How a nearly six-hour phone call with the Russo brothers changed Fortnite, and other stories
What we learned from The Game Business Live. Plus! Nintendo Switch 2 console sales
Welcome back to The Game Business!
So yesterday we put on our first ever event called The Game Business Live. I may have mentioned it once or twice.
It went well (or at least, that’s what people told me. Maybe they were just being polite). Twitch, Wizards of the Coast, Netflix, Blizzard, AGBO and Circana all joined us to share insight and stories.
But what did we learn? Over the next week, we will be publishing all the video from the event and writing up all the sessions. But while we’re busy getting all that ready, I thought it was worth picking out five key stories from the various talks, panels and interviews.
(Plus! Check out our bonus Nintendo Switch 2 story at the end)
Enjoy!
US game spending could drop 4.7% in 2025
Circana has significantly lowered its forecast for video game spending in the US.
The data tracker believes the market will deliver $56.5 billion this year, a drop of 4.7% over 2024.
“Coming into this year, we had a 4.3% growth forecast,” said Circana executive director Mat Piscatella, who opened The Game Business Live event. “Of course, it helped that GTA 6 was still in the year, and it sure helped that we didn’t have the tariff situation and some of the other situations we have right now.
“Mobile is struggling a bit this year. The console world has been struggling going into the launch of Switch 2, and we will see how powerful and sustained that launch is. But generally we have a consumer who is a little bit concerned, they’re holding back a little bit, and they really need to be pushed with the concept of value for their gaming dollar.”
During his talk, Piscatella also revealed that 40% of consumers plan to cut back on spend due to the impact of US tariffs, with a lot of that cut coming from entertainment spending.
The Russo brothers are responsible for Fortnite’s movie tie-ins
Joe and Anthony Russo spent five-and-a-half hours on the phone trying to convince Epic to allow Thanos into Fortnite.
The Russo brothers directed Avengers Infinity War and Avengers Endgame, and they were eager to see the movies’ villain Thanos invade Fortnite in 2018. However, initially Epic’s chief creative officer Donald Mustard (who now works with the Russo brothers at their production company AGBO) was resistant to the idea.
“It was Joe and Anthony who got together with Donald and convinced him to put those types of characters inside of Fortnite,” revealed AGBO’s president of interactive technology Pete Wanat, who was speaking as part of a panel at The Game Business Live.
“Originally it was like, no, we are not interested in putting outside characters into Fortnite. And Joe and Anthony got together and had a phone call with Donald. It was supposed to be a half hour call, but five and half hours later, they were still talking about it. And Donald basically changed his mind. He said, ‘hey, you know what, we’re going to do this’. And after that, the world exploded about what kind of integrations you could have between film and TV and games.”
The majority of players of Diablo Immortal are new to Diablo and Blizzard
Blizzard joined us at The Game Business Live to share insight into its hit mobile game Diablo Immortal.
Blizzard’s senior director of mobile marketing Shannon Williams and VP and executive producer Peiwen Yao discussed how they translated a traditionally core PC and console game into the smartphone space. And the duo reveal that the majority of Diablo Immortal players are entirely new to the series.
“What we’ve found over the past three years looking at the data, it is primarily a different audience,” Williams told us. “The majority of the players are new to Blizzard or new to the franchise. So we are really excited about this audience expansion, and our ability to serve players their first experience to these wonderful worlds we create.”
Yao said: “The vision of Diablo Immortal was really to make it more accessible. Bring it to more players. And mobile is a very, very obvious choice. It is accessible, it is convenient, and our vision was to bring the AAA experience, uncompromised, but on a mobile device that players can enjoy anytime and anywhere.”
GTA 5 on Twitch is “improvisational performance art”
Back in April, Twitch shared some impressive stats around video games on the platform in 2024.
It revealed that over 1.4 billion hours was spent watching GTA 5 videos on Twitch last year, which made it the No.1 most-watched game on the live-streaming platform. It comes ahead of League of Legends (1.19 billion hours), Valorant (804 million hours), Fortnite (539 million hours) and Call of Duty (451 million hours).
Twitch CEO Dan Clancy discussed GTA 5’s success on the platform during a fireside chat at The Game Business Live.
“GTA is interesting,” he began. “Of the different things on Twitch, as you go down that list [of top games] GTA is the one that does not fit exactly like all the other ones. A big part of GTA is GTA role play. With something like League of Legends, if you don’t play League of Legends, it is hard to watch it for hours if you don’t play it. Because that’s part of the magic.
“With GTA 5, it has really become improvisational performance art. I was a theater major undergrad, and I’ve often said that there’s a theater school that should just teach a course in GTA role play, where the theater students are acting out characters. An interesting part of what happens, is you get these emergent stories, because the streamers are playing characters in this virtual world. Drama ensues and story develops.”
He adds that although he is disappointed in the delay to GTA 6, just like everyone else, he doesn’t expect the game to be on PC to begin with, or to have a new online component at the start, so GTA 5 is likely to remain dominant on Switch for a long time to come.
Twitch is “emphatically not” hurting video games
We had to ask the question, are all those hours spent watching gaming on Twitch a good thing for the video game business?
Everyone is competing for time, including both Twitch and games publishers. And surely some of that 1.4 billion hours spent watching GTA 5 are hours that could have been spent playing GTA 5.
“Is it cannibalizing the gameplay? Emphatically not,” Clancy insisted on stage at The Game Business Live. “What it ends up doing is if you have an affinity for a title, usually if you’re watching streamers and spending time in that community, that drives you to play that title more.
“You talked about the attention economy. Of course, there’s competition with all sorts of things. The more the characters and the narrative stays at the top of your attention, either because you’re playing the game or you’re engaging on Twitch, that maintains that positive association with that game.”
You can still download this free Game Business Live report from Ampere
Data firm Ampere released a free report to coincide with the The Game Business Live, covering many of the topics we talked about during the show. And it’s free to download.
The report covers:
The impact of the GTA 6 delay and the Switch 2 launch on the games market
The battle for consumer time
the impact of cross-media activity with a focus on the Minecraft movie
Gaming audiences across Twitch, YouTube, TikTok and Instagram
And building and growing AAA IP through mobile
You can download the free report through here.
That’s it for today. We will be back on Thursday with our first full recording from The Game Business Live. See you then.