🚨📢 BREAKING NEWS: Xbox Layoffs, Niantic rebrand, New Turkish puzzle studio

Since I want Xbox to be one of the few companies to entertain more than a billion people each day. And you have the opportunity to create and quite a Yeah, sure. Billion people. Mhm. Okay. I can't wait what she will do with King. It will be quite interesting.
Two and a Half Gamers exclusive.
Breaking news.
Literally breaking.
Hello. Hello. This is Two and a Half Gamers breaking news segment. As always, every Friday we bring you the latest news of the week. So, lots of stuff today. Let's get to it. Xbox will axe 3,200 jobs. And it seems like this is literally the biggest layoff in the gaming industry for like quite long time. Uh on top of it, King and Mojang the two, let's say,

jewels of the gaming in the gaming portfolio of Xbox will now report directly to Asha Sharma, the Xbox CEO or the boss there. Um yeah, big moves there. Um actually, what's happening is that 1,600 people are being laid off immediately. And then the other 1,600 are being laid off throughout the end of the year, if I understood that correctly. On top of it, there will be four console game studios that's going to be spun out of, such as Compulsion, Double Fine, Ninja Theory, and Undead Labs. Uh yeah, the two, King and Mojang, will now report directly to her. And there's a new COO uh to to pretty much be responsible for the P&L because yeah, this is all about cutting stuff down because
[gasps]
Xbox, or let's say Microsoft, don't really need gaming at this point because

they have AI and all these other nice shiny things. So, this is kind of the rusty old old toy that we don't want to play with anymore. Um and yeah, as usual, like some PR speak crap, especially this sentence. I want Xbox to be one of the few companies to entertain more than a billion people each day and give you an opportunity to create and collect Yeah, sure, billion people. Mhm. Okay. I can't wait what she will do with King. It will be quite interesting. Um yeah, even though she said, "By the way, that mobile will now play a key role as Microsoft restructures gaming business." Yeah, I'm kind of scared and uh yeah, fingers crossed for all friends currently at King or Mojang.
[gasps]
Uh next one. Niantic Games Niantic Games uh team has been rebranded as Scopely Explore. I guess this is just part of that uh giant acquisition that Scopely did of

Niantic for 3.5 billion last year. Uh yeah, because that included all of Niantic's game teams. So, even games such as Pikmin Bloom, Monster Hunter, and of course Pokémon Go are all under Scopely Explore. So, I guess this is just like normal rebranding. The interesting tidbit here is that Pokémon Go now celebrates its 10th anniversary with over 9 billion in revenue, which makes it the fifth highest grossing mobile game across the decade. Yeah, uh again, everybody remembers this. Even though the revenue is kind of declining, it's still like 7 600 million easily. Uh um um a year. So, yeah, this is still just going strong. Let's see. Triple AI raises 150 million in series A3 funding round. Uh

3D foundation models and world model technologies. So, yeah, this is I guess the remnant of that craze of like world models will take over engines and goodbye Unity, goodbye Unreal Engine. And these guys are I guess banking on it. Yeah, let's see what happens because I'm as usually highly skeptical on all of these things. Then we have some niche spicy news with Love and Deep Space where actually there's an online petition to bring back Balco, a character that was removed, which already has like uh 200,030 K signatures. And the character was actually removed because it has some links to number 731, which is some Imperial Japanese Army unit that's quite infamous uh during Second World War. So, yeah, this happened and again even the state get involved into it in China and again you don't anger the state in China.

And because of that they also cancel like Love and Deep Space their appearance at the Bilibili World 2026 [music] amid ongoing controversy. So, yeah, I guess guys are getting some rough shape there even though they have the biggest interactive romance [snorts] husband game on the planet, but yeah, let's see. Uh Supercell opens applications for Africa-focused developer grants. Equity free grants range from 20 K to 200 K. The program is open to legally registered game development studios. Application close on August 9. Successful applicants are expected to be notified in October with funding beginning December. Yeah, I guess Supercell investments yeah, they just kind of spread stuff around. Sounds very noble and like great to support the African game development community. Let's see what comes out of that. Scopely, oh yeah, this is my favorite.

Scopely investing Uma Musume Pretty Derby Pretty Derby director startup studio AUNO. Yeah, so there's the studio which is led by former Uma Musume Pretty Derby content director Takuma Akitsu. And I cannot be more excited because finally, finally this great talent from Japan is getting some more realization and I can't wait what will happen out of that. For those who don't know Uma Musume Pretty Derby is of course the horse racing waifu game that I love and we covered it on the channel multiple times because it's one of the only games in the world that is coming directly from Japan and it's making now more revenue outside of Japan than in Japan itself, which is unheard of. Even though it's just like, let's be honest, after its peak already, it's like 15, 20 million a month, used to be 80. So it's getting quite old. But again, horse racing community super strong.

Yeah. Really looking forward what will come out of that. Then some key numbers of China booming mini games market which total an estimated 7.6 billion in revenue during 2025. The overall mini programs attracted 1.2 billion monthly active users in March only. Again, the revenue I just read is an uptick of 34% more than last year. And in this year mini games are forecasted to rise to nearly 10 billion, 9.7. And out of that IP's for last year accounted for 68% while ads make 31%. So, yeah, this is booming like there's no tomorrow and of course we'll go to China and see you in ChinaJoy. Uh so, by the end of July catch us there because we're going to of course talk to

all uh friends there and get the latest out of them for you. Then we have uh Christopher Nolan's Odyssey launches Roblox companion game ahead of film release. The game has already recorded 1.7 million visits. The funny part is that this experience is rated for players age 18 over you to violence and fear, which whole Roblox platform like 50% is under 12. Like amazing job.
[laughter]
That's like way to go.
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Uh anyway, uh moving on, PlayStation say it will stop making physical games and that should worry us all from Guardian. Yes, this is mainstream news now because this is getting quite big and uh after the announcement that GTA 6 uh now

going to be released November 19 for $80, we'll go diskless. So, you will just literally be buying a box with a with a key in it. Uh it seems that this is continuing and again, Sony will end the physical games production for PlayStation in 2028. And if you remember, um this already happened in 2013 when Xbox were actually trying to do it. And Xbox wanted to sell Xbox itself without disks. And PlayStation get this super super viral mock-up video where like, "How do you share games on PlayStation?" And literally see a Sony just went there and just handed the the disk to his friend and like, "This is how you share it." Because again, they didn't want to end physical production of disks, but it seems they got over them. So, now, you know, the

usual happens. You either die a hero or live long enough to become the villain. So, now they're getting old. All the internet uh meme crap feed back to them. But yeah, this I guess it's a they just want to get rid of the second-hand market. Like it's it's quite obvious and it will be just much more better for them, but not better for the consumer as is always. So, that's there. Um another month and another race for Turkey studio that will be making sort puzzle games uh specifically bold games raised 6 million. Red led by Arcadia Gaming and Makers Fund and E2 VC. So yeah, sending regards to Akin and Michael as always. These guys really rock and I can't wait to have another Turkish studio doing another sort based puzzler because there seems to be infinite amount of them that the market can support. So let's see.

Esports World Cup officially opens in Paris. The event features a record-breaking 75 million prize pool. That's pretty big. More than 2,000 players and 200 clubs from 100 countries are competing in 25 tournaments covering 24 game titles. The tournament runs until August 23rd. Oh, that's pretty big one. And then last one, we have gaming industry M&A reaches 2.3 billion in Q2 2026. The quarter recorded the highest deal activity since 2022. [music] Yeah, I guess it's slowly returning somewhere. It's still quite low. But we'll see what happens and again, hopefully this whole situation gaming industry get better after all the layoffs and everything. Yeah, that was it. Thanks for listening. Have a nice weekend and see you again [music] on Monday. Ciao.