🚨📢 BREAKING NEWS: GTA 6 pre-sale, EU regulations looming, Layoffs and Pokemon Champions launch

Which, of course, it's one of the main principles of free-to-play games, because why do we have so many currencies? Because we obfuscate the real world value. That's how this free-to-play thing works. Yeah, no [ __ ] Sherlock.
Two and a Half Gamers exclusive. [music]
Breaking news.
Literally breaking.
Hello, hello. This is Two and a Half Gamers breaking news segment, as always. Let's get to the news. So, first story, Take-Two stock rises as GTA 6 game pre-sale set to begin. So, everybody is waiting for this mega launch of the year, or rather century, of GTA 6. So, we already know that the game will be, or should be, available on November 19th after multiple delays, when it was supposed to launch in 2025, but again it was delayed twice since

then. And the pre-orders will actually start next week's Friday, June 25th. Uh the big question that everybody is, of course, thinking is, will this be uh still a $70 industry standard price for triple-A game, or it will be charging $80 or even $100? Yep, people are still on the line what will be the actual number. So, I guess let's see. And yeah, the stock rose. Stock of Take-Two already rose 5% on the news. Continuing with some bigger high-level news, mobile gaming companies lash out at Brussels. This is literally a Financial Times title, where makers of Clash of Clans, Candy Crush Saga, and Subway Surfers warn EU proposals could throttle rare tech success. Yeah, so I I this was done multiple times, Ilkka, the CEO of Supercell, have

wrote a letter last year. I think he's just continuing to push uh regarding this EU regulation. That seems quite significant, by the way, because what it would do uh it would require to click a pop-up each time a monetary value is spent, including any [music] currency in the game. Which would mean not only that, and he he literally said that in the article, that it would take Sorry. Uh it would take something like 40 pop-ups per session. And afterwards, uh all the currencies would need to be uh pretty much evaluated in real-world currency numbers. So, I'm guessing that near your five gems, there would be I don't know, 3 cents of a dollar or something. As as like equivalent. Which, of course, it's one of the main principles of

free-to-play games, because why do we have so many currencies? Because we obfuscate the real-world value. That's how this free-to-play thing works. Yeah, no [ __ ] Sherlock. So, yeah. Uh we'll see uh because the again, the crippling thing on this is that this will only apply in games in EU. While again games in the West and Asia can still continue their life. So, great move, EU. Again, shooting yourself into the foot.
[snorts]
And then we have some layoff section. Uh reports claim that Destiny 2 uh developer Bungie will soon face major layoffs and leadership departures now that the game has ended. [music] Uh game ending being Destiny 2, of course. So, there's probably significant layoffs. Yeah, of course, this this I guess makes sense. As I predicted, like US game developer, unfortunately, cannot compete on the world scale P&L and will most probably be extinct in 5 years.

Uh Xbox is reportedly closing South of Midnight studio, Compulsion Games, after buying out its award-winning developers earlier this year. Yeah, uh latest news on this by Jason Schreier from Bloomberg is that the developers, uh Double Fine, in Venture, and Compulsion are both in active negotiations to spin off as they try to kind of, you know, sabotage disclosure. Ninja Theory and several other studios across the board also potentially at risk of closure. Yeah, so they're cleaning the house out there at Xbox, and people are not happy about it. The ones being affected, of course, this is natural. So, let's see what happens. I'm guessing there should be more and more of these kind of layoffs and closures uh as we go forward as I said. Okay, real talk before we start. This episode is brought to you by Potensic. And if you're a mobile game publisher tired of leaving money on the table, uh

listen up. Potensic is a premium ad network built by people who have actually been on both sides of this industry, game publishers, agencies, successful exits. So, they get it. Here is the thing. Potensic has direct deals with Amazon, Apple, Coca-Cola, Vodafone. It's not programmatic. It's direct. Those budgets land in your game at premium CPMs, no middleman tax. And they handle everything with their in-house team in terms of the creatives. Plus, they've partnered with Playable Maker, ding ding. So, they will take brands' YouTube videos or static images and actually turn it into playable ads or rewarded video, proper interactive format built for gaming inventory. Brands getting a gaming native creative, publishers are getting a higher CPI. Everyone wins. Head to potentials.com to get started or check their creative portfolio in the link in the show notes. Thank you very much Potentials for sponsoring this episode.

Um then we have another closure. Uh new studio from two former King executives, Queen Digital, ironically instead of King, has closed. And the studio was founded in 2022 [music] by former King executives Sebastian Knutsson and Stefan Kögler. And if I had read this correctly, by those four years, they had 50 million in VC funding and uh yep, nothing unfortunately come out of it. They had four games in soft launch and all failed. Then we have 380 being the second amateur made football drafting game. Uh because you may have read about 38 to zero zero being the number hitting the chart with number one, which is like AI coded game that was built overnight using cloth and yep. So, another one hitting. This is all uh modeled after

the the NBA 820 uh idea, which I'm guessing lots of people are now copying because if hobbyists can get to the top of the charts without much marketing and everything, I guess there are people already working on this idea. So, yep. I guess because of AI we'll see more and more of these events happening. Then we have uh Rune Abyss uh Inter College Labs dev team has been laid off. The team was laid off just 26 days after launching a new game. Uh yep. So, again, PC team I guess being laid off after the is finished. Yeah, who would have thought? That's how it works, unfortunately. Uh Al Media's Free Cash returns to App Store following the removal. So, finally, it's on both stores, Google and Apple, which was the again rewarded platform Free Cash, which we discussed, I think,

a little bit in the news, but again, it's nice to see it back, and let's see what happens. Because the earlier uh return to Google Store on Android was on May 6th 7th. [snorts] Yeah, so good luck. Dream Games and Peak Games, uh according to latest report, are responsible for 80% of Turkey's games revenue, which of that 97% is Turkish developers doing puzzles. Who would have thought? And then, we have some more breakdowns where Dream itself is around 60%, where Peak is another 20% of top, and that's pretty much it. I'm guessing somewhere there in the last last 20% you would have Grand Games and all the other guys. Still not comparable to success of Dream Games yet, but of course, these companies are growing, so

uh yeah, kudos, as always. Giant growth pretty much there. Uh Epic Games outlines vision for Unreal 6, which means that the target release or early access release should be late 2027. [music] Uh the new engine will have focus on interoperability, live service development, and AI-assisted workflows. Uh on top of it, on the Unreal Fest event, Unreal shared that Unreal Engine for Fortnite creator payout surpassed 1 billion since its initial release in 2023. 75% of in-game transactions come from games other than Battle Royale. There are also more than 75 million active users playing games in Fortnite. Yeah, those are pretty big numbers, but still compared to Roblox, UEFN is much smaller platform. Uh, with that needs to be said that to

put it into context. Uh, 47% So, all hours played in Fortnite come from community-made games. Yeah. Nice that they showed some numbers finally, uh, but again, you can put this into perspective. And again, this platform, I mean, the UEFN platform is kind of lacking behind Roblox in its robustness and possibilities for other third-party creators. Let's see. Uh, UK has in the meantime banned social media uh, for youngsters. And it could actually affect gaming, but let's see because the good thing is that they are actually putting gaming and social media into two different [music] spots. But it seems that the world is continuing this trend because after Australia bans it from children under 16, I'm guessing whole EU and the rest of the world will kind of follow in the same footsteps. So, I

guess it's a matter of time until we get some actual restriction for gaming because of course, what multiplayer games are basically the social media. Roblox is the social media for small kids. And then we have some latest good news, uh, ending the news brief here. Pokémon Champions launches, uh, on mobile today. Uh, today being June 17th. So, if you're reading this on Friday 19th, it's already there. Uh, again, I was really waiting for this kind of big Pokémon release. So, let's see how that goes. We still don't have much data. I just see 500k downloads a day on the initial days of the tower, but again, this will be calculated with these big games, so it's not reliable. I guess we'll cover this game on the 2 and 1/2 Gamers podcast soon anyway. Uh and there's an event already running for Raichu until September 2nd, so go grab one if I'm saying correctly. The other

interesting part is that you can actually transfer transfer Pokémon from Pokémon Go into this game. And this is mostly like a battle simulation game, so let's see how this goes because I'm eagerly waiting if this will do any cannibalization or any dent in the market share of Pokémon Go or Pokémon TCG Pocket as being in my opinion the third biggest game on the market, but let's see how how this goes. Okay, that was it for the news. Thank you very much. Subscribe for the channel. Let us know if you want something covered or you have any ideas or suggestions, and see you next time. Have a nice weekend. Ciao.