if you’re in LA at the start of June, why not join us at The Game Business Live?

Until next time, thank you for reading.

Xbox has reduced the price of Game Pass Ultimate by over 23%, from $29.99 to $22.99 a month.

It’s also reduced PC Game Pass from $16.49 to $13.99 a month.

As a result, future Call of Duty games won’t be included in either service when they launch. New Call of Duty titles will now arrive on Game Pass Ultimate and PC Game Pass around a year later. Existing Call of Duty games, including last year’s Black Ops 7, will remain available in the service.

The cuts come six months after Xbox significantly raised the price of Game Pass in October last year. Game Pass Ultimate rose from $19.99 to $29.99, and PC Game Pass increased from $11.99 to $16.49. At the same time, Xbox added the Ubisoft+ Classics Collection and the Fortnite Crew subscription service to Game Pass Ultimate. It also promised to release more than 75 day one games into Ultimate every year.

In a blog post, Xbox acknowledged that there isn’t a single model that suits everyone, but said the changes are a reaction “to a lot of the feedback we’ve gotten so far. We’ll continue to listen and learn”.

It was another pretty quiet week for video game industry news, although there were plenty of headlines coming out of Roblox, and whole lot of discussion points generated by this year’s BAFTA video game awards.

Regular readers will know this Micro is for paying subscribers of The Game Business (unlike our Tuesday and Thursday shows, which are free for all). Now, last week we announced our speakers for The Game Business Live (including EA’s Laura Miele, Naughty Dog co-founder Jason Rubin and leading analyst and Epyllion CEO Matthew Ball). The event takes place in Downtown LA on Monday, June 8, and tickets are available now. Paying TGB subscribers can come for ‘free’ (and by free, I mean as part of your subscription). All you need to do to register is click on the link at the bottom of the email.

That’s it! Let’s take a look at the news.

Roblox makes more changes to strengthen child protection

In Brief: Roblox has added two new age categories in a bid to better protect younger players online. The firm has added the Roblox Kids category, which are for 5 to 8 year-olds. This category prevents use of chat tools and users can only access games labelled ‘minimal’ or ‘mild’. The second category is Roblox Selects, which is for children aged nine to 15. This category features games labelled ‘minimal’, ‘mild’ and ‘moderate’. Chat is available but in ‘default mode’, which allows for text conversations but not voice. It can also be turned on and off by parents.

What You Need To Know:

• Roblox utilizes age checking technology to determine the age of the user, and therefore which age category they fall into.

• Roblox is also adding new parental controls including the ability to block specific games, manage direct chat, and approve games that are not otherwise available to an age bracket.

• Roblox is coming under increased pressure over being a perceived danger for children. Perceived risks include grooming and the exposure to inappropriate user-generated content.

• This week, Roblox paid $12 million to the state of Navada, which was challenging the company over not doing enough to protect young people online.

Read more

Hello! Welcome back to The Game Business.

It’s a busy one this week. We are announcing our speakers for The Game Business Live in Los Angeles, with EA’s Laura Miele, games legend Jason Rubin and leading analyst Matthew Ball taking to the stage on June 8. Tickets are available now (and paid subscribers can come for free). Full details are below.

Our guest this week is UK government minister Ian Murray, who talks about supporting game studios, and the impact of Grand Theft Auto on the British industry. And we dive into the future of Xbox Game Pass following reports that Microsoft is set to cut the price, having only raised it six months ago.

You can watch or listen to it all above, or read the highlights below. Enjoy!

UK minister: It’s not a problem that Grand Theft Auto isn’t UK-owned

Grand Theft Auto being made in the UK has had a huge impact on the local video game industry, says the UK’s Minister of State for Culture, Media and Sport.

Ian Murray was talking to The Game Business to launch a £28.5 million fund for UK developers that want to get new ideas off the ground. And we discussed how 2026 is shaping up to be a banner year for British games, with titles such as Grand Theft Auto 6, Forza Horizon 6, Fable, LEGO Batman: Legacy of the Dark Knight, Star Wars: Galactic Racer and 007: First Light all scheduled for this year.

However, the majority of those games are not UK-owned, with US firms such as Take-Two, Warner Bros and Microsoft in charge. Is this a problem for the UK?

“Only partially,” Murray told us. “I’ve been to Take-Two in Manhattan and all they talk about is that Grand Theft Auto 6 is being built in Scotland, essentially. You gain from the jobs. You gain from the skills. You gain from the economic activity. You gain from the prestige. I suspect when you talk about other titles like Fable and LEGO Batman, I wonder whether they would be as successful or be as made in the UK if Grand Theft Auto wasn’t the title that it is, and people know that it’s made here.

“Yes, you want the IP to stay in the UK. But actually, for us, in terms of the sector plan, the jobs, growth and the skills, having [these games] made here is a big, big part of that.”

Murray said the issue is not exclusive to video games.

“Paddington is owned by a StudioCanal in France. The refugee bear from Peru, that came into Paddington Station and eats marmalade sandwiches, is owned by the French. But a lot of the economic activity around that is benefiting people here in the UK.

“It’s not ideal. We’d obviously prefer the perfect. But let’s not let the perfect get in the way of the economic activity that these games have. Grand Theft Auto 6 will probably be the largest launch of anything this year.”

He added: “It’s always been a difficulty because there’s always an exit strategy. And that exit strategy for the owners, for the creators, is often selling out to one of the bigger companies, of which some, like Take-Two, are not based here. So, yes, it is a challenge, but we shouldn’t look the gift horse in the mouth of being the creators and having the skills to make great games.”

The new £28.5 million fund is part of an effort to develop more home-grown IP. The fund includes financing for exploring new ideas, building prototypes, and getting games to that initial commercialization stage.

“Hopefully we’ll get some really good people who want to enter the industry as the developers of the future. People who have ideas, but they’ve never really been able to push them on. And then some people who’ve got the idea and prototype, but they want to get it to the next stage,” Murray said.

Elsewhere in our interview:

• Ian Murray believes the UK industry should speak with ‘one voice’ if it wants to secure the same financial support as the TV and movie industry. “The gaming industry is a bit more fragmented. The TV and film industry have been around for a long time. It tends to, as a sector, speak as one voice regardless of who you speak to.

  [Video games] is a relatively fledgling industry. But it’s doing really well […] it’s growing very quickly and I think that things will certainly catch up.”

• I asked Murray if concerns around online safety, and areas such as loot boxes, make it harder to secure support from government. Not at all, he said.
  
  “It probably helps. All of these issues that you’ve raised, they are concerns not just for government and the public, but for industry.
  
  “There’s nobody in the gaming industry that wants to harm children. There’s nobody in gaming that wants loot boxes to be ripping people off. There’s nobody in the industry that wants games influencing young people to do bad things. Nobody wants that in the industry. Nobody wants that in government. So, it’s important to have a partnership about how we resolve some of those issues. And of course, when you’re talking about these issues, you always go to extreme case studies to make the point. But actually, the good guys always do the right things, and the bad guys always do the bad things. And it’s up to us to find that balance of how you regulate properly to protect audiences and to make sure there’s a level playing field for the good guys.”
  

• Last year, when Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 won numerous awards and sold millions of copies, the French government celebrated it by awarding its developers with knighthoods. Why doesn’t the UK celebrate its successes in the same way?
  
  “If we were the US, we’d be puffing out our chest, putting up the flags and marching up and down the main street championing what we do,” Murray noted. “We have traditionally not done that from a cultural perspective. Let’s go and puff our chest out and try and be a little bit more bombastic about how good we are at this stuff and sell ourselves a bit better.”

Check out our full interview above.

How do you solve a problem like Xbox Game Pass?

The big story this week is that Xbox is set to change the pricing on Game Pass. Again.

This time the subscription service will receive a price cut, just over six months since its whopping 50% price hike in October last year. The catch? Brand new Call of Duty games could be excluded from the service (or at least will need to be added on).

A drop in users was inevitable after that initial hike, but Xbox would have expected a rise in revenue overall. Xbox boss Asha Sharma reportedly told staff that Game Pass had become ‘too expensive’, so presumably it’s lost more players than anticipated.

Unfortunately, lowering the price won’t instantly win those players back. There’s a re-convincing job that needs doing, although with an upcoming slate of Forza, Fable, Gears of War and Halo, it’s at least got the software to make a compelling case.

However, a price change is a short-term fix. There’s a longer-term reckoning that needs to happen with Game Pass.

Regular readers will know I’ve had my doubts about the subscription service. In 2018, Microsoft made the disruptive decision to put all of its games into Game Pass, including brand new AAA titles. That proposition is now only available to subscribers of the ‘Ultimate’ tier, but it remains Game Pass’ unique selling point.

There is clearly an audience of hardcore Xbox players that wants this. And according to Microsoft, because of Game Pass, that audience is playing a wider variety of games, and spending more, too. That’s a good thing.

However, for Game Pass to truly succeed long-term, it needs to go beyond the hardcore. The problem is that most gamers don’t play enough new games to justify the cost. According to Circana, only 15% of US gamers buy more than four new games a year. Game Pass Ultimate has an annual cost of $360, which is the equivalent of over five $70 games. So, the math doesn’t add up for most players. A game subscription service doesn’t have the same appeal as a TV or music one, because the consumption habits are different.

Perhaps Game Pass could adopt a ‘credits’ system. Players subscribe and receive a certain number of credits to spend on games. A new Call of Duty will use a lot of credits, while an old classic will be much cheaper. It’s still a full buffet, just not ‘all you can eat’. It could work, but it sounds complex.

A simpler solution would be to jettison new releases entirely and adopt the PlayStation model, where you get a wide selection of back catalogue games but not new ones. I think there’s a legitimate argument around doing that.

It all comes down to this question: what does success even look like for Xbox? As a division it seems a little lost. Caught between being a major third-party publisher and a platform.

It’s also caught between being a video game company and a division of Microsoft. It’s easy for me to say that Xbox needs to get back to basics and just make some hit games, keep them exclusive to its platform, and stop trying to disrupt everything all the time.

But Microsoft doesn’t want Xbox to spend its energy fighting for second place in the PC and console market. That cannot be the ambition. That not why it spent $70 billion on Activision Blizzard.

So, what is the ambition? Is it streaming? Is it subscription? I don’t believe either of those are the future. And judging by the cuts at Amazon (and before that, Google), Microsoft’s big tech rivals don’t seem to believe it is, either.

The Game Pass experiment has caused some damage. It’s eroded the margins on Xbox’s first-party games to such an extent that it’s had to publish them on PlayStation and Steam, undermining its platform business in the process.

Xbox needs to find a purpose. A goal it can point its considerable talent and resources at. Right now, it’s trying to be a subscription business, a major third-party publisher, a digital retailer, a streaming platform and a console. That’s a lot, and many of those areas get in the way of each other.

Xbox needs to find its focus. And I’m not convinced that’s Game Pass.

EA’s Laura Miele and game legend Jason Rubin headline The Game Business Live

EA Entertainment president Laura Miele, video game legend Jason Rubin and leading analyst Matthew Ball will headline The Game Business Live this June. Tickets are available now.

The event takes place on Monday, June 8 at The Grammy Museum in Downtown Los Angeles, hosted by Christopher Dring and Geoff Keighley. It is part of the Summer Game Fest program of events.

The Game Business will conduct live on-stage discussions with Miele, Rubin and Ball. Ball will discuss the state of the industry, and react to some of the key reveals during Summer Game Fest. Meanwhile, Rubin will look back at his huge career in games, from co-founding Naughty Dog and directing Crash Bandicoot, to stints at THQ and Meta.

We will also sit down for an interview with Laura Miele, who leads EA Entertainment, which oversees major franchises including Apex Legends, Battlefield, The Sims and Skate. Miele has spent over 30 years in video games, with a proven track record in developing creative teams and delivering business results.

Paid subscribers to The Game Business can attend The Game Business Live as part of their subscription. Check your inbox on how to register to attend.

Subscribe now

Alternatively, tickets can be purchased separately through here.

Finally, Summer Game Fest: Play Days Industry Day badge holders will also be eligible for access to The Game Business Live as part of their purchase. Summer Game Fest: Play Days is an invite-only event that will feature hands-on experiences from the industry’s leading publishers and developers. Video game industry professionals interested in attending Industry Day (June 8) can apply for consideration here.

Interested in sponsoring The Game Business Live? Please contact info@thegamebusiness.com

Meanwhile…

• Roblox is launching a new subscription service: Roblox Plus. Beginning April 30, Roblox Plus will cost $5 a month and offers discounts on in-game items and other ‘exclusive’ benefits. Roblox will cover the cost of the discounts so it doesn’t impact the revenue for creators.

• Sticking with Roblox, the company is adding two new accounts for minors: Roblox Kids for children between five to eight, and Roblox Select, for ages nine to 15. The new accounts, which launch in June, will align content, communication options, and parental controls with an age bracket. Roblox is also adding new parental controls including the ability to block specific games, manage direct chat, and approve games that are not otherwise available to an age bracket. Roblox has come under criticism for not doing enough to protect young people online, and this is part of its on-going efforts to solve that.

• PS5 hardware sales surged in the US during the week ending April 4, according to Circana’s retail tracking service. It comes just ahead of the console’s $100+ price rise. “US spending on video game hardware for the week nearly doubled when compared to the same week a year ago,” wrote Circana senior director Mat Piscatella.

• The UK video game market reached £8.7 billion in 2025, according to the trade body UKIE. Software sales grew 7% to £6.03 billion, hardware sales increased 3% to £2.17 billion, sales of game-related films, TV shows, and soundtracks increased 70% to £159 million, while toys and merchandising rose 43% to £333 million.

• According to data leaked by a hacking group, Grand Theft Auto Online is generating around $1.3 million a day. It matches analyst estimates that the Online mode makes around half a billion dollars a year. Take-Two’s share price rose as a result of the leak.

That’s it from us today! Join us next week for more news, analysis and interviews.

EA Entertainment president Laura Miele, video game legend Jason Rubin and leading industry analyst Matthew Ball will headline The Game Business Live this June. Tickets are available now.

The event take place on Monday, June 8 at The Grammy Museum in Downtown Los Angeles, hosted by Christopher Dring and Geoff Keighley. It is part of the Summer Game Fest program of events.

The Game Business will conduct live on-stage discussions with Miele, Rubin and Ball. Ball will be discussing the state of the industry, and reacting to some of the key reveals during Summer Game Fest. Meanwhile, Rubin will look back at his huge career in games, from co-founding Naughty Dog and directing Crash Bandicoot, to stints at THQ and Meta.

We will also sit down for an interview with Laura Miele, who leads EA Entertainment, which oversees major franchises including Apex Legends, Battlefield, The Sims and Skate. Miele has spent over 30 years in video games, with a proven track record in developing creative teams and delivering business results.

Paid subscribers to The Game Business can attend The Game Business Live as part of their subscription. Check your inbox for how to register to attend.

Subscribe now

Alternatively, tickets can be purchased separately through here. We are currently running an Early Bird 2-for-1 ticket offer until May 4th (limited quantities).

Finally, Summer Game Fest: Play Days Industry Day badge holders will also be eligible for access to The Game Business Live as part of their purchase. Summer Game Fest: Play Days is an invite-only event that will feature immersive exhibits and hands-on experiences from the industry’s leading publishers and developers. Video game industry professionals interested in attending Industry Day (June 8) at Summer Game Fest: Play Days can apply for consideration here.

Interested in sponsoring The Game Business Live? Please contact info@thegamebusiness.com.

Hello hello,

Tomorrow we will be announcing our line-up for The Game Business Live in Los Angeles, which is part of Summer Game Fest.

The event takes place on Monday, June 8 at The Grammy Museum in Downtown Los Angeles. And we will be interviewing, live on stage, a senior leader at one of the world’s biggest video game publishers, plus a genuine industry legend behind one of the world’s most famous video game studios. We’re very excited. Myself and Geoff Keighley will be there.

Tickets go on general sale tomorrow. But paid subscribers (that’s you) can sign-up today. Tickets for paid subscribers are free*.

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The studio was formed in 2022 by Konrad Tomaszkiewicz, the director of The Witcher 3. He initially funded the studio himself, quickly found investment, and its first game - the AAA open world RPG The Blood of the Dawnwalker - is nearly ready for release.

“I am surprised that it went so smoothly, to be honest,” Tomaszkiewicz says on today’s edition of The Game Business Show. “Everybody was saying that recruiting the team is this really hard thing, bur for us it was quite easy because people wanted to work with us. People said that creating the game is a really hard thing, but we’re getting really good results from the focus tests. We’re confident. I’m surprised that we haven’t encountered big problems.”

This doesn’t necessarily make for an exciting edition of The Game Business.

“I know, I’m trying,” he says. “But it is hard for me to say something went really wrong, because it’s coming together really well, and the people are happy. This is the biggest reward for me, I have a happy team making a great game.”

There was some drama before the launch of Rebel Wolves. Tomaszkiewicz had worked across all three The Witcher games, beginning as a junior tester on the first before rising up to lead development on the third. He also held a leadership position on Cyberpunk 2077. Over that time, CD Projekt changed significantly and Tomaszkiewicz found that difficult. In 2021, he was subjected to an internal investigation over allegations of workplace bullying. He was found not guilty, but left anyway and apologized to staff for “all the bad blood”.

Tomaszkiewicz had found himself in an environment where he had to be a boss, when he just wanted to make games.

“It’s different working with 150 people than 500 people. At Rebel Wolves, we have 160 including administration, the publishing department and so on. And I am among the people all the time. I’m working with everyone side-by-side, speaking with everyone… I know everyone. When you have 500 people, the management is like 100-plus people. With Cyberpunk it was 125. It is not possible to know everyone or to work with everyone every day. The creative process, the fun, is different. And I didn’t want to work like this anymore. I want to work like we worked in the past, with a smaller amount of people, struggling and fighting for solutions in every area of the game.

“I’m creating, and I’m not just someone on top who is testing the game and disconnected from the people.”

Tomaszkiewicz says he considers himself more a leader than a boss.

“My role is not to tell people exactly how to do stuff,” he explains. “My role is to help them get to the final solution.

“This is something totally different than being only the boss, because when you try to force people to do something, in 90% of situations, it’ll fail. In our industry, people are artists and they need to have ownership. They need to feel that they’re creating. My role is to show them the direction where I want to go, but it’s their role to achieve it, because then they fulfil that creative need. When you’re stealing it from them, and saying: ‘I want to do it exactly like this,’ they are not the artist anymore. They are outsourced. And they’re not motivated.

“It’s important to remember that what we are doing is an art. And to create it, you need a really good team that is well motivated and wants to create the best game in the world. And who are your allies in this, let’s say, war of creating. Because making a game is not easy. Every department is doing different stuff. The technological dependencies between them are so complicated that it’s really easy to break the game.

“To create something that is special is really hard. And to do it, the team is the most important thing. The vision is important, but vision without the team to achieve it is nothing.”

Art over money

Tomaszkiewicz wanted a studio where people can “grow old together”. And part of that was to build a company driven by art, not finances.

The Blood of the Dawnwalker might look like ‘The Witcher with vampires’, and that probably would have been enough for gamers to get on-board. But there are a lot of new concepts being tried here, and that comes from the artistic need to do something different.

“The problem in this industry sometimes is that people opening companies are thinking [too much] about how to make money,” he begins. “This is a really cold approach for the games. You cannot create art like this.

“I gathered around me people who love RPGs, and from the beginning we knew that we wanted to create story-driven, open world games with some twists. Opening a new company to do exactly the same things we did in the past is a problem, because we’ll not feel that we’re evolving, or developing ourselves. It was really important for us as artists. We want to push the boundaries of AAA RPGs by adding some risky stuff, which gives you more immersion, more emotions, and a different feel when you play.

“I think that this [idea] is growing these days, because when you look at Clair Obscur, or Crimson Desert right now, those games are different. They are not a copy of other AAA games, but delivering something quite fresh. And I’m really glad of it because I’m starting to feel like I did in the 1990s when I played games on my 286 PC, or even on the Atari where every game was different game. Every game was some unknown. We want to deliver a similar experience for people.”

Even so, The Blood of the Dawnwalker is inevitably going to get compared to The Witcher. Is he comfortable with that?

“Really comfortable. I feel really confident about our game.”

Investor frenzy

In the beginning, Tomaszkiewicz funded the project himself, before taking it (and Rebel Wolves) to outside investors. 2022 was not an easy time to seek funding, but he wasn’t short on offers.

“We were in a different situation than the other companies, because we had people on-board with a really good track record,” he explains. “We started to work on the Unreal Engine. We had the whole presentation about the vision, what we wanted to achieve, and all the documentation around the costs. It was really clear to investors that we knew what we were doing. We spoke with a few companies, and all of them wanted to invest, and we were in the situation where we had to choose one of them.”

In the end, the team took funding from Netease.

“One or two days after meeting Netease, we got the term sheet through. It’s hard to believe, but the team, plus a really good idea, all documentation, including the commercials, showed that we know what we are doing.”

The final leg

The Blood of the Dawnwalker is nearing certification. It’s almost ready. And it’s doing well. There was positive buzz coming out of Gamescom last year, and according to GameDiscover, it’s approaching one million wishlists on Steam. There are other RPGs ahead of it (including Microsoft’s Fable), and it’s a busy year for big games. But if Tomaszkiewicz is worried, he isn’t showing it.

But then the ambition for Rebel Wolves is a modest one. Tomaszkiewicz isn’t trying to create a second CD Projekt. In fact, he wants to do the opposite.

“The vision for our team is to stay the size we are,” he concludes. “Maybe we’ll need some help in some areas after this game comes out, so we probably will grow a little. But I’m afraid that if we grow more, we’ll lose this communication and process we have right now. I want Rebel Wolves in 10 years to be exactly the same size.

“I want to sell [enough copies] of [The Blood of the Dawnwalker] so we can secure the production of the next two games, and create some unique stuff. I don’t have a vision to create this big corporation that will do five games at the same time and be huge. I want to stay small. I want to enjoy making games as I am right now.”

Thank you for joining us on today’s The Game Business Show. We’ll be back Thursday where we’ll be speaking to a politician about the video game business. Until then, thank you for reading.

It has been a very quiet seven days for video game industry news. This coming week promises to be a little busier, and it certainly will be for us, as we’re travelling around London Games Festival, hosting talks and attending the BAFTA game awards. If you see us, do say hello.

But although last week was quiet, there were a few interesting developments to let you know about. So, let’s take a look.

Amazon simplifies its Luna game streaming service

In Brief: Video game streaming platform Amazon Luna will no longer feature game stores, individual game purchases or third-party subscriptions. This means players will no-longer have access to the EA, GOG or Ubisoft stores via Luna, and Ubisoft+ and Jackbox Games subscriptions are being discontinued on the platform.

What You Need To Know:

• A-la-carte game purchases are no-longer available via Luna. Previously purchased titles will stop working from June 10, 2026 and will be removed from Amazon Luna. Players are not eligible for a refund.

• Gamers who had bought games via EA, GOG or Ubisoft stores could play these games via Luna. Going forward, that will no-longer be possible.

• Luna users will be eligible for a complementary Luna Premium subscription as a ‘thank you’ for supporting the service so far.

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Hello and welcome back!

We’ve managed to go this long without doing a full AI-focused edition of The Game Business. But today I really wanted to share with you this chat I had with Jon Gibson, the head of transformation at Keywords Studios.

Keywords works with major game developers around the world, so it has quite a nuanced perspective on AI. And I found what Gibson had to say fascinating. He talked about AI being in its ‘chaos’ phase, and how few studios have worked out how to use it within their pipelines. It’s a great chat and I’ve selected some choice quotes below. Of course, you can also check out the full interview above, on YouTube, or via all good podcasting platforms.

Also this week we touch upon the Super Mario Galaxy movie, and the familiar sounding Netflix Playground. Enjoy.

The uncomfortable truth about AI

Keywords Studios has tested over 500 AI game development tools, and found only ‘half a dozen’ actually help ‘in the right way’.

That’s according to Jon Gibson, head of transformation at Keywords Studios. Gibson joined us on The Game Business Show ahead of his GDC talk on ‘the uncomfortable truth about AI in game production’, where he discussed how “everyone’s focusing on building better AI, and no one’s really focusing on how to use it in a live production environment.”

He said: “AI feels like it’s in the chaos phase right now. And we need to move to the usable phase. How do we use AI in live production environments? How do we use AI in a way where it complements teams rather than potentially threatens teams? And also how do we use it in a context where it’s governed, it’s controlled, it’s IP safe, it’s legally safe, it’s ethically and morally safe? The gulf between cool AI demos where you put in a prompt and you get something amazing, to actually AI in production where you get consistent, high-quality results steered and directed by humans, is quite a big leap.”

He continued: “A lot of people focus on what’s cool. They focus on the tool itself or the model itself, rather than what they’re trying to do. A company will use a tool or build a tool without a specific use case and try and cram it into their production pipelines, rather than flipping that problem around and saying: ‘What are our pain points? What are we trying to solve?’ And then building a tool against that.”

Gibson said that most AI game development tools are currently not fit for purpose.

“There’s a lot of garbage out there,” he explained. “We do a lot of R&D within Keywords. We tested about 500 different AI tools on some of the R&D projects we’ve done, and there’s about half a dozen that we feel complement development in the right way.”

The focus on cool AI tools, rather than how they might fit within development pipelines, is potentially exacerbating concerns amongst game makers. Gibson pointed to the GDC State of the Industry report, which revealed that 36%* of developers are using AI, but 52% don’t approve of its use. [*Note: Gibson incorrectly said 90% in the interview].

“I think not having controls and governance around AI is part of that issue,” Gibson said.

“A lot of companies are not really explaining to their people why they’re using AI, and why it’s a good thing, and what the strategy is. They’re going into using AI models without that clarity. And it concerns developers.”

Ultimately, AI tools will only work if the culture within the organization supports the strategy, he said.

“That culture is really about helping developers understand what they’re using, why they’re using it, and how it affects them and how it affects their roles specifically.

“There are very few people I meet who are totally closed off to using AI in game development. What you find is people asking questions, which a lot of businesses are currently unable to answer. We’re gradually reaching a point where those questions are being answered and people are becoming more comfortable and confident about the usage of AI in game development.”

He added: “It’s a slow process. That statistic of 52% of developers being concerned about the usage of AI, that’s gone up every year for the last three years. As AI tools and AI models and AI technology in general has become more prevalent, the lack of understanding and the concern has increased. Until we’re able to work out how to meaningfully build this technology into production pipelines in a way that is safe, in a way that adds value, in a way that complements the talent that already exists in this industry, and doesn’t threaten that talent, I think there’s always going to be that level of concern.”

Overall, Gibson told us that AI will have a meaningful impact on game development. He compared the technology to the shift from 2D to 3D, which also proved chaotic until game development pipelines caught up.

“We’re at that same phase with AI,” he said. “It’s impressive. It’s amazing. It’s transformative. It’s revolutionary. But going from a single prompt and something amazing, to something consistent and high quality that can be used in game development, that’s where the gap lies right now.”

Netflix targets 14.5 million US gamers with new Playground app

Streaming giant Netflix has ramped up its bid to win over kids and parents with a new mobile app featuring the likes of Peppa Pig, Sesame Street and Dr Seuss.

The Netflix Playground (not to be confused with the Nex Playground) will feature a selection of games available to all Netflix subscribers that feature no ads, in-app purchases or extra fees. The games can even be downloaded and played offline.

The kid’s games market is significant. According to Ampere, there are 14.5 million gamers under nine years-old and four million under five. But with growing concerns over the digital health of children, there’s been an increased focus around online safety and screen time management for younger players.

Kids giant Roblox has struggled with this conversation, with parents growing concerned around the title’s social tools and user generated content. 35% of verified users on Roblox are under the age of 13.

Netflix isn’t the only new competitor targeting kids and parents in the video game space. The camera-based game console Nex Playground has proven to be a hit in the US, and also features trusted kids brands such as Sesame Street, Peppa Pig and Bluey. It also adopts a subscription model, with no in-app purchases.

Of course, the other major player in the market is Nintendo, with its high-profile kids brands such as Mario and Pokémon. The company has sold over 170 million Nintendo Switch and Switch 2 consoles worldwide.

Meanwhile…

• The Super Mario Galaxy movie delivered $372.6 million in revenue for its five-day opening weekend, which basically (but not quite) matched the $375 million of the original film. Mario is now the only animated movie franchise to have two films that delivered more than $350 million in its opening weekend. The film didn’t do great with critics, with a 42 on Rotten Tomatoes. But fans were happier, with an 89 fan score. The film had a budget of $110 million.

• The Super Mario Galaxy 1 and 2 collection for Nintendo Switch jumped up the charts in the UK following the film’s release, with sales up 107% week-on-week (physical sales only). However, the game missed out on the Top Ten (Nielsen IQ data). Nintendo is set to release two games starring popular characters from the film in the coming months, including a new Star Fox and Yoshi game.

• In what is a rare moment for the mobile video game sector, Supercell CEO and co-founder Ilkka Paananen will be awarded the prestigious BAFTA Fellowship next week.

• Hazelight has now sold 50 million games across its three titles. 2018’s A Way Out has sold 13 million copies, 2021’s It Takes Two is on 30 million, and 2025’s Split Fiction has sold seven million copies so far.

• The United States Patent and Trademark Office has rejected Nintendo’s patent around in-game characters summoning a sub-character to aid it in combat (as seen within the Pokémon series). Nintendo has two months to respond, with the option to extend if necessary. It is all part of Nintendo’s on-going case against the 2024 game Palworld, which it believes infringes on multiple patent rights.

• This is potentially good news for Hello Games. The No Man Sky developer just announced a new No Man Sky expansion which appears to be similar to Pokémon. It’s called Xeno Arena, a new feature where players explore the universe to collect a team of creature companions, then use them to fight other creatures in turn-based battles.

• Five independent studios have established an ‘alliance’ called Nova Assembly. Developers Unfrozen, Sad Cat Studios, VEA Games, Weappy and Game Garden will share expertise and resources, and even establish their own publishing division to handle marketing, distribution and community. In total, the Nova Assembly has ten titles in development.

• The Nintendo Switch 2 version of 007 First Light has been delayed until later in the summer. Developer IO Interactive said that the Xbox, PlayStation and PC versions are still set for May 27. Hopefully this one doesn’t do a Borderlands 4 and disappear entirely.

• Eidos Montreal has laid off 124 employees, with studio head David Anfossi also leaving the developer. The redundancies are reportedly the result of the cancellation of a long-in-development new open world IP.

That’s it from us today! We’ll be back next week with more interviews, news, analysis and insight. Plus, full details for our upcoming The Game Business Live event in June. Until then, thank you for reading.

Kickstarter has been growing again.

In 2024, 463 video game projects were funded on Kickstarter, which is the highest number in the platform’s history. The figure dropped slightly in 2025 to 443, but that’s still the second-best year.

In terms of money, $26 million was raised for video game projects in 2024, the highest figure since 2015, and 2025 broadly matched it.

2025 saw bigger success stories, too. 11 projects raised more than $500,000 last year, which is the highest number of projects in that band since 2015, and more than twice the number from 2024.

This data is courtesy of ICO Partners. And although the figures are clearly positive for crowd-funding, we’re still talking relatively low numbers overall.

“400-plus games a year that get funded on Kickstarter… that’s about two weeks of Steam releases,” says ICO Partners CEO Thomas Bidaux.

“It’s stable. It’s growing. It’s not insignificant. But this is not something that people are going to in droves to get funding.”

The investment landscape is tough. Publishers and investors are scaling back the projects they’re signing and the money they’re spending. By contrast, Kickstarter is showing signs of stability and even growth.

So, why are we not seeing even more games turn to crowd-funding? Particularly those games that just need a little bit extra to get the over-the-line?

We dived into the subject with Bidaux and head of games at Kickstarter Asher McClennahan.

Kickstarter doesn’t work for all games

“I have three red flags,” Bidaux begins. “One is games for kids. They don’t work because getting parents to put money into a project that has a delivery in six to 12 months is very unlikely.

“My second red flag is mobile. The people we see back projects on Kickstarter are very PC-first and then console. Mobile almost doesn’t exist, and very difficult to do. Distributing the keys is difficult. Apple and Google don’t have the Steam option to basically get free keys. And the price point for mobile games is, on average, lower than a PC game. So, getting a significant amount of money from the mobile space is extra difficult.

“My third red flag is free-to-play. Free-to-play is kind-of the opposite of crowdfunding. Crowdfunding happens six to 12 months before you even play the game. Maybe you have a demo, but maybe not. You’re saying: ‘Give me money because you know you’ll love it.’ The philosophy of free-to-play is: ‘Don’t give me money, try it, and maybe down the line you’ll pay me.’ They’re both very community driven, but it’s difficult to communicate to people why they should give money now.”

It’s hard to know the value of the items that developers may be giving away with free-to-play Kickstarter campaigns, Bidaux explains.

“You can have a hat or a cat or whatever, visual items, but the value of that is difficult to project. I know a video game is $20 or $30 or $50, because of that genre. But how much is a hat? $1? $50? You need to play the game to have that sense. People have done things where if you give them $50 on Kickstarter, you’ll get a $100 worth of in-game currency. But then maybe everything is super expensive and $100 is nothing?”

Bidaux stresses that there are always exceptions.

“These red flags can be disproven. There’s a game called Epitome that just finished a Kickstarter campaign. They did a €500,000 Euros with 20,000 backers, and they are a free-to-play MMO. They went deep into the nostalgia of MMOs from 10/15 years ago, and that resonated with people. But they’re free-to-play. These aren’t hard rules.”

Crowd-funding is time consuming

The energy and time that goes into maintaining and supporting a Kickstarter campaign, particularly for a smaller team, can be significant.

“This will require energy, effort and probably dedicated resource in order to deliver on it,” McClennahan says. “It is so hard. It is so worth it, but it becomes all of your being while you are planning for and running your campaign. I want people to come in eyes wide open.”

Bidaux adds: “A crowdfunding campaign is an exercise in time. Before you launch the Kickstarter campaign, you need to do the Coming Soon page. This is where you can pre-launch your page. And then when you push the button, they’ll get notified about it. It’s such a good exercise to do that everybody should do it. But you need to leave at least three months between your Coming Soon and your Kickstarter launch. So, four months of Kickstarter is a thing you need to manage as a studio when you have other things to worry about.”

What’s more, a Kickstarter campaign can’t come first.

“Kickstarter brings you about 30% of your backings,” McClennahan continues. “For every seven backers that you bring to the platform, Kickstarter will naturally bring you three to four generally. That is to say, you still need to find that other 70%. And so that’s your Discord communities, your paid advertising, your email newsletter, getting people excited at shows and getting them to follow the pre-launch page.”

Kickstarter backers can’t leave Steam reviews

One thing that puts some developers off Kickstarter is the inability for backers to leave Steam reviews once the game is out.

“The way Kickstarter functions for video games, you’re going to Steam and saying: ‘I’ve got 1,000 backers, can I have 1,000 keys for those backers?’ Those backers are your super ultra fans. Then, they download the game, put a review… but that review doesn’t count, because they were given a free Steam key.”

However, Bidaux feels this concern is unwarranted. A lot of the people who utilize Kickstarter aren’t just doing it for the extra funds, but as a marketing tool. It creates a 30-day window where a new game’s most active fans are highly engaged with the project, sharing it and talking about it ahead of release.

“Yes, you are going to lose some reviews from your most hardcore fans,” Bidaux acknowledges. “But you will have hardcore fans who are not going to go to Kickstarter. Maybe they don’t like crowdfunding. Maybe they don’t have the money that month. Maybe they missed it. You don’t lose all your fans.

“But also the uplift you get from a Kickstarter campaign in terms of visibility makes up for it. I’ll give you an example of a French project called The Witch Bakery. They launched their Kickstarter campaign with 10,000 [Steam] wishlists. And then by the end of the campaign, they had 37,000 wishlists.”

Early Access can be more effective

One of the biggest rivals to Kickstarter isn’t another crowd-funding platform, but rather Early Access. With developers typically turning to Kickstarter later in development, for some studios, it can make more sense to create and release an Early Access version instead. That means they can build a community and generate revenue until launch, not just for 30 days.

But Early Access isn’t suitable for all games. Story-driven titles, for instance, would have the game spoiled via an Early Access release.

“And there are systemic games that go to Kickstarter, and then do an Early Access,” Bidaux adds. “They’re not exclusive from one another, but we see those trends.”

… but there is room for more video games on Kickstarter

“I wish it would grow. There’s a lot more room, as we’ve seen [by the number of] tabletop games,” Bidaux says.

“It will grow slowly and it will be more along the lines of this being a good marketing exercise. We have a finite number of marketing beats for a video game and developers will be like: ‘We could do with more. Maybe we should do a Kickstarter campaign?”

McClennahan concludes: “It is growing. 2024 was a great year for us, 2025 [had] 10%-ish more video games on the platform. And from the conversations that I’ve had, there are even more coming in 2026.”

For the full interviews with Bidaux and McClennahan, check out the links to the video and podcast above.

That’s it for us today. We’ll be back on Thursday for more news, analysis and insight. Until then, thank you for reading.

This is our mini-edition of The Game Business for paying subscribers, where we look at some of the biggest stories of the previous week, and give our own take on what is happening.

It has been Spring Break, and that means it was a slightly quieter week when it comes to big stories. In fact, the biggest video game story wasn’t about a video game at all, but rather the blockbuster success of The Super Mario Galaxy movie.

But there were a few other developments, including job losses at Eidos Montreal and Coffee Stain, an acquisition of a new Japanese game developer, Nintendo third-party data and Xbox is going on tour.

Let’s take a look.

Fans defy the critics (again) with blockbuster Super Mario Galaxy movie

In Brief: The Super Mario Galaxy movie delivered a massive opening weekend with $372.5 million gross over five days. The film made $190 million in the US and a further $182.4 million internationally (the Japan release is still to come). It is slightly below the first Mario movie, which managed $375 million over five days, but it is comfortably the biggest movie launch of 2026. The strong result comes despite a negative critical reaction.

What You Need To Know:

• The film had a budget of $110 million.

• Mario is the only animated movie series with two films that have exceeded more than $350 million during its opening weekend.

• It is already the No.9 highest-grossing video game movie ever after just five days. The biggest is the first Super Mario Bros movie, which finished on $1.36 billion.

• At the time of writing, the film has a 42 Critics rating on Rotten Tomatoes, but a 89% rating from fans. The first film finished on a 59 Critics rating and a 95% fan rating.

• It was a similar story with last year’s A Minecraft Movie. It had a critics rating of 47, a fan rating of 84, and generated $955 million at the Box Office.

Read more

It’s Spring/Easter break, and I know some of you are spending the week (or two weeks) finding ways to keep the kids entertained. I’ve already taken my little ones to see the Super Mario Galaxy movie, and I imagine we will end up going again before the schools are back. And… I’m ok with it. I’m sorry film critics. I thought it was fun.

Anyway, we sadly don’t have a normal edition of The Game Business for you today. But I do have something, plus a couple of updates.

The something is an unusual interview. In October last year, I conducted the keynote chat at the Game Republic New Horizons conference with someone outside of video games - stand-up comic and Taskmaster star Maisie Adam.

Adam is a well-known comedian in the UK and a regular on our TV screens. We had a good conversation where we discussed some of the similarities between stand-up comedy and video games, and the event’s organizers kindly supplied us with the video footage. However, it’s not exactly a business interview, and the recording quality isn’t the best. So it’s been sitting on our digital shelf for the best part of six months.

But with Adam back on our screens as part of Amazon’s Last One Laughing, and following our conversation with the Dispatch developers earlier this week where we touched upon comedy games, we thought: why not just put it out there? So here it is.

We’re releasing this just as a video (the audio is a bit rough for a podcast). And you can watch it above, or via our YouTube channel.

The Game Business on tour

We’re out and about quite a bit this year. In two weeks, you’ll find us at London Game Festival hosting panels and interviews. Our biggest one is on Tuesday as part of The Games Finance Market, where I’ll be chatting to Matteo Sapio, the chief strategy officer at Vampire Survivors developer Poncle. That’s on Tuesday, April 14.

Then in October we will be speaking to a real legend - the father of PlayStation himself Ken Kuturagi. This is part of Game Republic’s next New Horizons event on Thursday, October 15. Tickets are on sale now.

We’ll be handling the recording for these, and they will be released as future episodes of The Game Business Show.

But what of our own event, The Game Business Live? Well, we’ll have a lot more on that next week.

If you don’t know what The Game Business Live is, it’s a mini-conference that we run in Los Angeles as part of Summer Game Fest. We effectively record live versions of The Game Business Show in front of an audience, with plenty of time for networking. Tickets cost $100. But, if you’re a paid subscriber to The Game Business, you can come for free (well, as part of your subscription). And a subscription to The Game Business are… $100. May as well, right?

Subscribe now

The Game Business Live is on June 8 at The Grammy Museum in Downtown LA. I’ll be there, Geoff Keighley will be there, plus some special guests that we’ll be announcing imminently. Stay tuned for that.

That’s all my updates for now. We’ll be back next week with your usual editions of The Game Business newsletter and Show. Until then, I hope you have a great weekend.

Listen now on Apple, Spotify or YouTube

In This Edition,
AdHoc Studio’s Michael Choung and Nick Herman on…
- Failing to find money
- The interactive narrative genre
- Self-publishing
- Comedy games

Dispatch has now sold four million copies.

If you missed this game, Dispatch is an interactive, narrative-based, superhero workplace comedy. It boasts an impressive cast from the worlds of Hollywood and video games. And it was the debut title from AdHoc Studio, which was formed by veterans of Telltale Games.

It also almost never came out.

“We’ve been going to all these conferences for seven years looking for money and trying to make the next six months work. It’s been hell,” says creative director and co-founder Nick Herman.

CEO Michael Choung adds: “Nick jokes that we could make a whole series of Final Destination movies based around all the near misses and existential threats that we’ve had to weather.”

Dispatch began as a live action project that got closed down because of the pandemic. It was repurposed as an animated game, found a publisher, but then that publisher dropped it.

By now the market had shifted. Investors and publishers had become risk averse, and Dispatch was seen as a gamble.

New IP is always a risk, but the bigger concern was the genre itself. Interactive narrative games just weren’t selling in big numbers.

“We were looking at it differently in terms of the size of the opportunity,” Choung says. “You’re not going to hear more cynicism around the limited appeal of these games than from people that actually make them. [But] we knew that these games had a ceiling that hadn’t been seen before. We knew that the opportunity was massive. So, we set out to prove that people are looking at it in the wrong way. It’s almost the thesis of the studio.”

But that was a challenging argument to make.

“We’re founded by two writers and two directors,” Herman says. “You talk to any [investor or publisher], and those are the least useful people in their minds: ‘Where’s your programmer? Where’s your designer? You don’t have anyone who worked on Halo?’

“Then you go to Hollywood and they don’t understand games. Both those conversations were difficult.

“Then when you finally get someone who does understand, they’re telling you: ‘These things aren’t selling very well anymore.’ And you have to explain why those other games that had a lot of money put into them - and you’re sometimes talking to the people who put the money into them - didn’t make it. You have to tell [these investors] they’re wrong. Then they don’t believe you and you start to wonder if you know anything.”

Ultimately, Herman says, they had to convince investors they were better than the other narrative game makers out there.

“It feels gross,” he admits. “But we had to push through the grossness to get here.”

There were other reasons Dispatch seemed risky to potential backers. The episodic model is hit and miss, so AdHoc “stopped telling people” that was the plan. It’s also a comedy, and the developer was repeatedly told “comedies don’t sell in games.” In fact, it almost discouraged them from going down that route entirely.

“We had such a stack of things that felt like risk, adding yet another one via genre felt egregious,” Choung recalls. “It took some time and convincing.”

Herman felt that investors were confusing comedy games with games that were trying to be funny, but weren’t.

“It’s not like there’s all these incredible, hilarious games that no-one is buying,” he says. “It’s a trust fall where we’re like: ‘We can actually be funny in our game’. But we had to prove it.”

Dispatch wasn’t cheap to make, either. By 2024, the developer had 30 employees, it had an outsource animation partner, and a cast of world-famous actors. Choung described the budget as being “on the middle, lower-end of the AA space”.

But AdHoc did manage to keep costs down. Herman says that partners and actors read the script, saw the animation, and were eager to help, especially as this was a debut project. Of course, after four million sales, “a lot of those [fees] are going to go up,” he notes.

Playing a Critical Role

AdHoc needed a partner and Dispatch was proving a tough sell. But there was one interested party in the form of Critical Role, the famous online D&D series.

One of the lead actors in Dispatch is played by Critical Role’s Laura Bailey. Bailey was sent animation and scripts, and this was seen by Bailey’s husband, Critical Role CEO Travis Willingham. Willingham was eager to get Critical Role into the video game space and was impressed by AdHoc’s work, so he approached it about making a Critical Role game.

During discussions, the developer suggested that Critical Role might want to help it finish Dispatch first. But the conversation didn’t become serious until The Game Awards in 2024, when the game was revealed to the world.

“We were at The Game Awards without a deal,” Choung says. “And then, because of the TGAs and the impact that it had on wishlists, the conversation with Critical Role became much more serious and accelerated.”

Herman adds: “Without that show, I don’t know that Dispatch would’ve made it. We could see the end of the runway not too far into the next year, and we needed that huge spike in interest to generate confidence in investors and others. It was huge.”

Critical Role came in with the funding, but it’s not a publisher. That meant AdHoc had full control over how to release and promote Dispatch.

“We ended in a place that was the best for the studio and the project financially and creatively,” Herman says. “We’d pachinkoed our way to the jackpot. It’s something that I hope other people hear, and that it provides them with a bit of hope if they’re in the middle of what feels like an existential crisis. Michael was the steady hand a lot of the time, as some of us were losing our heads and freaking out.”

AdHoc stuck with the episodic approach. It believed that was best for the experience and for generating conversation. However, it found in pre-release testing that players who got to episode four typically finished the whole game. So, it released two episodes a week in order to get people there quickly.

Ultimately, it all worked. But Herman found publishing a lot harder than he had anticipated.

“We are very glad we did it, but it was certainly a journey. We didn’t have anyone on our team who had ever published a game before. It was the naivete of… well, I was at Telltale for 10 years and they self-published everything, so it can’t be that hard. We were very humbled by that experience.

“There are a lot of upsides to being in control of that. I don’t know why we would ever go back to working with a publisher.”

He continues: “I wouldn’t cross it off completely, but it would have to make a lot of sense. We just announced we’re coming to Xbox. We now know how it works with these first party platforms. We have these relationships. We’ve done it before. Certainly, help is useful. And there are other pieces to publishing, like marketing. I was also the person building the store pages and hitting the button to set the game live. And there’s something that I really enjoyed about it… there’s an art to building a Steam page.”

Herman is keen to stress that AdHoc had support, whether that’s from agencies it hired, or publishers like Kepler and Supergiant that were eager to help.

“The industry is small in a lot of ways,” he explains. “You find out who the real ones are by surviving as long as we have. It’s one of the best things about the industry and things like GDC and other conferences, where people are just so willing to share and be helpful.”

Beyond the niche

Herman and Choung don’t see Dispatch as a fluke. They believe the genre always had this potential. The game was a reaction to the fact their friends and families weren’t interested in their previous titles. They liked similar movies and TV shows, so why not these games? So they listened to the feedback and created something new – a game that empathises character over plot, with high quality animation and a likeable cast. They made a game for a specific group, and that specific group turned out to be over four million strong.

Regular readers of The Game Business have heard this story before. Helldivers 2, Clair Obscur, Space Marine 2 and Arc Raiders are all examples of what happens when you take a niche genre, focus on the audience, and deliver a strong product. Being risk-averse in today’s industry isn’t going to get you very far.

As for AdHoc’s next move, there’s a Critical Role game to make, plus some form of follow-up to Dispatch. The company is now looking to hire people, including in the publishing side. But when it comes to making games, it’s not just about adding more people.

“We think that’s a creative problem, less a production problem,” Choung explains. “The tendency for game studios is to think like production companies and not like businesses. They’re much more concerned about what a potential output is versus what the outcomes are. We’re making creative games. We don’t want to just build a studio that can make things. We want to make things that actually connect with people. To do that, you have to scale creative leadership before scaling [anything else].”

Herman concludes: “You don’t green light a film without a director and writer attached, right?”

Disclaimer: The Game Awards is run by Geoff Keighley, who is also the co-founder of The Game Business.

‘The Father of PlayStation’ Ken Kutaragi will be doing an on-stage interview this October with The Game Business.

The interview is part of the UK industry conference Game Republic New Horizons, which takes place October 14 - 16 in Middlesbrough. The session will be filmed as a full episode of The Game Business for release after the event.

Kutaragi formed Sony Computer Entertainment in 1993 and acted as its group CEO and chairman until 2007 after the release of PlayStation 3.

“I am absolutely delighted to be coming to the UK to take part in the Game Republic New Horizons conference,” Kutaragi said. “I am looking forward to sharing my experience and lifetime of innovation and my insights on future opportunities with all the attendees.”

Game Republic MD Jamie Sefton added: "Bringing such a legend in the industry to the UK shows the ambition we have for this conference to be a major unmissable and unique international event in the games industry calendar."

Kutaragi is currently the CEO Representative Director of Ascent Robotics, and CEO and President of Cyber AI Entertainment.

Early Bird tickets for New Horizons are available now at £149 until the end of April. Details on tickets and discounted accommodation can be found at: grnewhorizons.gamerepublic.net

It’s Easter break/Spring break time. But that doesn’t prevent us from diving into the big stories of the week. Especially when those big stories are about major pricing shifts for both PlayStation and Nintendo.

Plus, there were those Epic cuts, a UK trade body shared alarming data, and Savvy prepares to spend big on mobile games… again.

Let’s take a look.

DRAM crisis deepens as PS5 price jumps $100

In Brief: Sony has significantly increased the price of PlayStation 5 globally. All models have increased by at least $100.

What You Need To Know:

• In the US, the PS5 will rise from $549.99 to $649.99. In Europe, it’s jumping from €549.99 to €649.99. In the UK, it’s gone from £479.99 to £569.99.

• In the US, the PS5 Digital Edition will rise from $499.99 to $599.99. In Europe, it’s also up from €499.99 to €599.99. And in the UK, it’s gone from £429.99 to £519.99.

• In the US, the PS5 Pro goes from $699.99 to $899.99. In Europe it’s $699.99 to $899.99. And in the UK, it’s gone from £699.99 to £789.99.

• The price hike has also hit Japan, with the digital model at ¥97,980, the standard model at ¥89,980 and the Pro edition at ¥137,980.

• In addition, the PlayStation Portal has increased in price from $199.99 to $249.99, £199.99 to £219.99 and €219.99 to €249.99.

• PlayStation said on its blog: “We know that price changes impact our community, and after careful evaluation, we found this was a necessary step to ensure we can continue delivering innovative, high-quality gaming experiences to players worldwide.”

• The Digital Edition PlayStation 5 console has seen its price jump by $200 since its release.

• The situation is caused by rising memory and storage costs. DRAM prices have reportedly increased by over 170% year-over-year.

• Leading game analyst Piers Harding-Rolls from Ampere Analysis told The Game Business: “It wouldn’t be a surprise if Microsoft and Nintendo followed suit in the not-too-distant future.
  
  “Aside from a direct impact on hardware companies, I think this will cause some general industry concern about what the broader impact will be on market activity. The console and the AAA PC gaming markets rely on hardware investment to bring in new active players and drive market momentum, so if this weakens it might soften demand for new games. These pressures come at an awkward time for Sony and Microsoft with Take-Two’s GTA 6 arriving at the end of 2026, as both companies will want to take full advantage of the positive impact of this system seller release. Likewise, it’s awkward for Nintendo as it won’t want to raise the price of the Switch 2 when it is trying to establish the new platform.”

• Elsewhere, the family console Nex Playground has increased the price of its machine from $249 to $299.

• Microsoft raised the prices of its Xbox consoles twice last year. A standard Xbox Series X now retails for $649.99, up $150 since launch. The Series S is $399.99, an increase of $100.

My Take:

Regular readers and listeners will know I’m generally an optimistic person. But the situation facing video game hardware gives me a knot in my stomach. It feels almost existential.

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.

Until April 1, you can sign-up for a paid subscription at a 20% discount to celebrate one year of The Game Business.

February was dominated by Resident Evil Requiem, but outside of that it was a tough month with a fall in players and revenue across many major PC, console and mobile games. Let’s dive in.

The State of Games: February 2026

There were some clear bright spots during February. The subscription business saw a surge across the US, PUBG Mobile grew substantially, Helldivers 2 and Overwatch staged a comeback, and Resident Evil Requiem broke franchise records.

But as you’ll see, overall February was quite challenging across the business with declines for many of the usual players.

Fortnite, GTA, Battlefield and Arc Raiders suffer drops, as Resident Evil dominates

After four consecutive months of growth, Nexon’s Arc Raiders finally sees a drop in players, and it’s a big one, with numbers down 2.4 million over January. In fact, most of the typical big games dropped last month, while a certain Capcom horror game dominated the sales charts.

Here are the key details:

Read more

Listen now on Apple, Spotify or YouTube

In This Edition,
- Big cuts at Epic
- How is Switch 2 performing?
- VR discovery boost
- We celebrate one year of The Game Business!

Hello and welcome to our anniversary edition of The Game Business.

We have been around for an entire year, and to mark the occasion, we have Game File reporter Stephen Totilo on today’s episode of the Show. Stephen was our very first guest back in March 2025, and it’s great to have him back.

Today, Stephen and I discuss Nintendo’s current performance, Epic’s shock lay-offs, and the positive impact of Meta removing Horizon Worlds from the Quest Store.

You can watch or listen to the whole thing above. Or, of course, I have all the relevant stories and data from the Show in our articles below.

Enjoy!

What’s really happening with Nintendo Switch 2?

There are mixed messages surrounding how the Nintendo Switch 2 is performing.

We know it had a record-breaking console launch, which caused Nintendo to raise its projections. And there have been numerous hit games on the platform. Switch 2 exclusive Pokémon Pokopia arrived earlier this month and sold 2.2 million copies in under a week.

But then came our report earlier this year, which revealed that Switch 2 (outside of Japan), had a relatively soft Christmas. Nintendo confirmed this, revealing that international sales were “somewhat weaker than expected” in recent financial comments. And this week came Bloomberg’s report that Nintendo had reduced current Switch 2 production from six million to four million units.

So what’s the truth? In today’s edition of The Game Business, I’m going to dive into the numbers behind Switch 2.

Isn’t Nintendo Switch breaking records?

Yes. It was immediately the fastest selling games console in history when it launched in June last year, and continues to trend ahead of the original Nintendo Switch worldwide.

For the first nine months on sale in the US, Switch 2 is 45% up over Switch 1, and even 29% up over PS5 (Circana). Only the Game Boy Advance has sold faster than it. In the UK, Switch 2 sales are up more than 20% launch aligned compared with Switch 1 (Nielsen IQ).

In Japan, Switch 2 has shifted over 4.8 million units in just over nine months. By comparison, it took 17 months for Switch 1 to reach that same figure (Famitsu). The console has even sold half a million units in China (Niko Partners).

So why are people concerned?

After an explosive start, Nintendo Switch 2 sales are not quite hitting the heights they were at launch, at least in the West. Over November and December in the US, Switch 2 sales were about 30% down compared to how Switch 1 sold during its first Christmas on the market (TGB sources). That has continued into 2026. For the first two months of the year, Switch 2 sales are roughly 20% lower than what Switch 1 managed during January and February 2018. At this pace, Switch 2 will eventually fall behind the Switch 1.

What’s more, the Switch 1 vs Switch 2 comparisons aren’t entirely like-for-like. Switch 2 was released in June, so the first nine months of its life include the crucial Christmas sales window. Switch 1 was released in March, so the first nine months of its life doesn’t include December.

Is this a problem?

Not necessarily, because there are flaws in comparing the launch of Switch 2 to the Switch 1.

Switch 2 was well supplied from day one, which led to a record-breaking first few months on the market. By comparison, Switch 1 was not well supplied at launch. As a result, Switch 1 sales were more spread out across that first year as more stock came to retail, while Switch 2 sales were more front-loaded.

The launch line-up for Switch 2 is also noticeably weaker, certainly compared with the first Switch. During Christmas 2017, Nintendo launched the smash hit Super Mario Odyssey. There was no such comparable game for Switch 2’s first Christmas, and we’re still waiting on many of Nintendo’s biggest franchises to arrive on the new platform.

So why are investors anxious?

There are some significant macro-economic challenges facing Nintendo (and the entire console sector).

In a talk from June last year, Circana games boss Mat Piscatella told The Game Business that according to its survey data, 44% of consumers were cutting back on non-essential items (such as games) due to concerns around rising prices of essential items (like food and energy). 46% also said they were putting off big purchases due to concerns about the economy.

In addition, rapidly rising component prices has put significant pressure on the profitability of Switch 2. This creates a challenging situation where consumers are looking for value, and Nintendo is limited in what it can offer.

The competitive landscape has also increased for Nintendo. From smaller rivals like Nex Playground, to Netflix’s family strategy and the dominance of Roblox, there are players vying for Nintendo’s family audience. Meanwhile, PC-based gaming handhelds like the Steam Deck and ROG Ally are targeting some of Nintendo’s more hardcore portable players.

How come things are better in Japan?

Japan is Nintendo’s strongest territory. The company had developed a lower-price model for the market, and the games that have come to Switch 2, such as Pokémon and Kirby, are strong performers in Japan.

Ok, what about the games?

The picture here is muddled. Nintendo sold-in 37.93 million Switch 2 games during the console’s first seven months. By comparison, it sold 27.48 million Switch 1 games during its first seven months.

But the install bases are vastly different. Based on these numbers, the Switch 1’s launch attach rate was 3.7 games for every console sold, vs 2.2 games for Switch 2.

But it’s complicated. Unlike Switch 1, Switch 2 is fully backwards compatible. 84% of Switch 2 buyers (up until September 30, 2025) were also Switch 1 owners. This means that most early adopters already had a library of games to play, and some of them had been updated and improved for the new platform.

Also, between the launch of Switch 2 and the end of 2025, Nintendo sold between 90 and 100 million Switch 1 games, some of which will have been to Switch 2 players.

The data is inconclusive.

What about third-party games?

There is a myth that third-party games don’t sell well on Nintendo platforms. In reality, titles like Minecraft, LEGO, Hogwarts Legacy, Stardew Valley, Just Dance and Crash Bandicoot have sold significant numbers on Nintendo Switch.

Some more mature games sell well - Doom, The Witcher 3 and GTA all performed strongly on Switch – but the results are typically lower and less consistent.

Switch 2’s early third-party support has included Cyberpunk 2077, Star Wars Outlaws, Assassin’s Creed Shadows and Final Fantasy VII: Remake, which are games more commonly associated with PC, PlayStation and Xbox. And the early results are relatively low. Nevertheless, these are older titles, and it’s not unreasonable to suggest that many early Switch 2 customers already have access to these games on other devices. It comes down to expectations, and Ubisoft said Assassin’s Creed Shadows on Switch 2 beat its projections.

Resident Evil: Requiem is a more telling product, as it launched on Switch 2 simultaneously with other platforms. Looking at select European markets, we can see that roughly 5% of Requiem’s sales came on Nintendo Switch 2. It’s not a big figure, but 5% of a high selling product can still be significant and profitable.

Ultimately, people buy Nintendo consoles for Nintendo games. Therefore, the third-party titles that will perform best on Switch 2 will be ones that match that audience profile.

What do you think?

Nintendo has some real challenges, certainly in the short-term and particularly in the West. The macro-economic conditions are extremely tough and its release slate is currently lacking. Nintendo has only announced a selection of titles for 2026, and the biggest Switch 2 games on its calendar – Pokémon Winds and Waves – aren’t due until 2027.

Combined with high DRAM and storage costs, I can see why investors are spooked by Nintendo at this point in the story.

But Nintendo has a strong base for Switch 2 already, and the performance of Pokémon Pokopia shows that players will come out if the games are there. And more broadly, Nintendo IP remains extremely strong. The upcoming Super Mario Galaxy movie is conservatively estimated to deliver $160 million over its five-day opening weekend next week.

Nintendo also has huge opportunity in digital. A new Switch game can often see over 80% of its sales coming from physical retailers. Whereas, PlayStation, Xbox and PC sees the majority of its new game sales happen via digital stores. If Nintendo can accelerate its digital business, it would offset many of the margin challenges it’s facing on hardware. It could also lead to a far more lucrative generation for the company, even if Switch 2 doesn’t match the lifetime sales of Switch 1.

Nintendo is actively trying to drive its digital business. Just this week it announced that digital versions of its games will be sold at a lower price than physical versions in the US (a situation that was already the case in other markets, including Europe). Nintendo has reasons to be optimistic here, because the early sales of Pokémon Pokopia as a digital product (the physical game had sold out at retailers) is encouraging.

In conclusion, Nintendo has some tricky things to navigate. But to quote Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick from our interview last week: “You’re not going to be having a benefit dinner for Nintendo anytime soon”.

VR developers cheer the removal of Meta’s Horizon Worlds

VR developers are relieved to see Horizon Worlds removed from the Meta Store.

Meta’s VR game has become a contentious issue for third-party developers and publishers. The game’s various ‘Worlds’ would dominate Meta Store, which is the world’s biggest retailer of VR video games, making it harder for VR studios to get visibility on the platform.

“This is good news for discovery,” says VR veteran and consultant Cassia Curran. “It used to be the case that the Meta Store would highlight specific worlds from Horizon Worlds, taking up valuable storefront space and shunting out games and apps that were independent of the platform. Also, quite annoyingly for most users, the default library layout would have random worlds listed in with the users’ purchased games and apps without their consent. It felt like Meta was trying to brute force an audience and engagement, rather than focusing on making an awesome product.”

Andrew Eiche, the CEO of Owlchemy Labs, which is the developer of VR games such as Job Simulator and Dimensional Double Shift, added: “I am encouraged to see Meta’s focus on the commercial health of the store. Having the same goal between the platform and the studios is good for the long-term health of the ecosystem.”

It’s some good news for VR developers. However, Meta’s pivot away from VR is a longer term concern for studios. The Quest range have been the market leading VR devices, partly because Meta has been willing to subsize the hardware to try and deliver a strong install base. It’s expected the company will be less aggressive in this area moving forward.

Meanwhile…

• Epic Games is laying off more than 1,000 employees due a drop in Fortnite engagement. The firm said it needed to make “major cuts to keep the company funded.” CEO Tim Sweeney revealed that the job cuts, together with $500 million in cost savings across contracting, marketing and “closing some open roles” will put the company in a more stable place. On today’s edition of the Show, Game File reporter Stephen Totilo revealed that Epic had just over 5,000 employees before the cuts, which is roughly how many staff they had back in 2023 before making over 800 redundancies. Therefore, between making those cuts and 2026, Epic had regrown to the size it was.

• PlayStation has closed Dark Outlaw Games, the studio founded last year by former Call of Duty Zombies lead Jason Blundell. It’s the second time Sony has parted ways with Blundell, as he was working on a project with the company as part of Deviation Games, but it was cancelled in 2024.

• UK trade organization TIGA says the UK game development sector lost 1,537 jobs last year, which is a 4.5% drop. It is the first time since 2011 that the number has declined instead of grown. The trade body said that the number of new studios being formed fell 30% for the third year in a row. There are now 2,110 game studios in the UK, down from a peak of 2,175 in 2023. TIGA has called on the UK Government to offer stronger tax relief for studios.

• Crimson Desert from Pearl Abyss has sold three million copies. The game received mixed critical reviews, which caused the company’s share price to drop nearly 30%. But things have rebounded due to the initial strong sales.

• PlanetPlay has unveiled Battle for the Habitats, a major biodiversity campaign featuring video game developers, publishers and players. Launching on Earth Day (April 22) and running until World Environment Day, the campaign looks to raise $1 million for the Rainforest Alliance and Oceana.

• Ubisoft’s Red Storm Entertainment will cease making video games, with 105 jobs lost. The studio will remain open, working on the Snowdrop Engine and handling some other services, including customer relations. It’s part of Ubisoft’s goal to save €500 million between March 2023 and March 2028.

• The US video game market generated $4.6 billion in spending during February, up 1% from last year, according to Circana. Resident Evil: Requiem’s strong launch and a 27% boost in subscription services helped keep revenue on video game content flat compared to February 2025. Nintendo Switch 2 hardware drove 22% year-on-year revenue growth compared to last February, but it was the PlayStation 5 that once again led the hardware market in both units and revenue.

• CD Projekt posted strong financial results. Revenue reached $235.2 million, which is a 9% year-on-year increase, while profit rose 33.7% to $161.4 million. This was driven by Cyberpunk 2077, which saw revenue grow 12% year-over-year.

• Krafton must reinstate former Unknown Worlds CEO Edward Gill and extend the terms on which his team can secure a $250 million bonus related to the upcoming Subnautica 2. Gill, alongside the studio’s other leaders Charles Cleveland and Adam McGuire, fell out with Krafton (the studio’s owner) over the bonus. The three accused Krafton of trying to avoid paying it out by forcing a delay on the game. Krafton reacted by accusing the three leaders of threatening to handle the game’s publishing itself, without using Krafton’s internal publishing resources. This led to the termination of their employment. Now, the Delaware Chancery Court has ordered Gill to be reinstated as CEO. Subnautica 2 is currently the most wishlisted game on Steam with over four million wishlists.

That’s it for today! It is Spring/Easter break next week, so we have a slightly reduced schedule. But we still have some fun pieces for you to enjoy. Until then, thank you for reading.

Listen now on Apple, Spotify or YouTube

In This Edition,
Scopely co-CEO Javier Ferreira on…
- The Western mobile market
- Lessons from Niantic
- Google fee changes
- Its acquisition strategy
- ‘The sphere of incompetence’

Monopoly Go is a bit of a rarity.

It’s something Ilkka Paananen, CEO of mobile giant Supercell, observed in his recent blog.

He noted that just 22 mobile games grossed $1 billion or more since 2020. 20 of those games came from developers in China, Japan and South Korea, and just two were made in the West: Royal Match by Dream Games and Monopoly Go from Scopely.

Paananen was critical of the West’s mobile efforts. He wrote: “The fact is, we have not brought radical new gameplay innovation to the market.”

So, as a company behind one of those two Western breakout hits, I asked Scopely co-CEO Javier Ferreira if he shares Paananen’s views.

“If we were having this conversation six years ago, and we were thinking about the scale of the market we have today… both of us would’ve been saying this is an amazing outcome,” says Ferreira. “On top of that, it’s unquestionable that gaming and play has won. We have billions and billions of people playing these products every day.

“Having said that, the industry has changed. What is successful today are not the same things that were successful five years ago. The path to success is different. You have to be nimble and be very adaptable. Five or 10 years ago, you still had a lot of people coming in and discovering mobile games. That is no longer the case. Five or 10 years ago, you still had a lot of people trying to build a long-lasting relationship with some of these games. That is not the case today. All of these billions of gamers are playing these games with really high levels of engagement. About 80% of our revenue comes from people that have been playing our games for more than a year.”

Ferreira says that big mobile companies want games that can last years or decades, but to succeed at doing that they are “asking players to abandon their [existing] experiences.”

“And not just try a new thing - we’ve seen success in people trying new things - but to try and stay. And stay not for a week, or two months, but stay for years. You’ve got to make a gamer feel something very special to achieve that

“That’s maybe the internalization that still hasn’t happened across the industry. The reality is that there’s less of a need for new games. But exceptional games that make players feel [very special], can achieve levels of success that are unrivalled and bigger than anything that was happening a decade ago. Monopoly Go got to $6 billion faster than any mobile game in history. And we launched it in 2023 when a lot of people were saying that it’s not possible to launch new mobile games.”

We were speaking to Ferreira to mark Scopely’s 15 years in business. During our interview, we discussed what it’s learnt from its acquisition of Pokémon Go developer Niantic, the opening up of the app stores, PC and console games, future acquisitions, licensed IP and its obsession with getting things wrong,

You can hear the full interview above. And here are our highlights below.

‘We are never right’

Scopely is obsessed with learning.

“We are an ever-evolving organization,” Ferreira tells us. “Nothing is ever done. We have this idea of iterating to greatness, and underlying that is the belief we’re never right. We are always in the pursuit of greater levels of accuracy, which means: can we find better ideas than the ones we have?

“We are never right. The leadership of the company is very clear about that. We are very clear that nobody has been more wrong at Scopely than [co-CEO] Walter [Driver] and I have. That’s a fact. If we can normalize that, then we can focus a lot energy on the real work, which is learning and growing.”

Ferreira says success in video games means constant evolution.

“You don’t choose the conditions of success,” he says. “The market has certain characteristics, certain dynamics, and what you can choose is how you operate, and how you react to that marketplace. The opportunities are huge. There are still companies that are growing very meaningfully, and have found the success. It requires evolution and innovation at the company level.

“And at the individual level, too. Who we were as game leaders, as game makers, five years ago, is not going to serve us for who we need to be today. And most likely who we are today, is not going to serve us in terms of who we need to be three or four years.”

I asked how do you facilitate that learning when you’ve got 3,000 employees split across offices in entirely different countries?

“These things need to happen organically at companies,” he explains. “I don’t think in a talent industry you can govern from the top. So, we try to distribute decision making and behaviors. And then we elevate and promote the people that best follow or live our values.”

Niantic is teaching Scopely about community

By acquiring Niantic, Scopely added Pokémon Go to its roster of titles. But the acquisition was about more than just one big revenue generator.

“Niantic has been truly inspiring,” Ferreira says. “The game had an amazing 2025. It’s the ninth year that it’s been live, and it’s been the biggest year in the history of the game. The team has inspired us with two things. First, the fundamental deep commitment to the community. When you go to these Pokémon Go Fest events, the work that the team puts into these, and the bonding that’s created with the player base, is just extraordinary. It’s a good reminder of why we do what we do.

“The other thing is that they are very mission-oriented. They want to make the real world more fun and interesting through play. That’s a mission that’s exciting. To stay true to that mission, you’ve got to pay a price. It restricts the types of things that you can do. The belief in that mission and the discipline around it has energized the whole company.”

It’s eyeing up PC and console

Scopely is known for mobile, but it’s previously expressed an interest in the PC and console space. When we asked Ferreira about that, he said: “If there’s a gamer, we want to be there.”

But the PC and console market is very different to mobile. In this very newsletter, analysts such as Matthew Ball, Nicholas Lovell and Owen Mahoney have discussed how there are ‘multiple game industries’, with mobile having vastly different characteristics to PC and console.

But Ferreira, slightly, disagrees.

“They’re the same industry,” he says. “I’ve seen Matthew Ball’s presentation and it’s super insightful. And maybe the drivers of success are different, and the capabilities required are different, but I still think that the fundamental product, or experience, that you are delivering is the same. It’s just different types of players. The players of Monopoly are different than from Pokémon players that are different from Star Trek players, that are different from Call of Duty players, that are different from FIFA players.

“I go back to players. They are our bosses. We’ll try to live up to their expectations wherever they are.”

Ultimately, Ferreira relishes the idea of doing something he doesn’t know how to do.

“I enjoy it the most when we are operating in our sphere of incompetence, when we hit against things that we don’t know how to do,” he says. “That’s how we’ve got better. That’s how we’ve grown. Believe me, there are a number of projects that we are working on where we are hitting our heads against that wall.

“The opportunity to go to new platforms, with new gameplay and genres, it’s exciting. Hopefully we can talk about some of those in the future.”

It is not obsessed with licensed IP

Scopely’s biggest games are mostly based on existing brands, such as Monopoly, Pokémon, Star Trek, WWE and Marvel.

But despite how it looks, Scopely isn’t all about external IP.

“We are trying to build people’s favorite things,” Ferreira says. “For some people, Pokémon is their favorite thing, Marvel is their favorite thing.

“So, we’re excited about partnering with such IPs. I don’t think we are interested in IP as a universe. We are interested in the fandom and communities that exist around those IPs. And those communities can be built around original IP and third party IP. It’s not the IP that governs our strategy. It’s making sure that we have, and are building, deep communities.”

It’s not fussed by Google’s fee changes

Google has lowered its store fees following an agreement with Epic. The change should prove a boost to mobile developers of all sizes. But when I asked Ferreira about it, he almost shrugged.

“I could say the lower the fees the better. But it’s not a big driver of how we think about the business today or in the future. There are bigger themes that a success depends on than those.”

What about the idea that a more open mobile ecosystem enables a more direct relationship with players?

“I’ve never felt that neither Google or Apple have restricted our ability to build direct relationships with players.”

It wants to acquire businesses that make it better

“Obviously, with acquisitions you’re adding revenue or audience,” Ferreira says. “And, of course, those things matter. But we are always on the lookout for how these acquisitions make the company better. How do they enhance the capabilities that we have? How do they accelerate the journey that we’re on? In the case of Niantic, we were valuing the communities that they had built. They are the most engaged and largest community in mobile gaming, bar none. And we thought that was an incredible, unique asset which could make the company better.

“In the case of [recent investment] Loom Games, [its puzzle game] Pixel Flow is amazing with some phenomenal long-term retention and KPIs. But what I’m really excited about is their prototyping culture. Its way of making game is so different from the way that we’ve been making games.”

He concludes: “We believe that you build a stronger, more resilient and more strategically powerful company if you can bring in people and teams that can accelerate what you’re doing and enhance the DNA of the company.”

That’s it for today. We’ll be back tomorrow with our market report (paid subscribers only), and on Thursday with our latest news and analysis show. Until then, thank you for reading.