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In This Edition,
Xbox staff despair
Eurogamer editors launch new site
State of video games media
Atari plots ‘IMDB for video games’
Hello there,
Welcome back to The Game Business.
On the Show today, we are joined by journalist, media entrepreneur and former Eurogamer editor Alex Donaldson, who has just launched a new publication called Respec. Alex and I chat about the video game media, including some troubling statistics around the number of journalists. Plus, we spend a bit of time on this week’s distressing Xbox news.
Elsewhere, Atari’s new European president Andreas Deptolla chats to us about what’s going on at that company, including turning MobyGames into the ‘IMDB for games’.
You can listen to the discussions in full via the links at the top. But if you prefer to read, we’ve picked out some of the key facts, stories and quotes below. Enjoy!
Confused Xbox staff ‘living in fear’ after first round of brutal lay-offs
Xbox employees fear they’re next as the company butchers its teams after five years of failure.
Speaking to The Game Business, more than a dozen Xbox marketing and development staff say they were “stunned” by some of the cuts, particularly citing the way the firm had butchered Doom and Quake developer id Software.
“Dear God,” said one senior leader. “If that team wasn’t safe, then who is?”
One leader at id Software told me that if they had known the level of cuts facing the team, they would have tried to explore alternative options, such as a sale of the studio. “Although being independent can be out of the frying pan and into the fire,” he said.
The other staff we spoke to said they were “living in fear” about where the axe might fall next. One studio leader admitted they didn’t know what Xbox expected from them right now, and whether there was anything they could do to avoid job cuts.
Another told us they were finding it hard to focus on the job in front of them with the threat of redundancy looming overhead.
Earlier this week, Xbox announced it would be shedding 3,200 employees over the next 12 months, beginning with 1,600 staff. The worst affected teams include the Xbox platform team, id Software (Doom), ZeniMax Online (Elder Scrolls Online) and Obsidian (Avowed, The Outer Worlds 2). Meanwhile, the firm has divested of the studios Compulsion Games (South of Midnight), Double Fine Productions (Psychonauts), Ninja Theory (Hellblade) and Undead Labs (State of Decay).
The cuts follow multiple years of missed targets and failed games, many of which were commissioned to bolster the Xbox Game Pass subscription service. Game Pass has struggled to reach its initial goals and has seen its audience decline by four million over the past two years.
Game Pass was billed as the ‘Netflix of games’, but even from its early years, third-party publishers were sceptical about the concept. In numerous interviews, including one with me in 2022, Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick said that a subscription service built on new games didn’t make sense for publishers or consumers.
Number of journalists continues to decline as former Eurogamer editors launch new website
More than 250 specialist and over 90 mainstream video game journalists have left the industry this year, according to latest Press Engine data.
Press Engine is the PR tool that developers use to send out press releases and media invites, and it tracks the number of journalists in the industry. The latest data shows:
In 2026, 349 journalists have left the business, including 255 specialist writers, while there have been 63 new people join.
Therefore, the net decline in video game journalists is 286, which is just 11 behind the drop reported in the entire of 2025 (297).
106 of those journalists comes from ‘tier 1’ media, which are the bigger and more professional game outlets.
The US (-104) and UK (-54) are the hardest hit countries, but there’s also been big drops in Italy (-26), Spain (-23), France (-22), and Brazil (-20)
The current worst year for video game media losses is 2024, when 544 specialists and 166 mainstream writers dropped from the list.
In total since 2020, there has been a fall of 1,674 specialist video game journalists and 621 mainstream journalists.
Despite the results, a number of new media outlets have emerged from established names, ranging from newsletters to podcasts to full websites. This week sees the launch of Respec, a new media outlet by former leaders of Eurogamer and VG247, including Alex Donaldson and Tom Orry.
“One of the things we looked at when starting this website, is that there’s tremendous talent out there,” Donaldson told us on today’s edition of The Game Business Show. Donaldson also runs the specialist publication RPG Site.
“I am not particularly scared about Google AI, because we serve an audience who specifically wants what we think, rather than a chewed up and spat back out version of what we think. It’s been a difficult year for games media, but we’ve seen really strong growth on RPG Site over the last 12 months. One of the things that’s beginning to change over the last 12 months, is that games PR and marketers are starting to realize that you can get more with a placement at a smaller, more dedicated outlet, which also has an audience that can evangelize, than you might get from a brand with the biggest Similarweb number.”
“A good media brand can feel a bit like a club. If you can build that club, you can survive search apocalypse.”
Respec, like RPG Site, looks to target a specific audience and build a dedicated community through a more playful take on industry news and reviews. That will mean the site isn’t too reliant on search traffic, which is where some of the bigger outlets has struggled.
“A good media brand can feel a bit like a club,” continued Donaldson. “If you can build that club, you can survive search apocalypse.”
He added: “That’s a diminishing battlefield, and it costs you a piece of your soul. Absolute rubbish headlines. A headline like ‘Bethesda game has completely shut down’, ‘Assassin’s Creed Black Flag Resynced officially confirms popular feature’. It works for Google Discover, but it just disrespects the intelligence of the reader and it makes your website look crap.”
Check out our full chat with Donaldson in today’s Show above.
Atari wants to build the IMDB of games
Retro games giant Atari wants to turn MobyGames into the‘IMDB of games’.
That’s according to the firm’s new European president Andreas Deptolla. The website, which Atari acquired in 2022, is famous for its detailed list of video game credits, and the firm is now expanding upon that with a Pro service akin to what IMDB provides the TV and movie industries.
“IMDB is the comparison, where people can outline their portfolio and get opportunities in the industry,” Deptolla told The Game Business.
“When we acquired MobyGames, the first thing was all about preservation. So, we looked at how we make the site more usable and improve search and a few other things. We then did a lot of surveys among the current users. And the feedback that we got was like, “Hey, it’s really interesting for me to show others which games I worked on.” Moby is world-class in the credits area, but then also seeing with whom did they work on those games? Who are other industry professionals that they worked with? What is the news about them?
“And then people said, ‘Hey, can I use my Moby credentials for applications for jobs?” And then over time and with all of that feedback, our product team realized there’s a gap in the market. And that led us to build Moby Pro.”
MobyGames will remain reliant on a network of contributors and approvers, although Atari has hired a product manager for the website alongside “a very small but mighty development team.”
And Deptolla feels such a service will prove important in a modern video game industry, with the rise in freelancers and contractors.
“The industry is changing. It’s a lot now about freelance work and smaller gigs. And the question becomes: how can I get recognized? How can I find opportunities? And how can I showcase my portfolio and the value that I’ve created? That’s the foundation. Now, if you can use Moby as a way to network into the next [job], because you know you’ve worked with a couple of people in the past… that’s essentially a nice add.”
There’s more from Deptolla and Atari Europe in today’s The Game Business Show.
Meanwhile…
Project Fantasy – the multiplayer RPG made by James Bond and Hitman studio IO Interactive – has been returned to the developer. The game was being funded and published by Xbox. IO has the capability to publish the game itself, but losing that funding means it has had to close its Istanbul studio. The company said: “we had to find a new balance for the long-term future of the studio, focused on the success of our main internal core titles instead of external projects and potential mobile game derivatives’. IO told us in May it would be returning to its Hitman series next after finishing development of the acclaimed 007: First Light. It’s still not clear if the team will work on more James Bond games beyond its current DLC plans.
Nintendo is discontinuing the original Nintendo Switch in Europe. This is likely due to new EU legislation that requires devices have easily replaceable batteries. The Switch 2 is getting a redesign to comply with the new rule.
Sticking with Nintendo, Mario Kart Tour will shut down in September. Sensor Tower data says the game was downloaded 300 million times and generated $261 million.
Elsewhere in mobile, Scopely has rebranded the Niantic games team, which is responsible for Pokémon Go, Pikmin Bloom, and Monster Hunter Now. The developer will now be called Scopely Explore. Scopely bought Niantic for $3.5 billion last year.
Cyberpunk 2077 has now sold 40 million copies worldwide.
Meccha Chameleon has now hit 15 million sales, less than a week after reaching ten million. The hide and seek indie game was released in June.
That’s it from us today. Join us next week when we’ll be talking to Netflix’s Sean Krankel. Meanwhile, paid subscribers can look forward to our next market report and TGB Micro, where we’ll look more at Sony’s decision to abandon the disc.
Until then, thank you for reading.
