Gamescom 2026 & GTA VI: Everything You Need to Know

[music] Let's talk about Gamescom. Uh, last week we were only able to cover opening night live because we recorded on Wednesday morning. So now we have all the data in and we have Mishka's firsthand reports. So first just a few stats on what happened about 3% up in attendance and it was right behind preandemic levels of 18 and 19. So it's not like some amazingly new number. It it's kind of going back to the old days. It was however sold out. I think if you listen to a lot of gaming press, you'll you'll hear this note. It was, you know, primarily Eastern developers. 72% of all exhibitors were foreign companies. The indies area had a rise of 16%. Opening light live itself was up 8% to 78 million global viewers. So that is, you know, the Jeff Keley empire of Summer GameFest, opening night live and the Game Award show continues. If you want

to get your game marketed and in front of fans, that's the way to do it. Next year's Game Con is actually going to expand to the full week for players. It starts on Wednesday. Now they're going to open it up to to Monday. The post Gamescom, I was interesting to see that Sony has two states of play coming up. I guess they waited for everyone to get back and maybe now you're paying attention again, get past the news. And then two things that were really interesting, the Apple App Store folks were there talking about featuring. They did a talk that was kind of interesting. Mobile Gamerbiz covered that and then Google Play had a booth and like lots going on. So I think you know the platforms are showing up saying hey we're part of the game industry too. The one other fact I think the biggest fact is there was 100% more paddle events. You should talk to me about that. [laughter]
Yeah. So, this is my takeaway from Gamescom. Again, we've been I've been going to Gamescom for for several years now. I remember the one that Crest was on. We did even even a podcast in a

hotel room. That was a fun one. Anyways, this time around we did three events. I'm happy that there weren't more cuz I was alone. Mr. Criyot was not there. Three different events. No repeat events. No whiskey tasting, no water tasting this time around. So we organized together with Censor Tower their summit that was packed. People couldn't get in. So host a panel. There's a picture of Chris Petridge just laughing on the panel. Was a good one. People liked it apparently cuz I was unhinged. There was a paddle event which was a surprise success. We had to stop the signup after 100 people already were in. We definitely did not have enough courts there. So all the courts were taking. People really liked it. So congrats to the winners. We're going to continue doing paddle events. Next big one is going to be at PGC weekend. So we already took over one of London's bougiest paddle courses. So see you there. Before that, Limal in Tel Aviv. And then Supper Club, we did it at the tallest building of the city, which doesn't say much because it's Cologne. That was apparently success. A lot of,

you know, founders exe executives really liked it. That was together with Morgan Stanley and Nuzu and so forth. Jen, as you said, a lot of visitors. They say 368,000 visitors, which is 3% higher. And naturally the question is like how do you compare Gamescom to GDC and I think these are like apples and oranges. The reason why there's so many visitor at Gamescom is because it's not only a trade show. Actually trade show is the smallest part. It is a fan show. So the good part about it is is that you see a lot of gamers everywhere. You see a lot of game ads like new game announcements. Whatever was coming out was being promoted there. So you really felt like it was a gaming event and not like a bisdev event for you know gaming professionals. I don't think that this event despite bringing this massive audience and despite being like sort of the premier event is not the S tier that GDC is like you don't see the same level of executives like yes there are executives but it's not you know the CEO

forum that Morates and Goldman and McKenzie arranged in GDC where you essentially see 80% of global industry CEOs. So here it's more like, you know, A tier rather than the S tier of the of the executives. San Francisco is small. Cologne is smaller. It's kind of funny where Americans are trying to get an Uber in that city and it takes 25 minutes for the Uber to arrive. Well, it takes 20 minutes to take an e- scooter from literally, you know, the central to the other side. So I was, you know, walk or take e- scooters. Hotels, they're going to be equally expensive as in SF. Well, not quite that expensive, but equally like expensive and of poor quality. So if you want to reserve hotel and you're American, do it right now. Hayyatt is the St. Reges of Gamescom. Rison is the Intercontinental. Excelsier is the Four Seasons. That should paint the other perfect picture. Those are three to take. Everything else is, you know, the others. And make sure that you choose the hotel, right? Again, I've had some partners and media people there that that did not do this. The commute

between hotels is not like in GDC. It's not 5 minute walk from St. Reges to W. It's going to be 15 to 20 minutes. So, you're going to collect a lot of steps trying to go from one meeting to another. And you wish that you had one of these three hotels.
Let's be clear, this place was never designed for conferences. It is a small town with one big cathedral that has no business having any type of huge conference, right? It's a cluster and it's expensive
and it's ridiculous.
Yeah. And you actually, if you come in from the US, you need to fly to a city one hour train away. So, it's pretty far off. Yeah. It's
Yeah. This is why sadly we don't go anymore.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's it's expensive and so but if but I think it's gaining a lot of traction. It's growing. So I I foresee more American and now we saw a lot of Asian companies but I foresee more American companies coming in. And you know just to be clear it's going to be safer than San Francisco. I know it's now like a post-apocalyptic that there's no people. This is safer and the food is

going to be tremendously worse than you would expect in San Francisco. Let's go to Grand Theft Auto because holy it was great. It was actually really great. It ranked number one on the Netflix platform of their top 10 movie list. Pulled in 31 million views within 4 days on Netflix. Another 17 million on their YouTube site. So, uh, just a lot of people watch this thing. Mobile traffic, the US mobile app usage jumped by nearly 50% compared to typical Thursday averages over the last 12 weeks. web visitors. It soared 125% as users tuned in from PC. That's actually how I watched it. The initial surge, concurrent viewership, and heavy initial demand caused a brief momentary crash on the platform. This is one thing Netflix struggles with a little bit with live concurrent issues is it tends to crash. If you ever watch like the boxing or the MMA stuff, it tends to crash a little bit. Total reach combined across Netflix and creator reaction streams on Twitch

and other platforms. The footage pulled in roughly 4 million peak concurrent viewers. I love this. This marketing brilliance Miami Dade County. So this is, you know, the city of Miami in the county of where Miami is in the US. These local officials are exploring marketing partnerships with Rockstar Games to capitalize on the games depiction of a fictionalized Miami. Ideas include temporary rebranding parts of Miami International Airport as Vice City Airport. I mean, you could not be more brilliant. This is that like well done. Go and do that today. So my take on this whole thing is they crushed it. Special kudos to the art team. Like can you imagine the research to get all these different kinds of [clears throat] things correct? They should get the games industry equivalent of an Emmy, Oscar, whatever times 10. The authenticity like we were watching the tattoos on the guy's arms. You could see every little detail as as you were watching by. just the cultures, the

backgrounds, the body shapes, everything was like truly what I felt like was authentic. The transition from the cut scene to the gameplay was the best I've ever seen. And then I just have to say, take my money. I'm not even a GTA fan. I'm going to have to fire up the Xbox. Like I said, I was trying to fire off a PlayStation, but can't find one. So, Phil, I think you pulled some some other numbers. What do you see?
All right. So, unfortunately, Jen, I got to I got to be the guy who who delivers attribution. And it actually looks like there was some attribution. And so we're looking at Video Game Insights, which has a public pre-order tracker, which is reporting about 500 million in already existing pre-order sales revenue, which is just absolutely remarkable. And if we look at the most recent data point, it looks like there was an uptick. So, who knows? Gosh dolly, maybe like this actually had an impact and drove pre-orders. And of course, like you have to think about at the margin, would these players have purchased and installed the games anyway? But the more core question I have, Jen, is who pays

who in situations like this? Like we already know Netflix and Take Two have a relationship, but like did Take Two pay for this. What is this? Is this content? How does this even come together? How should I think about this,
my friends?
This info trailer.
This is what we call top offunnel marketing. This initiative was not for the fans. This was not for us. This was for general Netflix people out there. To hit somebody who wasn't normally going to go to Rockstars YouTube who may not know about this, you know, showing up on that first screen of Netflix was a way for the average person to be like, "What the hell is this?" and maybe click in and watch. And so, I would have expected there to be a bump in pre-orders. I think it's going to happen more slowly over time. So, who pays for this? I mean, you know, basically, in my humble opinion, Netflix made it rain just like Jason does in the strip club scene in the Netflix special. By the way, they go to the strip club and you're like, "Oh god, everyone forgets like what this game is." And you're watching that, you're like, "Oh, yeah." No, they there

is a strip club mission inside of this game. And so Rockstar in this whole thing has all of the leverage in the world. Everybody wants a piece of what's going on with Netflix. And we talked about this a couple weeks ago. Uh Netflix and Rockstar already have this relationship. Remember they had all those apps that were part of the Netflix, you know, bundle that they touted were the top downloaded games. I think there was some sort of relationship established when you see that that was so successful, Netflix probably went back to the well and said, "Hey, you know, like let's do something again." They absolutely had to have paid for this. But the silent winner in all of this, I don't know if you watched the whole thing, but at the very end it said captured on PS5. It didn't even say captured on PS5 Pro. It just said PS5. And I was like, "Holy sh holy that looked amazing." And actually, they have since confirmed that it was entirely captured on PlayStation 5 base model, not the Pro. That's kind

of the hidden marketing magic that I think we should all focus on is whoever made that deal happen at PlayStation is about to make it rain because PlayStations are sold out everywhere.
So, I'm seeing the collateral damage on this on the marketing side. Like Poly Market tweeted on X, movie studios are reportedly concerned the release of GTA 6 could pull audiences away from theaters and have major impact on the box office weeks. And this is naturally happening on gaming side because the release of Star Citizen spin-off Squadron 42 has been postponed to Q2, but Star Citizen is never shipping. So they just postpone for the sake.
Total vaporware. That's just an excuse.
Yeah, they just launched a new Kickstarter to to bring it closer. But apparently like this is such a big thing that it's just moving the dates for everybody else in entertainment, right?
Absolutely. uh you know, get get out of the way. If you weren't already out of the way, get out of the way or ship beforehand. So, Chris, let's go back to

PlayStation.
Yeah, good news from PlayStation overall. There are three quarters of the pre-orders, right? According to Sensor Tower, which I think actually is high is low. I think they actually are probably higher than that overall worldwide, but I think it's a select sample for Sensor Tower. So, but anyway, 8020 is it's a crazy number, dude. like that is just Xbox is doomed, you know, with these kind of numbers and and PlayStation's obviously playing that out on the on the trailers and on the co-arketing dollars of of which, you know, they're doing deals all the time to make sure that Sony is the premier platform for this. Sony basically the CEO says they're they're focusing his monetization on current PS5's players. And I guess the good news about the ramp apocalypse is it happened in the middle in the end of this cycle more or less. So that there's like almost 100 million units of hardware out there already of active players and that is what they're going to be focused on monetizing which ising obvious right but that's
clearly what they're doing and GTA is

going to help them get there and then also again as I've said many times is when you have a game like GTA becomes a more active install base which is going to buy more games and play more games and spend more money right and so it's all good for Sony because they're the ones that are clearly leading and we're also seeing that hardware is out of stock already dude Dude, it's freaking August, right? So, you can't get a PS5 Pro anywhere because they're selling out at $750 people, right? So, it's like price is no object for these these type of consumers, you know, and so they will sell like every every hardware unit at this level in order for GTA and that will again create a better active install base.
You mentioned the the RAM prices. So RAM prices are being pushed by, you know, the LM companies probably and the Nvidas and so forth. As RAM prices keep going up, that pushes the price of hardware, that increases the price for PS6 and makes it probably less attainable, probably over 1K. And then that means that if they're not attainable, if the penetration is low, the developers focus

on previous hardware like PS5 because of the TAM of PS6 is too limited, then that would probably mean that there's going to be less exclusive titles for PS6 and that means that there will be less need for PS6 and that creates a vicious cycle that will lead to more PCs being sold. I'm just asking and kind of hypothesizing cuz you you
the whole notion that PC is going to save the ramp apocalypse is ridiculous because
the cost of PCs go up the same amount, you know, and and more. You're not doing it in volume, right? So the the people that are going to benefit the most out of Rampocalypse on the price thing are consoles because they
make like 20 25 million a year versus, you know, the limited PC runs or limited runs on on different SKs of PC. So, what I've said before is that this will delay the release of the PS6, you know, and so we will hold on to this hardware a lot a few years longer than normal and they will basically milk this for what it's worth. And that that was the whole point of talking about this because the CEO is

already suggesting this now. And so with 100 million install base, we should get up to 120 150 somewhere in that range in the next 2 years despite the fact that RAM apocalypse which is a huge install base for these consoles and they will maint and and people buying hard software for it. PCs will actually be even more difficult to buy at a reasonable price given the RAM apocalypse until this is over and then the PS6 will come out when the RAM apocalypse is over. Right. in theory when [clears throat] the bubble has burst
and they get better deals on on ramp.
Man, did you see Nvidia's
earnings report from
Holy Yeah,
it it was the most revenue made by a company ever in the history of the world in one quarter.
It's just insane. Like it, you know, you hear about AI bubbles and then Nvidia is like, nope.
But bubble doesn't mean that companies are not valuable or the technology is not good. It just means overvalued. And Nvidia is selling picks and shovels, you

know, the the quads and and the the anthropics or the open AIs of the world that are essentially shipping models that are so much more expensive than the Chinese open source models, etc. Again, not an expert, but seems like it's pretty bubbly. [music]
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