Global reports and market data
9,191 documents·380 writers·28,548 charts and tables
Documents
The Game Business51 min
Why does Xbox need to make a brutal reset?
The gaming industry is currently navigating a period of intense volatility, characterized by a disconnect between the high volume of marketing activity and the underlying financial health of major publishers.
- Xbox’s aggressive acquisition strategy, including Bethesda and Activision Blizzard, has failed to deliver sufficient profit margins, leaving the division overextended and in need of a strategic reset.
- The gaming industry is experiencing a disconnect between marketing visibility and financial health, evidenced by a 14% increase in game announcements and 15.2% rise in press coverage during Summer Game Fest 2026 despite ongoing instability.
- Major publishers are facing significant workforce reductions, highlighted by Ubisoft’s decision to cut 1,500 employees throughout 2025 alongside the departure of key leadership across the sector.
The Game BusinessJun 2026
Two & a Half Gamers34 min
💀 Mo.co DEAD on arrival. Is it time for Supercell to kill Mo.co?
Supercell’s title Mo.co faces a critical existential crisis, as its current design fails to gain traction within the competitive RPG market.
- Supercell’s Mo.co is failing to monetize, generating only $14,000 in daily revenue despite reaching 230,000 daily active users.
- The game suffers from a fundamental design misalignment, prioritizing lightweight accessibility over the depth, build customization, and endgame progression expected by the RPG audience.
- The project is currently considered unsalvageable because the cost to bring it up to industry standards would exceed the development budget of multiple new, more viable projects.
Two & a Half GamersJun 2026
Mobilegamer.biz20 min
Amateur devs score hits with 38-0, WWDC reactions, May's top games, Orna, jobs, data and more
The mobile gaming industry is currently witnessing a surge in amateur-developed hits, driven by the accessibility of AI-assisted coding tools.
- Amateur developers are achieving viral success with AI-assisted football drafting games like '38-0' and '38-0-0', which secured over 100,000 downloads each in a single weekend with zero marketing spend.
- Honor of Kings dominated May’s top-grossing charts with $161 million in in-app purchase revenue, while 'Last War Survival' saw a significant decline, dropping to 10th place with $82 million.
- Apple’s new developer policy offers free access to its AI foundation models for apps until they reach 2 million first-time downloads, a move aimed at supporting indie developers.
Mobilegamer.bizJun 2026
Report16 pages
Rewarded UA Handbook: 2026
The "Rewarded UA Handbook: 2026" examines the state of rewarded user acquisition (UA) in the mobile gaming industry, providing best practices and future outlooks.
- Rewarded UA is now a core marketing channel, with 61% of surveyed studios planning to increase their budget in 2026 and 65% of studios allocating between 11% and 50% of their total UA spend to the channel.
- Extending reward structures beyond traditional short-term windows is critical for retention; for example, Candivore increased their Match Masters reward structure from 50 to 90 days, resulting in a 50% increase in D60 retention and a 70% uplift in D90 ROAS.
- Campaigns that layer multiple event types outperform single-event campaigns, with IAP/hybrid games utilizing an average of 3.25 distinct event types per campaign to drive long-term engagement.
AlmediaJun 2026
Mobile Dev Memo38 min
S07, E20: Shopify as a marketing operating system (with Venkat Prabhu)
Shopify is fundamentally transforming from a commerce platform into a comprehensive marketing operating system designed to simplify advertising for merchants.
- Shopify is evolving into a comprehensive marketing operating system by launching 'Campaign Autopilot,' a tool that uses data from $1.7 trillion in processed GMV to automate campaign settings and budget recommendations for merchants.
- Shopify is expanding its 'Shop Campaigns' advertising program to new surfaces, including ChatGPT, Pinterest, and the open web via Microsoft Monetize, to help merchants scale beyond their existing channels.
- The platform leverages its position as the transaction layer to solve cross-channel attribution and data blind spots, allowing merchants to manage attribution logic directly within the Shopify admin.
Mobile Dev MemoJun 2026
Jason Schreier30 min
How Things Got So Bad At Xbox
Xbox is currently navigating a period of profound organizational instability characterized by significant layoffs, studio closures, and the cancellation of major projects.
- Xbox is undergoing a major organizational overhaul under new CEO Asha Sharma, involving significant layoffs and potential studio closures as the company pivots to prioritize higher profit margins.
- The $68.7 billion acquisition of Activision Blizzard, which took 18 months to close, significantly increased Xbox's operational costs by adding thousands of employees during a period of industry-wide market cooling.
- Xbox's financial strategy has been complicated by the conflicting goals of its hardware, software, and services divisions, leading to internal debates over whether Game Pass cannibalizes full-game sales.
Jason SchreierJun 2026
GameMakers118 min
Epic Won the Fee War. So Why Is Everyone Losing? (Liam Wiltshire, Tebex)
The gaming industry is currently navigating a period of severe margin compression, driven by an infinite supply of content—increasingly accelerated by artificial intelligence—and a finite pool of player attention.
- The player relationship is the most critical asset in gaming, as evidenced by the shadow economy of UGC servers like FiveM and Hypixel, where community owners retain direct control and monetization power without publisher intervention.
- Creator codes significantly boost monetization, increasing average spend by 227% in titles like Rust by leveraging the trust and affinity players feel toward content creators.
- Alternative payment methods like Buy Now, Pay Later (BNPL) and cryptocurrency drive significantly higher spending, with transaction values 50–70% higher than traditional credit or debit card payments.
GameMakersJun 2026
Thomas Brush52 min
Why I Quit My AAA Job For The Indie Dream (w/ Mårten Stockhaus) — Ep 67
Game development is best approached as an iterative, archaeological process rather than a rigid construction project.
- Securing a publishing deal often requires demonstrating team capability through a playable prototype or vertical slice rather than just a concept, proving to the publisher that the team can execute the vision.
- Working as a contract studio for an established publisher like Coffee Stain on an existing project can provide a low-risk transition into full-time indie development by ensuring a salary while building studio credibility.
- Effective game design relies on 'contrast'—such as mixing fast and slow enemies or balancing pain points with relief—to create engaging combat loops and meaningful player progression.
Thomas BrushJun 2026
How To Market A Game22 min
Nothing has changed: June Steam Next Fest 2026
The June 2026 Steam Next Fest analysis emphasizes that the event’s structure and the Steam algorithm remain largely static, with minimal changes observed between the February and June iterations.
- Steam Next Fest performance is largely predetermined by pre-festival wishlist counts, with the vast majority of games following predictable statistical trends rather than experiencing viral spikes.
- The number of games participating in Steam Next Fest has grown significantly, rising from 2,650 in October 2025 to 3,458 in February 2026, and reaching 4,358 in June 2026.
- There are no effective 'gimmicks' or last-minute marketing tactics to improve performance during the event; developers should only push updates if the game is technically broken or crashing.
How To Market A GameJun 2026
Deconstructor of Fun55 min
My Wife Uninstalled Roblox. Then I Talked to Their Safety Team.
Roblox is undergoing a significant strategic shift to prioritize user safety through the implementation of age-gated account tiers and advanced verification technologies.
- Roblox is implementing age-gated account tiers, specifically 'Roblox Kids' and 'Roblox Select,' to restrict content and communication features based on verified age brackets.
- The platform supports its safety architecture with facial age estimation technology and a multi-layered moderation system that combines artificial intelligence, human review, and user reporting.
- Roblox currently manages a daily active user base of 150 million, positioning its investments in trust and safety as a core requirement for long-term platform sustainability.
Deconstructor of FunJun 2026
Whitepaper3 pages
Against Seamlessness and Hedonistic Loops: The Cases of Pause, Reflect, Resist, and Reform, from Interaction Design into Games
This analysis reinterprets findings from a qualitative study of intentional friction in interaction design to argue that certain types of friction can generate reflective, political, sensory, and transformative pleasures in games and play.
- The paper challenges the assumption in interaction and game design that friction is a usability flaw to be minimised, arguing instead that deliberate friction can be treated as a generative design resource.
- The authors contend that seamlessness can conceal structural inequalities and reproduce power asymmetries, while intentional friction can generate reflective, political, sensory, and transformative forms of play.
- Based on a qualitative analysis with purposeful sampling across commercial, artistic, speculative, and infrastructural cases, the authors derive four behavioural modalities: pause, reflect, resist, and reform.
DiGRAJun 2026
Whitepaper3 pages
Unruly Forces and Marginalized Pleasures: Exploring Glitch Aesthetics and Agency in Alternative Control Schemes
The research challenges the prevailing game design paradigm that prioritizes seamless and precise control, arguing that "unruly forces" such as glitches, input lag, and unconventional mappings offer a productive aesthetic and political space.
- The paper argues that glitches, input lag, erratic force feedback, and unconventional control mappings are a productive aesthetic and political space, challenging the game industry's dominant paradigm of seamless, precise, predictable control.
- Its framing draws on glitch aesthetics, queer theory's affirmative revaluation of nonnormativity, disability studies, and Sara Ahmed's work on orientation, treating the pleasures of unruly control as valuable in their own right rather than as compensation for deficiencies.
- Custom controller configurations used by disabled players produce a tactile-kinesthetic language that fosters mastery distinct from ableist design assumptions.
DiGRAJun 2026