35% of Marvel's Wolverine sales were physical, as Zelda reveal boosts Switch 2

This week, we discuss the consolidation of the video game business. We reveal who came out top in a competitive September. And we chat with the European boss of Crimson Desert publisher, Pearl Abyss. [music] Hello and welcome to the Game Business Show. Now, this week's edition is sponsored by WeHype. Now, if you're releasing a game, you know how hard it can be to cut through the noise, especially when release windows are as packed as it is right now. Big names drive reach, but some of the most authentic, trusted recommendations come from the thousands of smaller content creators who are the closest with their communities. The problem is that they've always been the hardest creators to reach at massive scale. Now, that's exactly what WeHype's new official integration with Twitch solves. We hype sponsorship campaigns can now be sent directly inside Twitch sponsorship dashboard, putting your game in front of hundreds of thousands of creators of all sizes natively on Twitch. creators opt in themselves in a couple of clicks, so there's no cold outreach, just hundreds

of creators going live with your game when it matters most. EA's Battlefield was among the first to run a campaign through the integration. For the past 10 years, We Hype has helped game publishers build creator campaigns that reach the right audiences. From launch week to seasonal updates and new markets. This year, We Hype supported Pearl Abyss with data, strategy, and creator campaigns for the launch of Crimson Desert. We'll be talking to Pearl Abyss in just a moment. Um, whether planning your next launch or looking to try sponsorships at a mass scale on Twitch, make sure to grab a chat with the WiiHype team. You can get in touch at partnerships.com. Now, back to the show. Right now, in a moment, I'm going to be welcoming our guest. His name's Yos Vandrin, and he's been on before. He's going to be talking to us about the consolidation in the video game business. And knowing us, we're about to talk about other things as well. But before I welcome him on, I've got some data to share. It's been unusually long time since we've done the data thing. And as September was such a big month for video game releases, I thought, let's do it. And there's some really positive stuff and some really surprising stuff in here. So, I'm going

to start with console sales data. Now, I don't have it for every market, but I do have some UK data from Neielson IQ. The data covers August 23rd to September 26th, and it reveals 125,000 consoles were sold in the UK over that period. That's 78% up over August and 9% up over September last year. It's units of course and it's just the UK. But I think I think it bodess well for the other markets. Now consoles are more expensive this year. So the revenue was up even more. PS5 sales is unit sales up 117% in September versus August and up 24% over September last year. It was the number one console of the month in the UK. However, overall it's still down 26% year to date. Switch 2 was up 70% over August and 17% over September last year. It was the number two console of the month and overall it's up 13% year to date. So it's doing still well um in terms of year-to- date numbers. And in third spot is Xbox. Now this one was up 30% over August. Actually down 29% over September last year but overall Xbox

sales are up 1.7% year to date. Now UK as I say this isn't the world but it is a good can be a good indicator of what we might see in other markets. And there's a few things that are happening here because this data window does include the reveal of GTA 6 on Netflix. I think that's had a big impact upon sales of next generation consoles. We also have some big releases like Wolverine and we'll come on to that in a moment. On the Nintendo side, they had the big direct which revealed the Zelda reveal. So, I think that's probably done good to them as well. It's all bodess really well for November. But let's look at some of the games. Um, I've got sales data estimates here from Ampair Analysis. They track 45 countries including all the big ones like US, Japan, France, Germany, UK, China, you know, all the big countries are covered. And according to Ampair analysis, no surprise, EA Sports FC was the number one game on PlayStation 5 and Xbox. On PS5, it sold nearly 5 million copies across those tracked markets. That's not a surprise. The number two game on PlayStation was Wolverine. Also not a surprise. According to Ampe, it sold 2.16 million copies across the markets. I think probably a little bit lower than

PlayStation would have liked, but we don't know. Um, interesting stat with Wolverine. 35% of its sales in September were the physical version of the game. Over a third of the game was sold in boxes. In Europe, according to GSD, more than half of Wolverine sales were sold in boxes. More than half. So more people in Europe bought the game in a box than they did as a download. Now, that number will go down in time, I know, and it does differ by market. So, twothirds of Wolverine sales in the UK were digital, but in France, twothirds were physical. We talked about this in previous episodes, how about how markets like France, they like their boxes. Um, so I'm I'm for me the stats like that sort of show up. I'm not sure PS5 players are ready to go fully digital. And it does be clear it does it does vary by by game. Like Ampe has got loads of stats here around the PS5 games of um uh they did well in in in September. Like 7% of EA Sports FC sales were digital were physical. Um but you know 30% of Onamushia sales were physical. 36% of

Blood of the Dawn Walker sales were physical. Physical is still a big thing. Um, and uh I know I've said that before, but I'm gonna I'm gonna keep saying it. Um, uh, there's some other really interesting stats in this. Um, uh, Halloween the game did really well on console, coming out ahead of games like Control and Silent Hill Townfall. Both those games didn't make the top 10 on Xbox or PC. By the way, Halloween was a number two game on Xbox behind EA Sports FC. Sold 650,000 units on that platform. Onimushi from Capcom did good numbers on all platforms. It did nearly 850,000 units on Steam, 725,000 units on PS5, 177,000 units on Xbox. It's all ampair data. It is all estimates to be clear, but you know, it clearly did well. For me, what stood out is how how many new IPs did well. War dogs topped the Steam charts with 3 million sales. We know that. Friends game How to Fish also performed exceptionally well. Blood of the Dawn Walker, which is the new RPG from former developers of The Witcher, was top five on all three platforms. It's it's a really it's a really

fascinating chart. Some of the things that we thought were going to do well in September, I'm not saying they did badly, but they were they were outdone by games like Halloween and on and and and uh uh Blood of the Dawn Walker and War Dogs and Body Cam and and loads of things like that. It's check you check out the full charts on today's um game business newsletter. I'm not going to read it all out here. You'll find that uh uh pretty boring. Just head to the game.com and you can get that. Right, let's welcome this week's big guest. He's one of the industry's leading analysts, perhaps even the next Matthew Ball, dare I say it. He is the writer of the Super Yoast playlist, Substat, which I fully recommend, by the way. And he's a lovely man that I've known for many, many years. He is, of course, Yoast Van Dunan. Hello, Yoast. Welcome to the show.
Thanks for having me.
Uh, I've just been sharing some facts and figures about September and and sort of end of August. Any of it catch your eye?
Yeah, it's been an interesting month. Everybody is getting ready sort of full force for the for the announcement the release, right? It's um it's not going

to go any other way than we know that it's going to go. We don't have to say what title is launching. And so then it's sort of interesting to see how everybody else is reacting uh in in the on the fringes and in response to it, I guess. And so I, you know, first things first, I did like the Saturday Night Live skit of having uh Link [laughter] Warren sort of go at it for a bit. You know, it's from [snorts] a just an observational point like when the industry is always being mocked, you know, there's always sort of like this underhanded commentary around it. I think it's hilarious. And I think it's it's interesting that mainstream media picks up on the fact that Nintendo is like, "Yeah, whatever. we're doing ocarina time GTA be damned like we got what we got and we're not uh you know we're confident about it. So, so that's one observ I think you know we're going to see sort of some of the pillar releases but then there's going to be a lot of nothing a lot of you know why would you launch against this the reason

or the secondary observation here for me is that is sort of the the changing of the guard at different companies right so Xbox has had a lot of layoffs as we know um not exclusively of course on the creative side in fact it's a lot of management people that have been shuffled around or have left on their own accord over the last 18 months 12 months and you see them pop up everywhere else. So, when you and I were both at Gamescom, I had more than a few meetings and sort of sightings of former executives from both Xbox and some of them at PlayStation as well. They're now wearing a different shirt, right? They have a different logo on their polo shirt and they walk around for a big tech company and they have a different flag that they carry, which is, you know, in many ways, I think an indication of what's to come next. It's like once GTA launches and we go we get over that hump, you know, I think in many ways the road will be much more open for other companies to jump in. The road will be clear for other, you know,

large companies to make their play properly in the in the wake of GTA 6. So, so those are some of the things I see for the remainder of the year.
Yeah. Well, I think I loved that Saturday night. I know there was the joke at the beginning about, you know, um I don't play games cuz I've had sex sort of classic line, but which was, you know, it was a joke from 2002, but I but even I actually quite I I I did kind of um I enjoyed it. I also enjoyed it because um I know other people had used the Barbenheimer comparison, but I'm pretty sure I'm the only one that put it in a headline. So, I'm like to think that the SNL um other to leaders of the game business, but um what I found quite fascinating about that, you talk about Zelda. Um, it made me think because would this whole Ocarine of Time sort of versus GTA fun thing, even though they're not really vers each other. Um, Call of Duty would normally be in this conversation yet somehow. I think because of Nintendo's placement of the game into November. I don't know, maybe I'm overthinking this. I think that's they've made themselves the the the jokey competitor to GTA 6 and Call of

Duty almost become silenced. Um, they're coming out the week the week earlier. It's it we're only two weeks away three weeks away from Call of Duty coming out and it's strange not for it even though it looks great and great not to be part of the um conversation at the moment. I guess it will be as it picks up.
Yeah, I think I think Xbox really put all of its money behind the Gears of War eay,
you know. I think that that was their big one like that's the book end and then we're going to have a little quiet time and get GTA up and you know spun up. They've renewed the license too. If you recall a week ago, they announced that they had this sort of new consolidated license with the Take2 Interactive, which doesn't really change too much. It sort of consolidates some of their existing things, but they want to get all of their third party titles, I think, set for the time that's ahead of them.
And so, they probably are holding short on some of the marketing and some of the the effort behind, you know, the Call of Duties. Does it really need a big

blowout?
Well, yeah. The community for that is very like I'm talking about it from a media point of view and actually Call of Duty has become so focused on the influencer space from a PR and marketing perspective that it does sometimes does pass us by. But I don't know. I think I think I the game I've heard good things about it and after last year's disappointment, I just I think it'll be interesting. And I um the other a few things I picked up I was really pleased to see console sales spike and I know I've only got the UK data at the moment but I think that's probably the GTA 6 reveal and the Zelda reveal which bodess well for for for the launch of those games I think um particularly after the price rises. Um I was also um surprised I wasn't surprised actually to see Wolverine's physical sales so high um because Spider-Man 2 had the same stat even though it was a few years ago. Uh but it does make me it just sort of cements in my mind that I think I don't think PlayStation fans are ready yet for that disc switch off. Um at least some of them aren't.
No, I'm with you on that. I mean physical sales I mean so it's both sort

of the industry data but also the casual observation in my classroom if you will and it's particularly around strong IP people have a a a need to collect you know like the the thing about GTA this I would have done this differently right but the the GTA box the whatever collector's box that's the one with the map in it that used to come with the game if you recall you know the same thing with you know things like around the Marvel universe for us is like these are heavy collectors. They want to have the little box with the pretty pictures and the swag. I think that's where the physical sales are still incredibly relevant for the consumer markets and the industry is ready to move on. It's like, yeah, not so fast. Like it's this is increasingly a big part of it. In fact, you could argue if you look at other industries, whether it's music or fashion, merchandising is an increasingly large part of the overall revenue. And so it's a bit of a, you know, you you know, are we missing an opportunity here to extend the fan experience? Like why isn't there more

available even at a lower price point? I think, you know,
this luxury category is cool, but you got to give people what they want.
Yeah. I'm I'm talked about it at length, but I think it also depends on the market actually because some of the stats was it twothirds over twothirds of um people in France bought Wolverine physically. And so for me that's [clears throat] like well France are certainly he obviously varies by market but um we've talked about it before I just I think that just sort of cementss my thought view and I was pleased actually from September to see
two of the big games were War Dogs and Blood of the Dawn Walker which is a new IP from Independent Studios which is which is it happens a lot. I know it's not that infrequent but it's good to see but um anyway um shall we talk about because you've just done some uh research into the consolidation of of the business. um you've you've you've been busy on it. You've is it a threepart um series that you're preparing?
Yeah, it's um let me uh let me lead it in, which is to say so [snorts] for the longest time like my sort of angle on a

lot of things is that games are amazing of course, but they're developed and designed and published in not in a vacuum but in a market with lots of restrictions and constraints and opportunities. And so if you look at the economic structure of an creative industry, it gives you a sense of direction of how things go. So that's not unique to games, of course, that applies to all media and entertainment industries, but nobody really does it. So fine, I'll do it. I've collected over the last 20 years uh a data set that looks at all of the major companies private and public and then aggregate their market shares based on revenue uh across different categories PC console mobile countries and so on just to get a sense of like who's dominating the space right when we talk about GTA 6 it's like you know sort of that's the big one left um that one takes so much market share in all these uh in all these aspects But we used to have a games market where you had lots of pure play p publicly traded

publishers like EA, Activision, Blizzard and so on. And so the structure of the economy shifted. So the uh short form sort of the the summary of that is that over the last couple years like 10% of publishing revenue uh is now controlled by 56 companies. So 56% of publishing revenues is controlled by 10 companies. Sorry, I'm saying this the wrong way around. And so when it the top 10 companies own and control that much of the market share, it's very difficult for everybody else to launch into the industry. Um, and that's remarkable because we had a transition when mobile came around where everything dropped in terms of concentration. All of a sudden it was much lower because you had more platforms, more people and so you see this reconsolidation where cons consoles were historically very consolidated and PC came out in the early 2000s if you recall with of course Steam and it became this hugely distributed industry and then mobile came after it and so everybody sort of thought like oh no big deal. um that's changed now to the point

where it's uh it's breaking through the ceilings of uh say the FCC or the CMA's metrics for concentrated industries and so suddenly now we are you know we're looking at an industry that's consolidating and it's impacting the creative outputs so that's sort of the the topline finding right so the top 10 companies control most of the markets and what does that mean for everybody else
I found it really interesting because obviously the data is the data you can't really challenged that. But the I had Undead Labs on the show this week um talking about obviously they were part of Xbox and become independent and they went out we need to find a publisher. They went out looking for a publisher and the guy who runs Undead Labs he hasn't had to do that for a long time. When he had to do that before it was like EA activities and Ubisoft. It was like it was a handful of companies and now he's presented with like huge number of potential publishers and we've you know we just had a big Star Wars game come out and that's by Secret Mode and Clare Obscure was by Kepler and Warog is by Team 17 and it feels like there are more publishers than ever breaking

through and that's before we get to the self-publishing side of stuff but you're suggesting actually that these organizations are going to get you know either going to get bought up or they'll be going to be playing they're playing in a smaller smaller slice of the pie.
It's um Yes, that's correct. So the but there is a degree to which we have more sort of the double A style companies that are finding success.
Mhm.
That has everything to do with the fact that the large game companies in the world, they can only afford so many shots. Well, maybe that's why Call of Duty is sort of taking a backseat this season, you know, but they at a at a high level, you know, the sort of multi-billion dollar scale, you can't afford to take that many shots on gold. It's just too expensive. Uh, you know, the risk is too great. And so, you put all of your eggs in one basket. This is why you have these blockbuster releases, but that's its own category. In fact, um, month or two ago, I wrote a piece on sort of the this recurrent sort of the the comeback of the mid market on Steam.

Yeah, we have blockbuster titles coming out and that's true, but the double layers of the world are finding success. So, it's
um
while market share is controlled by the large companies, innovation and sort of growth is coming from the bottom and the middle increasingly. I saw also uh Sean Leaden I think finalized his fund former PlayStation head of studios you know and he's focused very clearly on DA studios like that's his uh that's his growth thesis in that sense so so that's what you're up against and so I say consolidation not to throw my hands in the air saying like well that's it we're done now it's that's the that's the market circumstance and so if you want to zigg then you got to first figure out where all the big dogs are zagging so to say right and I think that that's really the the lesson from me.
You also you do predict though that it's going to get to what 2/3 by 2030 of of publisher revenue will be amongst those amongst that top 10.
Yeah. I mean it's a function of a few

things. So you have to immediately break the industry out into mobile uh PC and console.
Console of course is console that's always going to be consolidated. Always has been in a sense.
Yeah.
PC has gotten very expensive. Um and it's increasingly difficult. It's encouraging to see that Steam is trying a little harder to bring visibility to everybody else, but it's still relatively difficult to do it there. Mobile is the hardest one. And because that's half of everything, you know, you see these incredibly successful companies like Supercell or Dream Games, but they spend 95 99% of their their revenues on marketing and user acquisition. And so,
so that's where a large part of that consolidation comes from. That's why I would say twothirds will be owned by 2030 by by the top companies because it's it's really just who has the deepest pockets. The only there's only a few ways out of that, right? And one of them is sort of innovation from the middle or some technological disruption

in the form of AI. But really depends on the degree to which companies and consumers are comfortable adopting it. The AI thing was well loads of things I could spin off that one. I think um well I'll ask though we had a little bit of a conversation on LinkedIn about this which is a dangerous place to have a conversation. Star Wars game came out this week, right? And it is from Fuse Games, which is former Criterion Lock, which former Burnout developers, right? Um, but it's an independent studio and it's published by Secretary Independent Publisher. The last Star Wars game, which came out at the end of August. I know EA and Respawn were involved, but it was also an independent studio made game. and Lucasfilm clearly have an interest in Disney in general going hey let's find some of this innovation in in these independent teams that what the team that used to make XCOM the team that used to make Burnout and let's work with them on on taking these IPs and I do wonder if even if that consolidation happens more at the top level when EA decide they want to do a new command and conquer do they build a command and conquer team or quiet team or do they maybe it's a stupid question but does

the money sort of flow out potentially to these new companies that are cropping up as a result of these layoffs at the moment or that's a good my question makes sense.
No, it does. So the the the problem or the challenge with IP based um development at that scale is things like minimum guarantee
and the fact that Disney will hold you accountable. I mean that Disney is no different than like the toy makers or the Legos of the world saying like, "Yeah, you can make it." At first, you're going to cut me this size check and then we're going to talk about royalties and then you're going to jump through all these hoops so that I feel comfortable that you're not putting my name, my brand, my characters out there and somehow dilute the value of our asset. And so that's not for everyone, right? If you go to like the licensing expo and you know development shops or studios that will try to get an IP um and one of the barriers to entry is like do you can you afford to bring enough

lawyers into the room to negotiate all these things if not then you're not in the right place then you can't have our project and so there is substantial barriers to entry to get those contracts in other words
um so as a development studio it always helps if you have a big publisher to help you out with that stuff and so what this publisher just get out of it is like they derisk or offload a lot and they outsource a lot of the creative work, but they take care of all this sort of businessy capital stuff
and vice versa. So, so that's sort of the the trade-off
to develop to set up studios internally and also do the capitalization and all the licensing and the legal work. I think that that is probably unaffordable for the EA. Like they're better off just giving it out of hand and take a piece along the way.
That's how they derisk a lot of the the work here.
Yeah. I know. I just I didn't I'm just It's an interesting I I you know, you got IP also these big companies are focusing You're talking about how many shots on goal they can have and Xbox [clears throat] is an interesting one. They got so many IPs that you think this is probably not going to do anything with.

Why resurrect that midsize shooter franchise when you've got Halo and Call of Duty? Why do a Banjo Kazouie game when you've got Spyro and Crash Bandicoot? Like, you know, you've got But then there's probably studios that go, "Oh, I can see an opportunity there." And I don't know. I'm I'm deviating off from your uh your topic a little bit, but it's just a just a thought.
It's sort of like a recurrent theme, right? So So you have portfolio management, whether you're an IP holder or just a platform or publisher, we say like, "Oh, well, we have two or 20 IPs that we could put into market for large conglomerates like Xbox for instance, what you often see is that they will take just the two, three that work and the rest of them, they either get much less attention or they go into the freezer entirely." And so, [clears throat] and that's fine for a season, but over time that means that innovation slowly withers because,
you know, the big IPs are also
rarely the sight of most innovative gameplay or sort of forward thinking around what you could do with them because they they have so many rules attached to them.
Whereas the back of the portfolio allows

for a lot more wiggle room. And we've seen this time and again, but so it's the the larger the the company, you know, you could make an AR an argument that it will also give you less innovation and that's why innovation comes from elsewhere, right? The skirmishers of the world, they are much easier. They're much more flexible and variable.
I did win at your stat that 10 cents entire publishing business in 2025 was larger than the top five publishers a decade ago. It it really does highlights how the uh how the business has changed in that time.
That's remarkable.
It's interesting if the 10 publishers big publishers are twothirds of the market
because you've obviously you're planning to do something on platform holders. I think we haven't done that one yet and and they're increasing power in the industry, but if the 10 biggest publishers are twothirds of the market, does that not shift the power a bit towards the those publishers from a from their perspective?
Yes. Uh so this is uh that's an excellent question because it comes down to definition. So this is this analysis is only on game publishing revenue.

Yeah. Right. So it's just all of the money made by people paying games. Um the platform component is just the platform fees, right? It's the 30% that you fork over to the Steams or the Apples of the world. And so what you see is that of course game publishing as a revenue category is larger but platform revenue grows much faster and it's um you know sort of the numbers are still in beta but think of it is that over the last 15 years game publishing revenue has um grown 3x compared to 11x for platform holders. And so when you basically have all these toll booths you have this bottleneck in the in the value chain. everybody has to feed up into this one subset of companies that control things. And increasingly those companies don't even make games. And so you can kind of go back and forth like you know of course Valve does have games in its own market uh place and so does Epic and so does uh you know Apple has like Apple Arcade. Sure, I guess it all

counts, but really most their money comes from platform feeds. And so that's really their primary function is to to be an intermediator between audience and creatives. When you have a bottleneck all of a sudden, you know, you'd think you'd have leverage against that, but if you were a small publisher or small creative outfit, good luck getting Apple on the phone. Good luck getting Steam on the phone. You know, that's never going to happen. If you're EA, you have a much bigger seat. then you have a special pro a special line of communication of course then you can negotiate better deals better rates
but everybody else and so it's really you know I I'm a little unsure to use this analogy but so you get this sort of gig economy right we have all these like small individual units that do all this work and they hand it off to this all knowing omnipotent platform in the middle and while we're not at the same level in the games industry as you would see in like an Uber or Instacart um that those are um platform economics that they all have in common, right? And so that's a that's a problem. Um you know,

creatively, can you build anything outside of what works for those platform is really the uh the challenge then? And so by 2030, you know, yes, they will have more negotiating power, but okay, so now we have four or five providers for a handful of platforms. Where is the rest? Right? Because this industry thrives on the innovation coming from the bottom up. I've always got a slight thing about it's Sean Leaden said this to me once about how platforms have become too powerful and he wasn't necessarily talking about um the the the size of them, the scale of them. He talks about the fact there was a time that a game console was just a machine you played your game on and now it's now it's the shop and now it's increasingly becoming the media outlet as well. Like it's where you discover the games, it's where you buy the games, it's where you um play the games. And um and he said, "I don't think that's healthy." Um and um well someone someone who's associated with games media people I like I agree strongly but uh it's um but you know um

anyway uh what it's it's true like so you so you end up dealing with these these intermediaries that just like sit on top of everything but it's not that the problem was never paying Apple 30%. It's now you're also paying for marketing and in fact if you don't adhere to our rules that's a whole another problem because now you know you can't compete in a certain way you can't always make what you want to make and so it isn't that they dictate what you can make as a game developer but they restrict what works in their store and so I think and that's where Sean and I generally agree it's sort of like it's you know should they get a fair price for the service they provide of course um But by doing so, they have all these other policies. For instance, um one of the big ones is always you you can't price your content at a lower value somewhere else to draw in customers that maybe could not afford as much in that other market, whatever that is. It has

to be on par with everything else. Sort of this par clause, as they call it. And so, in other words, you end up subsidizing more affluent players by overcharging less affluent players. And so so that's a economic inefficiency that is only constituted by the fact that platforms operate this way.
So those are some of the problems that you get and that restricts access to capital and therefore restricts innovation and growth. But I think long term we're seeing it now with consoles. I one of my big things about the state of the console industry right now and I'm sure it's making more money but it's it's a shrinking industry and actually the way particularly PlayStation is at the moment but the way sometimes these companies act I'm starting to think they're okay with it. audience expansion isn't necessarily their number one their number one focus at the moment but and I'm sure that might be the the circumstances they're in with all the component prices but my worry about that is you talked about it in your thing about how there's no middle on console I think in your article and I interview a lot of independent developers and publishers who are doing the innovative

stuff and they're all steam they all I mean China as well but they spend all their time talking about steam and that is their focus sometimes every now and again I get somebody getting excited about Switch or Nintendo but console is very much an after for it's it's not the thing they're talking about and I think that's a problem maybe not today but certainly down the line for consoles when I think this generation has suffered from the fact that the biggest games of this generation were the biggest games of the previous generation and I remember the launch of the PS4 and it was and okay these are big games big companies but it was Destiny and Watchdog was these big PS4 launchings [clears throat] they were new things there were new characters new games new ideas and the biggest launches of PlayStation 5 and Xbox when was was Call of Duty and Man, it [laughter] was uh and and anyway, I'm not sure I I think I made a point. Wasn't really a question, but that's my
No, that's you you point out um what's been troubling the console space in a very clear way, which is the reason Xbox have a hard time is because it is only this large stuff and they are too dependent on first party content. Right?

postacquisition of Activision Blizzard now they're making 11 12 billion dollars a year of just first party publishing and third party publishing is like three to four billion and so they've just put that whole balance out of whack and they're trying to run that back in a sense right they're vesting and they're doing lay layoffs on stuff and you start you will slowly see them turn back into third party publishing as probably the largest category because it's two competitors Nintendo and Sony have been doing is the whole time. The big strength that Sony has is that it does rely mostly on third party publishing. It is its own first party content of course great but it's really to help everybody else sell. When you talk to their third party people you know that's a thriving business. All these account managers like that's really where they make most their value because that creates the most value for the ecosystem. Nintendo, which is long held out for most of this. Like that was historically mostly first party content, has started to open that up with the

Switch 2, very deliberately saying like we must be more innovative. We must allow for smaller games to be in here. We're going to support indies and so on. So all the consoles realize now that third party is really the way for them to grow to create value for customers and sort of get people to come into their ecosystem. Whereas previously they didn't think that way. They just wanted to be big and exclusive and you know the only thing that you cared about.
It's interesting. We didn't know. I was at Tokyo Game Show.
How was that?
The thing I find with Japan, somebody mentioned described Japan to me as being a country that seems like it's the future from 1980s and I and I kind of I kind of get that it both feel incredibly futuristic and somehow retro. And the um I also found it really fascinating to see so many people buy video games in shops and they're being arcades. But what I found into a Tokyo game show about and it's interesting when you see it, you sort of get it a little bit more is um I was fascinated by the sheer number of Japanese publishers that going all in on Nintendo Switch 2 like you know Square Annex going in with Final Fantasy and and uh Capcom and Monster

Hunter and this sort of stuff. But when you walk around Japan and realize that Switch is the market, you know, in in that in that country, right, you start going if you want to have if you want to sell a game in Japan, you you got to be on the Nintendo. and and I thought that was in a way it's it's not really what your point anything to do what you were saying there but it just made me realize why that that can be so attractive certainly to Japanese publishers when you're living in a market where most the audience is playing on that the machine but yeah that's that's that was my my one observation
it's a unique market instance like you know the two cents I'll add is like but like Japan is always it's futuristic but it's also just an odd one out in the same way that like uh Korea was with freeto play for a long time
what you have in the market of Japan is like there's barely any Xbox presence there which is not some secret but but then that leaves really Nintendo and Sony Sony you know developed a handheld device right the the portal
because they realize every household in Japan might have one PlayStation but

they have multiple switches like we got to get it so it's like it's there's an incredible demand and there's incredible sort of pervasiveness or penetration and it's such a keystone throne of their entire economic model that it's they must do well there and so and it has everything to do with this sort of oddball behavior that you don't see anybody anywhere else.
Yeah, it is it is a it was a definitely unique uh place to visit but obviously it's a big market as well and lots of games are sold there. Anyway, I think that's [laughter] interesting your thoughts on the third party expansion. I hadn't really heard it framed like that before. Let's talk about the other thing you bring up in your article which is around um AI immediate. You you suggest that in in the immediate future actually that that consolidation might stop happening because of AI and sort of prompt based games I guess because we've got Roblox got Google now doing it and meta um doing it it prompt games experiments and platforms they're launching. One of the things I can't quite work out is if this is a business opportunity or is it sort of a thing for

people who are you know playing around people in their spare time UGC thing right so that's a that's actually a question like is it is it like sort of a bolt on on existing stuff or is it something new in its entirety right does it come and and if it is entirely new does it come with its own revenue and business model
and So you know long allegory for me is uh live streaming for instance when Twitch became popular and so okay everybody kind of got the concept.
Did Twitch develop an amazing revenue model? Eh not really right. It's it's a it's a sort of intuitive part of the industry and it has a lot of marketing around it and there's a lot of visibility and you have your your influencers or whatever that category that class of people and then there is a degree to which like okay well but they never really overtook the core business which is just playing games with AI you know you could argue I think you pointed out correctly like UGC is sort of playing with the game rather than

playing the game is sort of the primary objective
you see this in younger audiences they're just sort of tinkering But this this whole brain rot phenomena, this aesthetic that you see on Roblox has very little to do with let's make a pretty game with a cool story and save the princess. It's about what's the most insane thing that I can conjure up to entertain my friends right now. And then tomorrow we log back in and we do it again. Which is why I think Roblox and Epic and Unity and everybody in between is making this available because they realize that's the nature of it's like just this goofy fun of it. if they can figure out a sustained revenue model is another question but certainly it's it's gradually taken over. you see it's expressed everywhere right it's a [clears throat]
it's a challenge for existing incumbents in that uh for instance in music you see now like companies like dieser will announce it's like 50% of uploaded music in the month is like AI generated and they're not sure how they even like deal with that because it's so overwhelming

but it devalues the service in a sense and it creates a huge amount of additional cost for them so what is the equivalent there for the games industry will steam be flooded with AI generated slop kind of is, but is that a problem? And what does Valve think it should do about that? Can it do anything different than like a dieser or Spotify when it's when you make the comparison? But it's the so that's where it's disruptive. Um, but ultimately in the absence of a revenue model, it will just be part of it in the same way that esports and live streaming is a subset of the industry. It's not the dominance that doesn't have [clears throat] the dominance of anything. The thing that I I wonder if most people will be playing these sort of AI generated prompt based games if they'll be browser based, right? Which is a growing growing segment of the industry. I've just recently spoken to pokey a pokey pocky pokey. Um, and they went from 10 million MAUs in 2020 to 100 million in 2025, which is obviously amazing, but still the top performing

games on their platform. They sort of hit a million dollars a year. That's what they make, which obviously is a lot of money if you're, you know, three people. the game developers like these games cost 10 grand to make, right? They're talking very different economics, but obviously from a big business point of view, it doesn't seem worth the attention.
Yes, it's the, you know, does EA care about any of this? And the answer is probably no. Um, but that's why there's an opportunity there because there is an absence of Apex Predators. That's why I think browserbased games have been
increasingly more popular, right? sort of this web GPU phenomenon where in recent years is both consumers and creators have been spending more time there. You know, I mean the easy explanation is like, well, consoles cost a,000 bucks. I can't afford a custom PC anymore. Everything is so expensive, but I have a browser on my whatever bulky laptop that I still have left from the pandemic kind of thing. So accessibility is a sort of requirement for growth and

as a generation of new players comes into the market like yeah I don't it's a lot of hand-me-down devices they don't have top-of-the-line stuff they can't afford it so so that's where the growth comes from but then
that's just the distribution model the next is then the revenue model which you correctly point out it's like well the numbers aren't exciting
once of course so this is a space where you could expect direct monetization to be sort of the first line of thinking or maybe three to play sort of existing set of models. But here's also an opportunity for advertising, right? Which is, you know,
it's entirely ad based.
So, yeah,
that's a that's a you know, and that's going to dramatically offend lots of people because they say, why is there ads in my games now? It's like, yeah, well, you know, in the for the same reason it's everywhere else shortly. But you see, for instance, this week in New York, there is a big advertising week. All the advertisers come into town for play funds and ad week and all this kind of stuff. And increasingly game companies take up presence and market share. EA comes rolling around. Unity is

out out to play. Xbox is here with a full team. And it's interesting like how the big dogs are moving into the ad space at the same time that you see growth in these like low entry barrier markets like browser. the browser based games particularly obviously this is based on my chat with Pokei is the games seem to be almost a Tik Tok video game equivalent Tik Tok people play these games these aren't they people aren't playing Halo and their browsers like these aren't these aren't big story games they're things you play for 10 minutes maybe even less and um and then you move on to the next one which I think is like the opposite to a live service game where you you're living it for years and years so the browser games actually look a lot better than I think people expect them to we've moved on from the flash days I think AI plays into that
it seems like like what's the next logical step in all this, right? It's like this is sort of brewing. It's like how do we expect this to manifest in a more material sense? And I would argue that it's if you've ever read any of that sort of Clayton Christensen innovators dilemma stuff where a lot of innovation comes from the bottom like and so if I as a 13-year-old

with the use of some AI tool, some language model I get for cheap or free can generate something that's fun enough that cost me 10% and that's 80% is good, whatever. Um then all of a sudden it starts to push everybody else in the market up. You know it reserves incumbents only the top spots where they spend the most to capture the most value. In the meantime the bottom of the market is uh you know it moves up a little bit and so I suspect browserbased uh AI generated content perhaps you know driving revenue through advertising will start pushing everybody else up the chain. This is why you see GTA 6 being this spectacle. I mean, come on. Like, this is a this is the Taylor Swift of video games, right? It's like, how much bigger does it get? Is that appropriate? Is that going to offend people? It's just like how [laughter] how do you launch the biggest thing in a in an industry, you know, and like you couldn't possibly do it the other way.

You couldn't do this on a on a browser. You couldn't do GJ6 in a brow browser based launch. Not until way at the end, right at the end of the cycle.
Yeah. I might have a slight this is like a side worry when you talk about the ads being the ad business model. Go on. There's a lot of moment talking and AI is sort of part of the conversation around piracy at the minute and um and piracy is a thing that's sort of faded away. I mean it's always bubbling in the background amongst um amongst certain communities but it's sort of generally been pushed down and down and down with the prices of everything rising. I think Gabe Neil famously said like uh piracy isn't a price issue, it's it's a service issue. And I sort of broadly agree with that. But then you throw in the fact that our services are now increasingly complicated and then now we're throwing ads into everything and then we're making the service worse potentially and now we got all this AI stuff going into it. I don't know if it drives more users towards um illegal means of obtaining their games and and the AI is making that potentially easier to do. I don't know.

That's a weird side of conversation that I've not fought through.
It's a it's a question that's in a lot of people's minds. So whether it's investors or creatives and the precursor would be something along the lines of you know I think maybe the best way to explain it is like the games industry has this stubborn history of seeing its audience as this homogeneous singular uniform category of humans until 15 20 years ago they discovered women like wow there's two genders you know and it's [laughter] and that became this incredible growth spirit right and we had Candy Crush and that's your mom playing we never felt that that was possible Um, once you start to take entertainment or gaming seriously, then you have to also adhere to the different food groups, the different categories of users in there. And so what may not work for you, like I'm a Gen X gamer, so I'm mostly single player. I like narratives, you know, I like campaign mode. Multiplayer, cool, but I suck. But it's see, you know, but you know, put me in front of brain rot and I will pay you to

get to leave because it's not for me. So, in other words, but my 13-year-old, the key is all about it. And so, I think that the aesthetic appeal and the sort of sensibilities around it have changed. And as we take the industry more seriously, you start to do more segmentation in terms of the type of content. The kind of stuff like I don't know, let let's ask this question. How much reality TV do you watch, Chris? Right. Like for me, it's whatever I see in the corner of my eye when my wife watches it. I don't watch true crime, but I know lots of people do, you know? So there's like categories of content and distribution models and revenue models attached to those that apply to very specific demographics that traditionally don't have anything to do with the games industry. And so that's really the mindset shift like we we are more people now and we have different tastes and different revenue models and distribution models and so on. That's really the change the fact that the industry is more businesses than it was before.
You've phrased it a lot better than I've ever done it. Um, I've said it a few times where I talk about the fact there was a time when the video games industry for me was two groups of people.

There were nerdy men
and children. That was the '9s, right? There were the two people that play games. And if you made a game, you knew it's one of those groups of people, right? And and and then but now now it's it's we've got to that point where everybody plays games. So therefore, you need to think when you look at something, you think, well, I'm not sure that will succeed. But you often find it's older industry people that haven't quite escaped the mindset that that is what the video games industry is. It's it's nerdy it's nerdy men and children and and I've mentioned a few times now with the Star Wars game this week. He he talked about in an interview recently that the um the games industry has become so much broader now and there's so many different groups of people that a Star Wars racing game actually even though it did quite well back when pod rate when episode one came out it sort of faded away for a while and he wonders if now the reason why it work it might work today is because there's just a lot more people
Mhm. who just like that kind of that kind of thing. And it's and you know that's what Amazon are trying to do with Luna now and it's what um Netflix is trying to do with its yes um its playground what next playground is

doing. They I know a lot of this is going back to stuff that we've tried in the past but it's sort of going there is entire groups of people in this industry that aren't actually being served in by the traditional market. I don't know is that's another subject. [laughter]
No that's the future. That's the future. It's like how do you accommodate like if we truly are three billion people? You can't possibly expect an all buy Spider-Man copy. Like that's crazy, right? It's and so I think it's like and so because play is such a universal phenomenon and because we all have access or increasingly have access to all these different technologies and devices and and and ways to connect with others. Okay, what type of forms of play can be come up with and design at all these different moments for all these different audiences? And I think the it's been very uniform in the same way that the film industry used to be all spectacle and you know Cleopetra and pyramids and elephants and then it became reality TV piped right into your home in a little box right and so there's a transition of what filmed entertainment looks like nowadays in the

same way the games industry as it becomes more mainstream it has to also accommodate much more diverse different tastes and aesthetics and that is a whole another question that's where the growth will come from but the longer you look at this as how do we keep doing the same thing which side note one of the interpretations around the Xbox troubles is the fact it's like yeah okay so there's a lot of movement here but no production and when it comes out it's more the same and so like at what point do you um turn over the generation of developers and designers like in the same way that you see that in fashion and music like you know if the Rolling Stones were still top of the charts really do you think people would listen to music because they they need their own artists. They need their own songs,
right? So, it's it's time to move sort of refresh that a little bit.
I think that's a good good idea.
So, I want to book end this because there's a great book end I've got in the mind, but I'll also say that I've always had this slight issue with the generations. You've talked about it there like my 13-year-olds into this and

I'm into this because I'm a Gen X gamer, but actually I've always got a I don't know cuz we're a first generation game gamers really. I don't know if my kids when they're 40
if actually they'll be interested in the same games that I am interested now that I'm 40 because I played a lot of multiplayer games when I was a teenager. I played a lot of Golden Eye. I played a lot of that stuff and now I play less of it and now watching my, you know, youngest play a lot of multiplayer games. I know they're different types of multiplayer games. I know that the the industry's moved on, technologies moved on, but I do wonder to myself sometimes actually, would I have played the games he's playing now when I was his age? And is it more an age thing than a generation thing?
Excellent question. I have less time now. I've got um I've got different needs. Sometimes I just want a bit of me time. It's just different. Right. So, and so I um ponder with um when we talk about people have different needs, younger people have different needs. We either be thinking about what different groups are, but actually I think older people you be thinking about them as well and what they different ones. But it's interesting with the going back to

the um uh the SNL sketch we talked at the beginning. One of the jokes in the SNL sketch was how boring Zelda sounded versus how cool GTA sounded, right? Who wants, you know, GTA was heists and and stealing things, attractive women, and Zelda is um wandering around Hyrule play uh solving puzzles. That was the joke. But what was really funny, I found really funny is the roar from the crowd was higher, louder for the wandering around Hyrule playing puzzles than it was for the heist and the stealing kings. cuz I think maybe what we thought was cool was a cool video game idea in 2005. Actually, there's lots of people that would just like to wander around a field and solve some puzzles and um and
ride a horse.
Yeah.
Yeah. Ride a horse.
But you you have to always wonder is like, you know, so GTA I love GTA, big fan, but Rockstar and Take Dude, they're very sort of entertainment focused sort of media company almost. And so to a media audience, GTA is what a video game

looks like, right? that has like action heroes and explosions and guns and cars, whatever. And to a gamer audience, something like Zelda is what a game looks like. And so they're just different aesthetics. And so many you could argue it's like GTA is what media companies think a game look like. And it does to some degree and it's super popular, but that's not the only version of that, right?
Yeah. So I I take that point very seriously. Like I think you're right. I think it's a it's a good observation.
We've gone off consolidation. I don't know. you I you seem quite pessimistic at the beginning about everything becoming consolidated at the top and where's the innovation going to come from but actually there's a lot of hope we've had through this conversation of where some of that might come from well I I'll borrow one of your lines which is that whatever the circumstances in the industry the only way out of it is make better games that's just fundamental and so the challenge is never like oh is it is you know are big companies too powerful of course that's always been the case that was the case from day one atari was way too powerful

and then lost, you know, spent it all kind of thing. And so you realize, you know, in what what are the the pockets of innovation? Where can we create something that we haven't seen before? Where can you be brave? Where can you invest? Because no investor wants to go up against GTA. So where do you go? Right? And I think that that's really the answer is like once you understand the environment, okay, then if they're zigging, let's zag this way.
I think should we end on that one? [laughter] It's
we could talk for hours. We should definitely have you back on. Y I really enjoy chatting to you.
Yeah. Anytime.
Yeah. Thank you for your time.
Of course. Always. Pleasure, Chris.
Right then, we're not done yet. I have another thing for you. It's a small interview. At Gamescom, I had a chat with someone called Libby Park. She's the CEO of Pearl Abyss Europe. And Pearl Abyss obviously launched the breakout hit Crimson Desert earlier this year. It's another successful game to come out of Korea. and I thought I'd catch up with her to talk about the game, talk about career, how it's impacted the studio. It's a short interview. It was on a very noisy booth at Gamescom, but I

think you'll find it interesting. And here it is.
Hello, Libby. Hello, Rick. Welcome to the show.
Hello.
Thank you. Thank you.
Congratulations on the success of Crimson Desert, 6 million sales.
Thank you.
The success, has it had an impact upon your other games? Like, have you had to sort of move people over to work on Crimson Desert?
Not really. We have our designated black desert studio and then crimson desert studio just on their own and we have also studio internally and etc. But since we are sharing especially for and crimson desert we are sharing our black black desert
black space engine.
We are sharing black space engine. So whenever they actually learn something new that works amazing on black space engine the stock team shares it with crimson desert team. So
not really
they are sharing internal knowledge basically
80% of the game sales were in US and Europe at least initially. Was that a

surprise for you? For me, yes, it was like it was very good surprise. But indeed, we had this confident inside of deep inside of us like like they will people will recognize us. But it is also a bit of a gamble because it is our first title and our audience never met Palis's this style of games and etc. previously. Yeah. But it was really like surprise surprise for us in a good way. Obviously, it's been this massive breakthrough success in the West. What is it? We're starting to see more and more of this. What is it about Korean games and that appear to be resonating so strongly outside of the markets it normally does well in?
I think it's being exotic is one side. Yeah. But also, Korean game industry was very small. like nobody knew where Korea is located before or if like if if we make our own games and etc. But

initially Korean developers make our presence with MMO RPG Jung in the western market. And by having that recognition of international fandom, it gives us more confident to build up and expanding our game knowledge or game languages. So it's been decades even though we are recently recognized as a memorable company when it comes to the games but was has been preparing for this years to actually meet this international audienc's expectations while keeping our own identity and kind of being slightly exotic or different to the audiences.
Well, it's not just games, is it? K-pop and Squid Game and all this sort of stuff. It seems to be I guess digital distribution is making it easier for people to discover this thing.
Yes, for sure. And also during pandemic,

everyone became more open to listening to those foreign languages and reading those subtitles rather than having like full voiceovers in their own languages and etc. And also that opens up a lot of opportunities for entertainment industry in general. So they are already have enough amount of those familiar contents of their own languages and people were willing to explore further. So it was it was very difficult time but in that sense of like cultural experiences it was really different it made huge difference
and I think the game sales were 50/50 between PC and and console. Has console become a bigger focus for Pearl Abyss? I should admit, maybe it's my personal opinion, but console is obviously the dream goal. No, cuz Korean game industry, we started as a PC game developer because it was more familiar

tool for us, but obviously everyone is game gamers, right? Everyone has this higher goals that they've been growing up playing and also watching all those amazing console titles and dreamed of becoming one of those titles. So those experiences while developing PC game now giving us more chance to understanding console market, console language, console like fans needs and wants. Yes.
Yeah. I didn't expect to see the 50-50 numbers on console. I was just well I I I I just felt I think because it's Pearl Abyss and it's you know I thought it was destined to be more PC favorite to see it do so well on console is great but I guess that's part of the western success if it's succeeding in the west it's probably doing quite well on PlayStation and Xbox and it's coming to Nintendo as well isn't that right Switch too
I was about to say this so just we are eager to meeting the more fans possible so we would like to support the tools

they are like comfortable with so That's our main focus. That's why we are trying it to expand to like serving all these different consoles including Switch 2.
Now, I was a bit surprised to see the player response to the game was very strong. The critical reception was a little bit more mixed, right? It wasn't terrible, but it was a little bit little bit lower. Do you have any theories as to why there was a disconnect there?
I can have my personal opinion, right? So I do believe both parties have fair points especially for critics.
They had to play the build that is not the exactly same version of the launched game and also they had limited time and then usually the classical approach when they review the game is following the main quest line. But Crimson Deserts our unique charm is just spread all over our in-game world. all those tiny details that are hidden all those freedom you

can actually explore even further beyond uh the common expectations so all those unique bits and interesting new freshening up bits I don't think critics had like fair chance to explore experience while those reviewing period
obviously there was some controversy um around sort of AI assets in the game um and I know they've been taken out and there's been you know all that kind of stuff but Has there been any result any impact on sales or have you had to change any processes as a result of all that?
So our game being so massive and also we've been developing this game for years and years while working on our own engine development. So since it is so huge there are all those small bits or important bits still not found or like realized within the build. So it was really good waking up call for us because it was never intended to be even in right. So it was more of a kind

of placeholder at a kind of initial settings to check how the atmosphere would feel and it should have been immediately removed.
So yeah it was a bit hard experience but it was really good learning point that we really need to kind of approach with all this cautiousness. You're focusing on free updates rather than paid DLC. I might be being naive. That doesn't seem the most commercially prudent way of doing things. Why do it that way?
Why do why do we do it in that way? So, it is very similar approach to us trying to reach out all these different platforms and etc. We wanted to deliver our game that satisfies us and that we can be proud of. So we thought is this is fair to add this additional changes adjustment that we feel even more comfortable even it's after launch. So

that's why we made decisions of just giving it to our fans for free because we want as many as possible can experience yeah as our like full full game.
I'll ask a couple more. You've got you've got multiple projects in the works right? How do you make sure you don't get distracted by these all these new projects?
So we have our amazing operations team. So they are the frontlininers who meet our fans. So Black Desert team even though of course they share our success with of Crimson Desert with full heart and etc. But still they know and they the love of them there's to black desert is amazing and they understand black desert is our also black desert is our first ever game title and it kind of contains all this vision of parlabis it speaks parlabis language thanks to black

desert we learn a lot and so it allows us to implement into even crimson desert and etc. So they have their own like pride in our title. They still want to learn things from Crimson Desert experience but implementing into Black Desert working even further for Black Desert. And we also recently announced that we are closing our first chapter 10 years of first chapter of Black Desert and it'll be the second new chapter of Black Desert. Black Desert team is excited and they were still develop even further purely on Black Desert.
You've got separate teams that are fully focused on their project and they're sort of learning from each other. So actually it's helping each other. Oh, I see. Okay.
I'll ask one last question. Where would you like to see Pearl Abyss in 5 years? Like I was going to say 10 years, but five years I think you're doing so much. So I would like to see Parl being recognized as a like public as a trusty

developers even though we are going to have multiple IPs new IPs different junks and etc but still we have our own like spoken languages throughout those games. So I would like us to be received as the devs with the characteristics, unique characteristics.
Thank you so much for your time.
Thank you so much for having us
and congratulations on the on the success so far.
Thank you. Thank you so much.
Thank you to Libby there and thank you to Yoast earlier on as well. Now, before we completely finish, it's worth wrapping up some of the big news stories of the last week. And one of the biggest stories was about Google, cuz they've announced Playground, which is a new consumer platform for games made using generative AI tools. Anyone 18 plus in the US can generate and customize playable games using a text prompt with no coding required. You can make 2D and

3D games, and depending on the genre, both single and multiplayer experiences. The company calls it an experimental platform. Now later this year this will be supported by an expanded creation tool set called Unity Spark which is from as as the name suggests Unity. It keeps the prompt driven interface but adds professional level mechanics high fidelity 3D and more. It follows similar offerings from Roblox and Meta and we will be covering this story more and more in the weeks ahead including we got an interview coming up with Meta. By the way also follows the playground naming conventions that other companies are using. So you have the next playground, we have the Netflix playground and then we have the Google playground. That's three video game platforms called Playground. Anyway, another massive story this week. Paramount and Warner Brothers has completed his $10 billion merger. The companies will now be called Sky Dance. And more importantly to us in the video games industry, their two games teams are uniting as well. Now, Paramount Games has only recently formed and they're overseeing titles including the upcoming Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: The Last Ronin from Platinum Games, plus games in the Avatar, Spongebob, and Star Trek franchises.

It's also working on the Marvel 1943 Rise of Hydra game which Amy Henning is building. Warner Brothers, of course, is a massive games company. It makes Hogwarts Legacy. It has Batman developer Rock Steady in its portfolio of studios. It got the Lego games. It's got Mortal Kombat. It's got loads of titles. However, the new combined entity will be managed by the Paramount Games Studios boss Tony Driscoll. Disappointing story this one. We knew it was coming uh two months after announcing layoff plans. Horror game developer Supermatic Games has cut 70 employees according to the studios facilities director Frank Tindle on LinkedIn. Uh another sort of it's a UK story in a way but a far more positive one. So you may have seen Star Wars Galactic Racers come out this week. Got great reviews. I'm very excited about it. I've just bought it. But it's also surprised released on Amazon Luna. The game single player mode is available to all Prime subscription holders and reading that out makes me realize I should probably have done that rather than bought it from Amazon. Like I say anyway, I'm actually looking forward to it. not happy to have bought it. Elsewhere, Embark Studios's Arc Raiders and The Finals are both being adapted for film and TV. The production company

that has signed the projects is churning in Entertainment. Another sales story, Torn Banners, No Room in Hell 2 has sold 1 million copies after leaving early access. And finally, Craft and is ending development on PUBG spin-off Black Budget. The extraction has a closed alpha test early this year, had a closed alpha test earlier this year, but the publisher concluded it isn't going to deliver the right experience. That's it for today's episode of the game business show. I hope you enjoyed that. Next week we've got loads and loads of cool uh stuff. We've got a big interview with Veland Studios at Guhan and Caric Bara. Those are video game legends. They really are. And their new studio uh well it's not new studio anymore. It's 10 years old and they've just released that Star Fox game with Nintendo. It's a really good chat. I can't wait to show it to you. That comes out on Tuesday. Then on Thursday, barring, you know, any last minute changes, we have got interviews with Lucasfilm and Call of Duty. So check us back on Thursday for that. If you are in the UK and you're heading to New Horizons, which is a big conference that takes place in the UK, you might see me there because I'm interviewing PlayStation Legend, the father of

PlayStation, Ken Kusharagi live on stage. So a bit of a game business live uh mini there for you as well. Massive busy week for us next week. And if you want to make sure you don't miss any of that, head to the gamebus.com and put in your email and you'll get an alert every time we put out a new episode. Um, you can also become a paid subscriber and we do a Monday morning bonus show for paid subscribers that you will get if you want to do that as well. But until then, thank you for tuning in.