• UK social media ban says that it’s the children who are wrong, not the digital world they’re living in

• European Commission deals blow to Stop Killing Games

• EA’s UFC game lands just after idiocy in the White House in the week’s release round-up

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Hello VGIM-ers,

It’s finally here! Power Play: Video Games, Politics and the Battle for Global Influence is available to buy as a hardback, e-read or audiobook in the UK and Commonwealth territories today after literally years of teasing.

Instead of banging on about the book in this week’s newsletter, you can get your teaser on how video games have become a channel for geopolitical influence through:

• A print and digital interview with Chris Alnutt from the Financial Times.

• An episode of My Perfect Console with Simon Parkin.

• A chat with Arthur Snell on the Behind the Lines podcast.

• A check-in with the Good Game Club podcast.

• Today’s episode of Conflicted with Thomas Small, which should be in feeds right now.

Ready to buy Power Play? You can get it from many of your favourite online book stores, audiobook providers or indie favourites by hitting the button below.

Buy Power Play right now

And thank you all so much for the support over the past two and a half years. It’s a genuine privilege to have written the book, and I can’t wait for you to read it.

The big opinion - The UK social media ban punishes kids for our failure

I promise this introduction goes somewhere: Power Play is a book about taking the digital world seriously on its terms. It argues that the weaponisation of video game content, communities and the information ecosystem surrounding it is not evidence that the medium is inherently harmful. Instead, it’s a by-product of the disdain and disregard Western democracies have towards the digital world. By mocking digital culture, failing to take its influence on our reality seriously and taking no steps to bring the norms we value into the spaces and ecosystems we inhabit, the people within them can easily become disillusioned and disconnected from wider society. And unless we come up with serious, cross-society interventions that accept that standards are just as important as regulation, the influence of digital spaces won’t just disappear; it’ll continue to shift its centre of gravity towards states, groups and actors who can persuade disaffected players and people that they care about them. That leads to meaningful harm for our communities, who get dragged towards darker thinking, culture or ideologies without a democratic counter to defend them.

Don’t pull your punches: I mention this because the UK Government’s proposed social media ban for under-16s is precisely the wrong-headed, moral-panic-inflected policy that promises to make digital life much harder for young people and society at large. Rather than creating a digital world where young people can grow up in digital spaces with adequate protections from the platforms they use, the Government is instead setting up an easily hopped-over barbed-wire fence around spaces to pretend it is doing the hard work of cultivating our values within these digital environments. The result will almost certainly not be a safer online world for children and young people that respects their rights to express themselves, to talk and play. It’ll feel more transgressive and dangerous for them to enter, pushing them towards those darker spaces where hostile voices thrive in the process.

Rushing to conclusions

A quick rundown of the policy: The proposed social media ban is a blunt instrument that tries to keep teens safe by punting them out of most of the internet. The Government’s fact sheet supporting the announcement says that ‘under-16s will no longer be able to use certain social media.’ The government said that services like Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, Snapchat, Facebook and X will be affected by the ban, with messaging services like WhatsApp and Telegram excluded. It claimed ‘high-risk’ features like livestreaming and contacting strangers will be restricted for under-16s, including through unspecified gaming services. It also said that this’ll all be backed by stronger requirements for age checks on platforms, with Ofcom set to judge what forms of age assurance are effective before the ban comes into place in Spring 2027.

Making it up as they go along: You’d expect that a policy that bans 12m people from talking to friends, accessing information or building their communities in an important part of the world would be fully fleshed out before it’s announced. You’d be wrong. The loose list of platforms subject to a ban was immediately queried, with journalists left with vague answers over whether Roblox, Reddit or Telegram – a messaging service currently under investigation from Ofcom for allegedly failing to do enough to prevent the sharing of child sexual exploitation material – would be subject to it. The supposedly ‘harmful’ nature of features like livestreaming wasn’t defined, with the Government telling everyone to check back in with it in mid-July when it’s worked out what it is talking about. There’s also no timeline for the ban’s rollout, other than a handwavey reference to Spring 2027.

Alarmingly quick: The announcement felt hasty. And that’s because it was. The social media ban emerged from the government’s Growing up in an Online World Consultation. The Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT) received a record 116,000 responses to its 54 questions before it closed on Tuesday 26th May. Typically, Cabinet Office says that government departments should respond to a consultation within 12 weeks of its closing. DSIT, by contrast, was given barely 12 working days to assess the findings and propose a policy solution in time for this week’s announcement. That’s not enough time to assess the evidence, let alone analyse it properly. This shows that the consultation was a farce and undermines confidence in its conclusions.

Legacy before policy: Of course, DSIT should not be blamed for delivering its analysis so promptly under pressure. Instead, we must criticise the crass political cynicism from our country’s leadership which forced them to rush the process. Last week, Politico reported that the Government wanted to announce a ban before the Makerfield by-election taking place later today. Was the government’s rush to announce the ban a reassuring move for the thousands of parents responding with concern to the consultation? Or was it because a dead-in-the-water Prime Minister wanted to announce a legacy-sealing policy before his main political rival could enter Parliament and sweep him out of power? It’s the latter, obviously. When it comes to regulating the spaces that shape our world, that just isn’t good enough. And the opinion that the ban is not the plan is shared more widely than you think.

Punishing kids for our bad choices

Not the usual suspects: Despite the social media ban’s popularity amongst parents, it’s gone down badly with groups and individuals who were firmly behind the passage of the UK’s monstrously sized Online Safety Act. Criticism of the social media ban has come from such noted firebrands as *checks notes* the NSPCC, the 5Rights Foundation, the Molly Rose Foundation, the UK Safer Internet Centre and dozens of other civil society organisations, who’ve claimed that bans are the ‘wrong solution’. Academia responded with a similar lack of enthusiasm, with the Science Media Centre compiling responses from dozens of bigwigs at universities such as Cambridge, Oxford, Durham, Royal Holloway, and Nottingham who have raised serious objections and concerns about the ban.

Early numbers: For many, the expected criticism of a social media ban is that it is too easily circumvented. Australia’s eSafety Commissioner revealed earlier this year that 61% of teens remain on social media after the country barred access late last year. Advocates for a social media ban such as Ed Rith argue that this demonstrates the effectiveness of a ban, saying that a 40% drop in social media usage is huge in behavioural and cultural terms. Given the alleged harms within social media, which Rith compares to tobacco or alcohol, he argues that a ban is better than nothing and a valuable starting point for changing teens’ social media habits.

Interesting analogy: It’s not a bad argument if policymakers were seeking the answer to the question “what’s the best way to keep young people off social media?” The problem is that policymakers are answering a different question: “how do we keep young people safe online?” Regulation is part of that answer, including potentially limiting access to platforms, banning features or restricting access to content (e.g. pornography) to protect younger users where appropriate. But it goes much deeper than that, towards fostering behaviours, standards and cultures across society that allow children to interact with the digital world. If we want to respect the rights of children to relax, play, freely express themselves, form identities, and access information to participate in the world around them, we have to make sure they can access the digital world safely and freely. Otherwise, we’re failing to respect their rights and failing to prepare them for the world they’ll actually live in.

Digital natives: This brings us to the substance of the criticism of the social media ban. There’s extensive concern that children and young people’s voices about the importance of digital life haven’t been listened to. The consultation response showed that the opinions of youngsters differed from parents. But public polling from Savanta, which reached a representative sample of 9,000 parents and teens and was commissioned alongside the consultation, showed how important the digital world is to young people. Young people were nearly twice as likely to say that social media helps them feel connected (82%) or included (71%) than anxious (39%). They marginally said that the positives of social media outweigh the negatives (28% to 25%). And perhaps unexpectedly, the majority of children and young people wanted some limitations of social media use for under-16s without an outright ban. Kids and teens wanted help from policymakers, not to be cut off from their community.

The parents aren’t always right: A blanket ban on social media doesn’t just deny children their right to be listened to; it doesn’t align with what parents want either. Turning to Savanta’s data yet again, 16% of parents within its panel wanted a blanket ban on social media compared to 31% being in favour of restrictions to time spent on screens and minimum ages for most risky functions (44%). By contrast, the 116,000 consultation responses – which were self-selecting and featured 33,000 pro forma responses from a campaign group in favour of the ban - suggested that 63% of parents supported a ban. The government’s case for banning social media rested on conclusions from a dataset subjected to widespread lobbying, which tilted heavily in favour of a ban. But Savanta’s data found that a majority of parents and young people supported a graduated approach to accessing social media, bolstered by targeted restrictions, time-based controls and specific safeguards for AI features (e.g. chatbots). A fairer policy option to limit young people’s access to social media was on the table. The Government chose to ignore it, favouring an easy answer.

Not very informed voters: The decision to boot children and teens out of social media is inconsistent with efforts to build a generation of engaged, resilient young people ready to navigate the modern media landscape. At the same time that the government weighs up an 8:30 pm curfew for 16- 17-year-olds accessing social media, it is handing those same people the right to vote in a national election. If 57% of young people get their news from social media and 51% of adults do, excluding teens from platforms won’t mean that they’ll suddenly gravitate towards ‘proper’ news sources to get their information. It is much more likely that they won’t engage with that content at all, or they’ll access information secretly on social media. This is a recipe for creating a less informed, less digitally literate and less resilient cohort of voters, something that hostile actors will be delighted to hear.

Double standards: But most unforgivably, the implementation of the ban when the Government is failing to enact existing laws or set societal standards shifts the blame for online harms onto those suffering it. Nowhere is it clearer than the Government’s policy towards X. It is willing to ban teenagers from accessing it until 16 because of harms within the space, such as Grok’s brief phase generating child sexual exploitation material and the role the platform has played in fomenting riots in Southport, Belfast and Southampton. But despite the radicalisation of the space, Government departments, ministers and the Prime Minister keep giving X the thumbs up by posting directly into its information environment. Rather than enforce the Online Safety Act or lead from the front by exiting extreme spaces, the Government’s social media ban tells young people that hateful and harmful spaces are fine as long as you’re over the age of 16. That doesn’t make the online world safer. It makes it more dangerous, punishing young people for our timidity and complacency.

Unhappy times ahead

Wasy answers win: Will the misguided ban come into effect? Almost certainly. Despite the rush to announce the ban, the lack of meaningful thought behind it or even any certainty that the Prime Minister will be in post long enough to see it through, the direction of travel is set. In an age of utter political mediocrity within just about every British political party, the social media ban is exactly the kind of easy, popular answer to a complex problem that politicians love (without it delivering meaningful benefits to society at large). It is unlikely to be taken off the table from this point onwards.

There is a better option: Nevertheless, I hope that there is room to change direction in a way that brings together reasonable parental concern with respect for the rights of young people. There is room for regulation which allows young people to access more parts of social media with the help of parents, something that Roblox – of all platforms – has shown is possible with its multiple account layers for kids, teens and older players. We can support the development of the norms we want to see in digital spaces by funding public awareness campaigns, community initiatives and education programmes to help children grow into the citizens we want to see. And the Government still has a chance to lead from the front through its own communication channels to demonstrate the values it believes are important in our digital world. The Mayor of London’s ‘Build a Man’ campaign, which saw young men use video game character creators to create what they thought to be positive male role models for their communities, is a fantastic example of this.

One last warning: As it stands, we’re on the cusp of a major error. In an effort to give a lame duck Prime Minister a policy win before he’s booted out of office, we’re about to tell young people and teens that it’s their fault that the digital world we built for them doesn’t protect them well enough. And by kicking them out of it, we won’t make them safer. We’ll increase their disaffection and disappointment. We’ll make it more likely that they’ll disconnect from society, or go into the digital landscape undercover or underground to avoid censure. And in doing so, we’ll push them away from the mainstream towards darker spaces and communities — perpetuating harm, rather than trying to end it.

News in brief

Steadily Stopping Killing Games: The European Commission has dealt a blow to the Stop Killing Games campaign by saying that it cannot force video games to stay playable after they’ve been withdrawn from sale. In its response to a European Citizens’ Initiative about the campaign, the Commission said that it cannot propose a legal obligation due to copyright and intellectual property rules. It has committed to working with industry to draw up an industry code to manage the ‘end of life’ process for service games, while also working with consumer authorities to raise awareness of consumer rights with players.

Steaming up: Dutch not-for-profit group the Consumer Competition Claims Foundation has launched a campaign to cut the commission Steam takes from its store. The organisation is inviting players in the region to join its Game Claim campaign, with the initial aim of sitting down with Valve to discuss issues such as its 30% standard cut, its policies discouraging developers from releasing games on other platforms and geoblocking Steam keys bought in other EU nations. This paves the way for a possible class action claim in the country, akin to similar efforts currently underway in the UK and US.

Fake Act News: The US games industry is facing an unexpected challenge from a bill designed to stop AI-generated deepfakes in their tracks. The No Fakes Act aims to prevent the creation of ‘digital replicas’ for the purposes of attacking public figures, defining replicas as “a newly created, computer-generated, highly realistic electronic representation that is readily identifiable as the voice or visual likeness of an individual.” The lack of subtlety in the drafting has drawn concerns from the Entertainment Software Association, which notes the definition’s lack of distinction between carefully crafted digital game content and a deepfake of a person. Frankfurt Kurnit Klein + Selz breaks down the concerns.

Savvy sponsorship: Hat-tip to VGIM reader Mark who noticed that Savvy Games Group has been popping up on advertising hoardings as part of the 2026 FIFA World Cup. The Saudi Arabian games publisher was announced as a sponsor of the event as part of the Public Investment Fund’s (PIF) support for the tournament. And to think I still remember the time when Savvy’s PR lines were that it was completely separate from the PIF…

Game jam today, tomorrow and yesterday: Finally, Playing for the Planet’s Green Game Jam is underway. 70 games including the likes of Subway Surfers, Just Dance and Magic: The Gathering Arena are facing off in a competitive campaign to raise funds for causes preserving rainforests or coral reefs. Content rolled out in the first games in time for World Environment Day a couple of weeks ago, but there’s still a week’s worth of competitive game-jamming to go.

Moving on

Craig Duncan, Head of Xbox Games Studio, has stepped down from his post. Louise O’Connor, who was Duncan’s Chief of Staff, is also out as part of a reset…Kelsey Medeiros has started a new role as Content Creator at Sega of America…Rohan Jain is the new Head of Corporate Development at Lego Digital Play…And congrats to Liz Prince from Amiqus, who was named an MBE in the King’s Birthday Honours…

Jobs ahoy

Kojima Productions is looking for a Social Media Manager based in Tokyo…Rocksteady Studios is hiring an External Development Manager…Playground Games is hunting for a new Senior Producer…Epic Games needs a Social Media and Content Ops Director in the States…And Hasbro is hiring a Director, Studio Operations in Montreal…

Events and conferences

• Serious Play Europe, Mainz - 18th-19th June

• Develop, Brighton - 14th-16th July

• VGIM Business Breakfast, Brighton - 15th July

• Games for Change, New York - 21st-22nd July

• ChinaJoy, Shanghai - 31st July-3rd August

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Games of the week

• EA Sports UFC 6 - Recreate the stupidity of what happened in the White House last week with the latest entry in the UFC fighting series.

• R-Type Tactics I.II Cosmos - Remakes of two strategy games based on classic shmup R-Type arrive on all platforms this week.

• The Adventures of Elliot: The Millennium Tales - JRPG from the makers of Octopath Traveller and Bravely Default with ‘stunning HD-2D visuals’ lands for your role-playing pleasure.

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Before you go…

I’m also happy to celebrate the launch by unveiling the snazzy Power Play Up, an asset designed by the wonderful Anna Hollinrake.

Get in touch if you’d like to include it in your game.

Keep up with VGIM: | Linkedin | Bluesky | Email | Power Play |

Good morning VGIM Insiders,

Welcome to a special edition of Playing Politics.

Rather than run the usual newsletter, I’m giving VGIM Insiders a special treat: an early preview of a small part of Power Play’s audiobook.

At the end of April, I spent four days in a studio in London reading my book from cover to cover. Many cups of tea and biscuits were devoured in the process.

The audio was eventually whittled down into 12 and a half hours of content, eventually becoming the audiobook that’ll be available via Audible, Spotify and your favourite indie audio storefronts on Thursday.

But I know that a lot of you are interested in finding out what Power Play is really about and discovering whether my plummy British accent is perfect for narration.

So rather than make you wait until Thursday to judge book/me, I’m sharing a 14-minute extract from the audiobook exclusively for VGIM Insiders so you can listen to it before launch.

I’ll tell you a little bit more about what’s contained within shortly. But if you want to listen to the extract, you’ll need to sign up as a VGIM Insider to tune in.

Use the code POWERPLAY to get an Insider membership for £25 per year or £3 per month by hitting the button below.

Get 50% off forever

And if you’re not a VGIM Insider, you can check out my interview with the Financial Times that went out yesterday. Read it here.

The Other Putin

The audio extract you’re about to listen to is taken from Chapter 6 of Power Play, called Nothing is True and Everything is Playable.

Read more

This week’s Video Games Industry Memo is sponsored by Moore Kingston Smith

Advising businesses across the video games industry, with a full range of commercial and financial services.

• VGIM publishes 12,000-word report exploring LGBTQ+ censorship in games

• Summer Game Fest’s biggest announcements dominate the news

• NBA’s new 3 versus 3 multiplayer game tops the week’s releases

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Hello VGIM-ers,

I’m writing to you this morning from First Playable in Florence, where I’m here promoting Power Play and writing about the Italian games biz (more on that later this month).

Before we get into today’s newsletter, it’s one week to go until Power Play launches. And a few people have asked me how best to support the book before it lands on Thursday 18th June in the UK.

The simplest answer is to pre-order it. Whether you want to buy the hardback or listen to the audiobook, getting your order in now helps rack up first-week sales, increases visibility on platforms and encourages bookstore owners to invite me to more events. You can get your pre-order in here, via your favoured bookseller or audiobook distributor.

The next best thing is to tell people about Power Play. Word of mouth is just as big a deal in selling books as it is with games.

If you’re excited to read the book, want to share how it looks in your hands when it arrives next week or want to be kind about the quality of my audiobook narration, tell your friends about it in person or share on social media. Use the link above to make sharing easy.

Finally, you can support the event by attending one of the events on my book tour.

I’ve just added Sunday Papers Live to my tour schedule on 5th July, but I have dates in London, Bradford, Cambridge, Norwich and New York coming up (and more to announce next week too). Get a ticket to one of the events here.

And with that done, let’s get into the newsletter.

The big read - How LGBTQ+ video game content is censored across the world

Some context: Over the past year, VGIM has reported on the rising censorship of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, and other sexual orientations and genders (LGBTQ+) content in video games. We’ve examined how Russia’s censorship agencies work with storefronts like Steam to chastise developers for creating queer games. We’ve unpicked Steam and itch.io’s blunt censorship of LGBTQ+ titles due to a botched response to an international pressure campaign. We’ve also highlighted concerns over game companies rolling back support for Pride, as part of wider fears about industry self-censorship.

A really big read: But I felt that there was a lot more to say on this topic. That’s why VGIM has produced its first report called Trapped in the Network. Funded by industry advocacy group Out Making Games, it explores why LGBTQ+ communities are targets for oppression across the world, why digital censorship plays a role in silencing their voices, and how video game content has become a prime target for states and non-state groups seeking to suppress the community.

Grab it now (or read on for the summary): You can read the full 12,000-word report by downloading it using the button below. But if you want a quick summary before you dive in, then read on.

Read Trapped in the Network

How we got here

Quick précis: The report opens by explaining how censorship evolved in a digital age, why LGBTQ+ communities have been censored generally and why video games have increasingly attracted the attention of censors.

The three ‘fs’: Before the arrival of the internet, censorship was a predominantly centralised process governed by states through fear and good ol’ fashioned physical violence. Three decades on from the rollout of the net, it has decentralised enormously. Whereas censorship used to be all about creating fear from the top-down, this is much harder to do in a digital landscape when content is easily created and shared by individuals. So, modern censors changed approach. They impose friction on users by making it harder to access content online through filters, blocks and other technological means. They flood the online conversation using friendly media, supporters or bots to dilute real voices. And by imposing punishments publicly and loudly against hand-picked targets, authorities can project fear more effectively than ever through digital channels. This encourages people and communities to self-censor; silencing targeted groups in a way that makes the rest of the population feel like nothing is going on.

Four actors: This decentralised censorship landscape is shaped by actors across society, who work in tandem — whether deliberately or organically — to chill free expression. States continue to set the rules for censoring content, setting out punishments for breaking them and deploying resources to enforce them. Platforms increasingly act as an indirect policer of these rules, trading ongoing access to a market in return for operating on behalf of censors. Businesses and institutions end up self-censoring content to try to meet the demands of platforms, as much as to stay on the right side of the state. And in a flattened digital landscape, groups or individuals who lobby noisily can impose further fear on creators through grassroots pressure campaigns – deepening self-censorship by engendering fear, or helping states identify content or creators who may have slipped its net.

Wedge issue: LGBTQ+ communities are a target for oppression because typically censorious actors like authoritarian governments, religious regimes and populist groups seek to ‘other’ queer communities to divide and conquer their populations. Censorship (or self-censorship of) LGBTQ+ content and communities is invaluable because it suppresses stories that could push back against the prevailing narrative. The enforced silence also allows dominant powers to spread false or malicious narratives about the community unchallenged, deepening control and strengthening oppression simultaneously.

Commercial censorship: Trapped in the Network shows that censorship of LGBTQ+ content within video games has occurred for decades. Initially, it was driven less by state censorship and more by prudish attitudes towards the community in the United States in the 1980s and 1990s. Games such as Caper in the Castro, Final Fight and even Super Mario Bros 2 each made adjustments to queer-coded games to secure publishing deals or certification to release as a by-product of moral panics around sexuality.

The emergence of an inclusive playerbase: However, censorship of LGBTQ+ games in the past decade has deepened because, somewhat ironically, queer games and communities became a major part of the industry. Games like The Last of Us, Baldur’s Gate 3 and Stardew Valley demonstrated the cultural and commercial value of representing queer experiences. Workforce surveys such as Ukie’s census showed that the UK industry workforce was twice as likely to be LGBTQ+ as the general population. The Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD) identified a similar rainbow dollar trend in the player base in the US, reporting that 17% of the country’s players identified as LGBTQ+.

An authoritarian counterattack: However, the prominence of LGBTQ+ content and communities in games occurred just as the political environment surrounding the industry became more authoritarian. The rise of China as the biggest consumer market, Saudi Arabia as a major investor and the outright hostility of the modern US political right to LGBTQ+ has centred the industry around territories which, for varying reasons, suppress queer voices. Online safety laws designed to rightfully protect children and individuals from sexual exploitation online have been maliciously weaponised to conflate LGBTQ+ content with inappropriate or illegal sexual content. And the industry’s failure to combat misogynistic hate movements such as 2014’s has empowered pressure groups to attack creators from minority backgrounds, including the LGBTQ+ community. This created the conditions for censorship and self-censorship of game content to rise worldwide.

How censorship of LGBTQ+ games actually works

Onto the practicalities: After explaining how censorship of LGBTQ+ games and communities has evolved, Trapped in the Network explains how it happens via the four main actors propping up modern decentralised digital censorship.

Rules of the censorship game: At a state level, countries continue to set the rules of censorship and create the enforcement structures to suppress LGBTQ+ content. Regulators in states like China, Russia and Saudi Arabia set vague but flexible rules banning game content which promotes ‘non-traditional’ genders or sexuality (e.g. Russia) or ‘effeminate’ masculinity (eg. China) to give them maximum discretion to ban content they don’t like. They use regulatory bodies like content rating agencies, culture ministries or the state’s official censorship body to stop LGBTQ+ content getting into the market (e.g. Saudi Arabia’s General Authority for Media Regulation). These enforcement bodies then enact those deliberately vague laws to empower them to take action against queer content, such as ordering stores to delist titles that get past the censorship process or removing market access for businesses that are seen to support queer content when politically convenient (e.g. Russia’s decision to ban Roblox in part for featuring LGBTQ+ experiences and content). This creates fear for communities and creators in the country, as well as market entrants.

Providing a platform: Platforms and storefronts are the next layer of censorship because they work — whether willingly or not — with regulators who enforce censorship to maintain market access. Many do this by responding to content takedown requests directly to take down LGBTQ+ video game content on request. But platforms often inadvertently expand censorship through poor moderation strategies, or by allowing inadequacies in their infrastructure to be weaponised by states or pressure groups to affect queer creators operating outside censored territories. Steam and itch.io’s response to Collective Shout’s campaign to convince payment providers to withdraw support for each store is a prime example of this in action. Because neither store had an effective content rating or moderation process to protect legitimate free expression, the blunt removal of thousands of games with ‘sexual’ content caught many that simply featured LGBTQ+ themes. This imposes friction on queer content, reducing discoverability, damaging commercial viability and diminishing voices.

Censoring the self: Beyond platforms, game developers and publishers have contributed to the problem through self-censorship. Whether through fear of harm or through desperation to enter a market, decisions by developers to tone down — or reduce — LGBTQ+ content within their games contribute to a chilling of free expression. Removing support for queer communities within titles that previously backed them publicly (e.g. Jagex’s rollback of Pride content in Runescape) or ‘straight-washing’ content to gain entry to markets (e.g. Riot’s decision to remove K’Sante’s LGBTQ+ identity in League of Legends to enter markets like China and Turkey) are prime examples of self-censorship. This shows how fear quietens the community’s voice, often where it is most needed.

Pressure groups attack: Finally, the report shows how groups and individuals can apply pressure from the bottom up to deepen censorship of LGBTQ+ content and other minority groups. The most prominent example in the past few years was the concerted attack on narrative consultancy Sweet Baby Inc. What started as an unfounded attack against a business providing much-needed sensitivity services for game developers, including when writing LGBTQ+ stories effectively, turned into a hate campaign that seeks to harass developers creating games which promote the “avoidance of traditional male and female terminology” in their content. But it goes beyond this too, with creators on Steam being targeted by ‘No Woke’ campaigns for featuring queer content and 52% of LGBTQ+ players reporting to GLAAD that they have received hate online. This floods the information environment with an inaccurate perception of what players think about LGBTQ+ content, dissuading developers from supporting the community and strengthening actors willing to politicise the debate (e.g. Elon Musk suggesting Sweet Baby Inc was at the centre of Gamergate 2).

The contagion effect: The biggest problem with increasing censorship of queer content is that it does not confine itself to borders. With games plugged deeply into digital infrastructure and reliant upon selling globally, the values transmitted from markets like the United States and China – as well as from investment hubs like Saudi Arabia – often spread to the rest of the world. This risks turning localised censorship efforts into globalised norms.

How to fight back

Bravery needed: So, what can be done about it all? The report rounds off with a range of conclusions, primarily targeted at different groups across the censorship net. But the primary conclusion is that the best way to begin to solve the problem of censoring LGBTQ+ content is, bluntly, to be braver about protecting freedom of speech, creativity and expression within games.

Take action: Democracies need to be much punchier about protecting the rights of LGBTQ+ communities to exist, while also teaching the public through digital literacy programmes how authoritarian groups and populists deliberately target minorities to sow division. Platforms need to evolve much more sophisticated approaches to moderating game content on their platform to stop malicious efforts to conflate queer content with illegal sexual content (and, in the process, prevent brute force attacks from pressure groups who attack payment infrastructure or review bomb to distort the discourse). Developers and publishers need to recognise the value of LGBTQ+ communities to the games market, maintain – rather than roll back – support for them within their titles, and give greater agency to players in areas like character creation screens to allow them to make ‘ambiguous’ content that acts as an invaluable source of safe self-expression. Preventing aggressive groups and individuals from dominating the discourse by taking strong stances against blatantly hostile campaigns, stamping out hate speech, and supporting staff who face abuse on the social media frontlines is key.

Freedom at stake: But to do this, we need to accept two things. There is a rising tide of censorship of LGBTQ+ content in games, and there needs to be a joined-up whole-of-society approach to tackling the problem within liberal democracies. Otherwise, we won’t just see LGBTQ+ communities silenced and suppressed in an increasingly authoritarian digital landscape. All voices will be diminished.

Read Trapped in the network: the rise of LGBTQ+ censorship in games and what we can do about it here.

News in brief - Summer Game Fest round-up edition

The main event: Ah, Summer Game Fest. The bafflingly busy week where the game industry announces everything at once has pretty much wrapped up. And the reviews are that it was alright, y’know. Geoff Keighley and Lucy James announced the third entry in the Final Fantasy VII remake series (and its subtitle of Revelation), another Resi reboot in the form of Code Veronica and a new Cuphead game to get excited about. Eurogamer has a full list of everything else announced, which you can find in the link above.

Having a Laufey: Geoff’s gun was technically jumped by PlayStation. Sony rushed out of the blocks with a State of Play that revealed the next chapter in the Until Dawn horror series, an extended look at the forthcoming Wolverine action game and Dave the Diver spinoff Bancho the Chef. Eyebrows were raised during the announcement of God of War: Laufey, a new entry in the franchise that explores what happens when Kratos’s wife heads into the afterlife. And the reason why eyebrows headed north was the presence of a gelatinous cube, played by actor Jack Quaid, as Laufey’s sidekick. Each to their own, I guess.

Back in its XBOX: Last Sunday’s XBOX showcase told us a lot about the company’s likely strategy under Asha Sharma’s leadership. It announced a return to console exclusivities with news on Gears of War: E-Day and Clockwork Revolution, notably keeping the word ‘PC’ out of executive mouths while doing so. It kept its cross-platform options open for multiplayer games like Forza and Call of Duty, where user counts are king. Less strategically, Sharma ended the event by going full Oprah, by effectively shouting “and you get an XBOX” at the showcase’s many attendees. A nice touch, I’m sure you’ll agree.

Ninten-do what you feel like: As someone rushing to get a lot of this newsletter written before I flew to Florence, I was obviously delighted when Nintendo slipped an under-the-radar Direct into the calendar on Tuesday 9th June. The company briefly baffled fans when it dedicated five minutes of the Direct to showing Yoshiaki Koizumi lose a thumb-wrestling match in the soon-to-be-released Nintendo Switch Sports Resort. But the announcement of a closed network test for From Software’s multiplayer game Duskbloods, a release date for Deltarune Chapter 5, a new Kingdom Hearts game and the first look at the long-teased Ocarina of Time remake won them over again.

PC Gaming Show Mastered the Race (for releases): But if you asked me to pick the showcase that I enjoyed the most, it was the PC Gaming Show. Sure, it had an advantage over the others because I was deeply interested in finding out more about the new Warhammer 40k Total War game. But chuck in the reveal of a definitive edition of WW2 strategy game Company of Heroes, a follow-up to the criminally underrated Cassette Beasts and a deeper look at Control Resonant and I was a very happy man indeed.

Moving on

Sam Hilary has been appointed Brand Director at Team 17…Mark Nolan is the new Head of Marketing at GamerSafer…George Corner has been appointed Commercial Director at The Game Business…And Side has been busy hiring lots of people, with Sijo Jose arriving as Chief Services Officer and Kaley Hurst becoming Chief Marketing Officer…

Jobs ahoy

Google DeepMind is hiring a Game Designer in its London office…LEGO Digital Play is looking for a Lead Engineer for its mobile games team…SEGA Europe needs a Paid Influencer Manager (presumably because an unpaid one would get it in trouble with the law)...Nintendo needs a Manager for its eShop, dealing with those pesky publisher/developer relations…And if you fancy a stint in Tokyo, Ubisoft is hiring a Communications and Content Specialist…

Events and conferences

• Power Play in conversation with Keith Stuart, London - 16th June

• Serious Play Europe, Mainz - 18th-19th June

• Develop, Brighton - 14th-16th July

• VGIM Business Breakfast, Brighton - 15th July

• Games for Change, New York - 21st-22nd July

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Games of the week

• NBA: The Run - Three vs three basketball in the style of Rematch and Rocket League? Put me in, coach.

• Unrailed 2: Back on Track - It’s a co-op railroad digging game that’s best played with friends, so expect Transport Tycoon with a side-helping of Overcooked.

• Voidling Bound - It’s a third-person shooting game that’s a little bit like Palworld and a little bit like Helldivers, if that sounds like your cup of tea.

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Before you go…

The World Cup kicks off today, but who is going to win it? Electronic Arts has predicted that Spain will emerge as winners, according to SportBible.

Sure, EA’s football game has successfully predicted the past four winners of the tournament. But can the game’s predictive powers win me over like Paul the Octopus, the football result-predicting cephalopod, did?

Of course not.

This week’s Video Games Industry Memo is sponsored by First Playable

The gateway to the Italian video game industry.

• Europe’s games industry tries to strike a balance in Brussels

• UK online safety minister suggests games should be included in social media ban

• We tip our hat to three video game showcases for Summer Game Fest week

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Hello VGIM-ers,

Tick tock, it’s book tour o’clock.

After kickstarting the Power Play book tour last week, I’m very pleased to announce a swathe of dates in the UK and beyond.

You can see me discuss the book in the following places:

• First Playable, Florence: Wednesday 12th June

• Backstory, Balham: Tuesday 16th June

• Bradford Literature Festival, Bradford: Saturday 4th July

• A soon-to-be-announced event, London: Sunday 5th July

• Waterstones Norwich: Wednesday 8th July

• Waterstones Cambridge: Thursday 9th July

• Waterstones Hitchin (morning book signing): Saturday 11th July

• Games for Change Festival, New York: Tuesday 21st July

I’ve added links to all the currently online ticketed events on the Power Play Linktree. Hit this link to access it.

And if you’d like me to come to your town, city or event to talk about the book, get in touch. We’re taking bookings through to the Autumn.

P.S. Power Play releases two weeks today. Pre-order it here.

The big read - The European games biz goes lobbying

Not quite as sunny: It’s that time of year. Games journalists and influencers from across the world have clambered into trains, planes and automobiles to attend the hottest video game event of the year. But whereas the vast majority of the video game media ended up in Los Angeles for Summer Game Fest, I travelled to Brussels – a city just about as glamorous as LA – to attend an event with distinctly fewer must-see video game trailers on show.

High stakes lobbying: Video Games Europe (VGE) and the European Games Developer Federation (EGDF) host an annual event to bring together the games business with EU policymakers and officials to talk shop. These mini-conferences are an important opportunity for the European industry to talk to a crowd of Brussels bigwigs about what it’s up to. But this year’s event is particularly high stakes. The forthcoming Digital Fairness Act (DFA), the ongoing controversy over the Consumer Protection Cooperation Network’s in-game currencies principles, the persistence of Stop Killing Games and worldwide moves to ban social media have put the industry under genuine pressure to tell its story – or be hit by a powerful regulatory wave.

Regulatory surf’s up: VGE’s event was a rare opportunity for the industry to share its side of the story with members of the regulatory elite. And somewhat interestingly, the story that emerged was not one of a sector swimming into a wave. Instead, the games sector is trying to find its balance so it can ride the incoming wave as effectively as possible; a strategy that makes a lot of sense, but one that feels fraught with risk given some obvious scepticism from the bloc’s regulators.

It’s the mobile game economy, stupid

Euros and cents: Before the event started, King fired the first salvo on behalf of the European industry. The mobile game giant responsible for Candy Crush Saga released a new report called Mobile Matters: The Impact of Mobile Games on Europe that made one strident argument to policymakers not to over-regulate the sector: it’s gonna cost you.

Don’t mention the B word: Drawing on research from Nordicity, considered to be the gold standard of industry economic reporting within government circles, the report found that the European mobile games biz contributes €5.89bn in gross value-add to the continent’s economy and supports over 63,000 jobs across the region. Within the EU, the sector has provided a particular boost to Finland, Sweden, Spain and Ireland. But across the continent as a whole, King’s paper found that mobile has also supported growth in non-EU states such as Serbia, Ukraine and the United Kingdom *sobs gently*.

Mobile first: The report is well worth a read on its own terms because it offers a rare insight into the specific impact of mobile games on economic growth. Most of the research about the economic impact of games has either assessed the value of the whole sector on a country or region (e.g. BFI Screen Business Report) or on a single game (e.g. Roblox and the US). Taking a deep dive into a sector that has typically been ignored outside of mobile-first territories is exciting stuff for nerdy industry watchers like me (if not for anybody else).

Reading the subtext: Launching a document like this just before a big lobbying event means that it, inevitably, has a subtext. In this case, the argument is a very friendly exhortation to regulators to tread carefully when writing rules for the games business. In the introductory spiel from King bigwig Todd Green, the report notes that “China and Turkey are building highly competitive and technology-driven mobile games ecosystems and competing for talent, investment and audiences.” This, he continues, means that policymakers who are thinking about digital regulation in Europe have “an opportunity to support one of the region’s most dynamic creative and digital sectors”. He goes on to say that “getting the balance right” on regulation will be key to maintaining the industry’s strength.

Avoiding damage: Green’s introduction is diplomatically written, but the message rings out when set alongside the wider regulatory chat in Europe. The CPC Principles jabbing at in-game purchases and the DFA’s ambition to target loosely defined dark patterns in video games may be well-intentioned, but they will almost inevitably hit a sector contributing high-value jobs across the bloc. And with economic growth in Europe overall struggling to breach 1.5% per year as inflation bites due to Trump’s misadventure in the Straits of Hormuz, the industry is trying to politely say that it might be a mistake to go too hard right now.

Minor protection argument

More valuable than money: However, the argument of “don’t regulate us because it might cost you money” can’t work by itself. Games, whether fairly or not, have been lumped in with Big Tech’s social media platforms as a potential source of harm online. Arguing against regulation solely on economic terms won’t wash in a world where politicians, officials and the public are justifiably i) concerned and ii) pissed off by platforms that they believe are causing social harm.

F*** those guys: This is why the industry is intensifying its efforts to draw a dividing line between itself and social media, particularly when it comes to protecting youngsters who play video games. I chaired a panel at the event about minor protection featuring reps from age-rating bodies, a major Triple A game publisher and a senior figure at the directorate general overseeing the game biz, where the main aim of the game (ha!) was to clarify the difference between the two.

Good news: The event was hosted under the Chatham House rule, so I can’t report exactly what was said. What I can say is that efforts to build a firewall between video games and social media didn’t exactly go to plan. The conversation did recognise differences between the two. It noted that games do function meaningfully differently to social media platforms. It suggested that the industry’s self-regulatory framework and co-regulatory approach have broadly worked. Efforts to strengthen that framework further through changes to age rating systems, which now recognise in-game spend and communication features as something that could bump up the rating of a game, and by boosting technological features like parental controls were welcomed.

Ratings regulation incoming?: But while the industry mostly won the meat of the argument on social media, it was dead clear that there is appetite for strengthening regulation further. This included a pretty punchy chat about the importance of bringing self-regulatory work through age ratings systems into the formal regulatory tent to show that the sector really does approach things differently to social media. For an industry looking to steer policymakers away from hammering it too hard with the incoming Digital Fairness Act, suggesting that age ratings should be a legal requirement across the EU — rather than a nice-to-have self-regulatory extra — might be a necessary concession.

There may be troubles ahead

More contentious: The rest of the event offered variations on the themes above. The standout moment was a disagreement between industry reps and officials over the possible impact of the much-mentioned CPC principles on games. Designers argued that implementing the CPC’s rules would lead to players being interrupted by approximately 30 pop-up messages during a short mobile game session, with players constantly disrupted with messages reminding them of their consumer rights to meet the CPC’s recommendations. Without wanting to oversimplify too much, the official response was to say that the sector was wrong. Okey-dokey.

Less contentious: The final session about the potential of games as a source of growth and innovation in Europe took a primarily positive position on the full value of the sector across supply chains, including through multi-purpose technologies like game engines. It also noted rising global competition from countries like China was eating the EU’s lunch and that a lack of a continent-wide strategy for games was holding the bloc back from competing.

Difficult circumstances: Did the event show that the industry in Europe is successfully riding the regulatory wave? The answer isn’t clear. The tone of the event was polite, cordial and constructive. But the reality is that the regulatory environment feels fraught and unpredictable. Even in a setting where game developers had a chance to shape the message, the pushback against Big Tech, social media and historic negative perceptions of games feels like the public policy equivalent of wandering into a riptide. Everything increases the risk of the business getting pulled under the water.

Mature expectations: So, we’re in a curious place. The industry is telling its wider story more effectively than ever before. It has deeper engagement with political officials and elected representatives, allowing it to reach the people who matter with those messages. But with the industry maturing socially, culturally and economically, it’s clear that in Europe there is an expectation that it must demonstrate that its maturity strengthens – rather than weakens – rights and opportunities across the EU. And while it feels like the sector has successfully pulled itself upright and is currently riding the European regulatory surf, don’t be surprised if a crashing wave rises up and knocks us off the board at some point soon.

News in brief

Won’t somebody please think of the children, latest: Speaking of lobbying, UK video games trade body Ukie said in its response to the social media ban consultation last week that video games shouldn’t be treated similarly to social media. This week, The Sunday Times reports that Kanishka Narayan, the online safety minister, and Dame Rachel De Souza, the Children’s Commissioner, have both called for young people’s access to online games to be restricted – citing fears over stranger pairing (i.e. all multiplayer matchmaking) and the fact that boys spend a lot of time playing video games. Delightful news for all, I’m sure.

Hasan’s trip is sPiker-ed: Political commentator and video game streamer Hasan Piker, known as HasanAbi on Twitch, has been banned from entering the UK because his “presence in the UK is not considered to be conducive to the public good.” Piker was due to appear at SXSW London and make a series of appearances with left-wing political figures like former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, but was denied access to the country seemingly due to public support for Hamas. Lewis Goodall, co-host of the popular News Agents podcast, warned that the ban on Piker, and left-wing commentator Cenk Uygur, was “counterproductive, authoritarian and chilling” on free speech grounds. Commentator James Austin believes that it is justified based on the supportive comments he made for proscribed terror organisations.

Not stopping Stop Killing Games: Stop Killing Games has scored a first victory of sorts in the US. California’s State Assembly passed a vote on the Protect Our Games Act, which would require game developers to provide 60 days’ notice of video game shutdowns in the state and offer access to content offline if it did (or provide a refund to players). Despite major questions about the act remaining (why aren’t free-to-play games included, what happens if a game flops straight out of the gate, would refunds apply for titles players had happily enjoyed for years, etc), the bill received enough votes to pass to the Senate. It is due to be debated further next month, with the campaign hoping to pass it in time for January 2027.

Ever Greater Unions: In the biggest “what are you going to do, start your own casino” news of the week, Rockstar employees have unionised as the Rockstar Game Workers Union. Sitting within the Independent Workers’ Union of Great Britain, which is currently leading a claim against the studio for allegedly dismissing dozens of employees for union busting, its formation has certainly shown Rockstar (that at least 10% of its workforce has the appetite to join a union).

Bordering on problematic: Finally, the new Call of Duty game is courting controversy by making the central conflict of the game focus on a hot war between North and South Korea. Modern Warfare 4 will partly follow battles on the frontline between soldiers on both sides of the divide. But given that games that have depicted war between the two countries have previously been banned in the country and the South Korean state has rules against games that might damage the reputation of the republic, Activision really needs to handle this with care.

Moving on

Tekken 8’s director Kohei Ikeda has left Bandai Namco…Lauren Roberts has been promoted to Director at PR firm Premier…Dr Dylan Poulus has become the Global Lead, Esports and Gaming at Movember…Cassandra Villareal has been hired by Supercell to become its Senior Corporate Brand and Communications Manager…Mariam Ahmad is the new Editorial Director - Events for Pocket Gamer Connects…And friend-of-VGIM Lucy James has departed GameSpot to launch Looking For Game, a weekly PC game discovery newsletter backed by Big Geoff Keighley…

Jobs ahoy

Sega Europe wants a ship-sharp Copywriter in London…Cloud Imperium is hunting down a Senior Producer…TripleDot is looking for a Creative Producer down under…Flavour of the month IO Interactive wants you to join its team in Malmo as Platform Development Manager…Nintendo is hiring an Influencer Marketing Manager in Redmond…And Newzoo is hiring an Editorial and Publishing Specialist based out of its Amsterdam HQ…

Events and conferences

• Summer Game Fest, Los Angeles - 5th-8th June

• First Playable, Florence - 10th-12th June

• Power Play in conversation with Keith Stuart, London - 16th June

• Develop, Brighton - 14th-16th July

• VGIM Business Breakfast, Brighton - 15th July

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Games of the week - Summer Game Fest showcases edition

There’s the sum total of bugger all releasing this week due to Summer Game Fest. So, here are three virtual events for you to check out instead.

• Summer Game Fest - The headline showcase for the industry’s forthcoming relentless promotion of itself kicks off on Friday with Geoff Keighley and Lucy James (of the jobs section fame) on hosting duties.

• The PC Gaming Show - The PC games showcase from, erm, PC Gamer hits virtual screens on Sunday 7th June, with a sneak peek at the Warhammer 40k version of Total War.

• The XBOX Games Showcase - And finally, it’s probably worth tuning into the Xbox (sorry *inhales and shouts* XBOX) Games Showcase on the same day to see what the heck is going on over there given everything that’s been happening with it over the past year.

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Before you go…

Don’t forget: I’ve got two signed copies of Power Play up for grabs in the first ever Video Games Industry Memo reader competition.

Everyone who is subscribed to the newsletter by Wednesday 10th June will be entered into a draw to win one copy.

And every VGIM Insider will be eligible to take part in a separate additional competition, running alongside the free-to-enter contest.

Want to join the contest? Sign up as a VGIM subscriber for free here to enter the main competition.

You can also use the code POWERPLAY to become an Insider for just £25 a year (or £3 a month) to secure entry into the second contest.

Keep up with VGIM: | Linkedin | Bluesky | Email | Power Play |

• Switch 2 prices hike as RAMaggedon hits the industry

• CCP rebrands as Fenris Creations, with a little help from DeepMind

• Secret Handshake’s arcade pop-up leads the critical chatter

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Good morning VGIM Insiders,

Welcome back to The Debrief, the monthly summary of the big news, deals, data and cultural commentary shaping the global games biz.

This newsletter is exclusively for Insiders, who’ve signed up to support the newsletter as one of our paid subscribers.

If you’d like to receive the newsletter, receive other exclusive VGIM content, get first dibs on tickets for VGIM events and score 10% off on everything we flog, you can do so now using a special discount code.

Sign up as an Insider using the code POWERPLAY to receive an Insider membership for £3 per month or £25 per year.

Get 50% off forever

And if you sign up before Friday 12th June, you’ll be entered into an exclusive Insider-only prize draw to receive a signed hardback copy of Power Play before its launch on 18th June. Neat, eh?

The top stories

RAMaggedon hits Switch 2, pushing up prices

Read more

• We ask the Esports Foundation why it moved the Esports World Cup to Paris

• Ukie distances games from social media in UK ban consultation response

• IO Interactive has not gotten Bond wrong in the week’s release

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Hello VGIM-ers,

I’m hitting send on this morning’s newsletter from Hay-on-Wye.

The first date of the Power Play book tour kicked off with a great chat with Robert Nisbet at the Hay Festival yesterday.

Thank you to everyone who made it along and bought the first copies of the book in the wild.

In further exciting news, I’m very pleased to be kicking off the first-ever Video Games Industry Memo competition.

I’m offering two readers the chance to win a signed copy of Power Play from my special stock of author copies.

There are two ways to enter the competition. The first is to subscribe to VGIM for free. I’ll pick one lucky winner from the list of circa 7500 free subs on Wednesday 10th June.

And the second is to subscribe as a VGIM Insider. They’ll be entered into the main draw and a special, separate draw exclusively for paid subscribers, giving them two chances to win.

Want to win a copy? You can sign up as a free VGIM subscriber here.

You can also become a VGIM Insider for £3 a month or £25 per year if you use the code POWERPLAY at the checkout before the end of July.

Get 50% off Insider membership

Winners will be emailed on Friday 12th June, with the aim of getting you the book in time for launch day (postal services permitting).

The big read - Why has the Esports World Cup moved to Paris?

Flashback: Last year, I had a chat with Mike McCabe, the Chief Operating Officer at what is now known as the Esports Foundation. I interviewed him for VGIM and Power Play about the Esports World Cup, the foundation’s flagship event, to understand its role within Saudi Arabia’s soft power strategy.

Lines to take: During our chat, I asked him whether the foundation would consider moving the tournament to another country or whether it was locked to Riyadh in an effort to entice tourists into town. The answer was a nuanced no. “Everything is possible from our perspective,” he said. “But it will be here this year [referring to 2025] and likely next year [discussing 2026 plans].”

Change of plans: So naturally, my interest was piqued by the announcement last week that the Esports World Cup was not returning to Riyadh in 2026. The tentpole event at the heart of Saudi Arabia’s esports strategy was instead moving to Paris from 6th July, drawing its dozens of video game tournaments, enticing thousands of players and lugging its $75m prize pot to the French capital.

It goes Macron and on and on: What’s behind the move? Why was France’s President Emmanuel Macron splattered all over the announcement images? And what does the move tell us about the future of the tournament and Saudi Arabia’s video game strategy? I caught up with Fabian Scheuermann, Chief Games Officer for the Esports Foundation, and a couple of VGIM-adjacent journalists to understand what this all means.

Avoiding a Strait answer

Getting on with it: At the start of the call, Scheuermann told me how unbelievably busy his year had been as a result of the move. So to spare his diary, I cut to the chase. Why was the Esports World Cup (also EWC for short) moving to Paris this year, ahead of the timeline seemingly outlined by McCabe last year?

Sticking to the plan? “As Mike rightfully said, the intent was always to travel”, Scheuermann started. “EWC is a platform. And we want to grow this platform not only from a regional perspective, but from a truly global perspective. That means we want to make sure that fans, publishers, and players can use this platform to the best extent. And we can do this only if we’re also rotating EWC. So, we were not looking to rotate this year already. But due to the regional situation, we accelerated that path. And Paris, specifically with the institutional support, was the perfect spot to go to.”

Safety first: ‘Regional situation’ clanged with me as soon as it was said. It was the same language used in the EWC’s press release to justify the move, a phrase designed to carefully ignore the impact of Donald Trump’s war against Iran on the region. I asked Scheuermann to clarify whether the move was related to the ongoing conflict in the Strait of Hormuz. “It is the general situation in the region, and we want to make sure that fans feel safe, and don’t even have to worry about it,” he said. “So, while Saudi Arabia is still very safe, we want to make sure that the fans – especially if they’re international – feel safe in that region.”

Subtext alert: Scheuermann was obviously seeking to be diplomatic over the ongoing situation, especially when the country’s head of state, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MbS, for short), is on the board of trustees. But for James Montague, sports journalist and author of Engulfed: How Saudi Arabia Bought Sport, and The World, the tournament’s relocation to Paris is inextricably linked to the aftershocks of the conflict and the uneasy ceasefire that followed.

Awkward truths: “The war with Iran has made Saudi Arabia, and to a certain extent the other Gulf states as well, rethink what their soft power investments are and what they hope to achieve,” he explained. “It was about creating a different story around their countries and nation-building projects in many ways and about attracting investment, attention and visitors. The war has really focused minds to say that you can have all of those things, but it is still a very dangerous neighbourhood. No matter what you invest in, no matter how many Formula 1 Grands Prix or Esports World Cups you host, you can’t change your geography.”

Macron has entered the lobby

Lobbying win: So with a Riyadh-based EWC being just a short drone flight away from an exceptionally narked off regional rival who deeply dislikes Saudi Arabia’s major military ally, the tournament had to move. But why Paris? Emmanuel Macron’s public backing for the esports industry put the French capital in pole position to snap up the tournament.

Pole position: “In 2022, Macron said esports is on their [the French government’s radar. And they have shown repeatedly that they support global tournaments and the best tournaments coming to Paris”, said Scheuermann. “When we were looking at different regions to pull off the EWC in a rotation, Paris very, very quickly was the favourite candidate, because the government instantly said, ' Look, we will help and support with all the important things.” This included practicalities like managing visa applications, a considerable burden for a tournament bringing thousands of athletes to a city for six weeks, and providing wider infrastructure support for the tournament. Scheuermann described the package provided by the French government as “unmatchable from our perspective.”

Esports Capital of the World: Paris’s strengths as a home for the EWC stretched beyond institutional support. “Within the esports community, it developed as the esports capital of Europe,” he said. “We have so many tournaments there. The Rocket League major just last weekend, we had Counter-Strike there, and Call of Duty is coming with a major. And it’s just a very esports-proven, very international city.” Scheuermann highlighted its wider strengths as a city, including its transport infrastructure, myriad event venues and ample accommodation for tourists, as further reasons for its selection.

On the ground reporting: VGIM received separate confirmation of Paris’s readiness as a host city for a major esports tournament from our freelancing friend Tom Regan. I DM’d him on Instagram after spotting that he had popped along to the Rocket League Major that Scheuermann referenced in our chat. He reported that the 25,000-seat venue for the major, which had been re-specced to hold 15,000 spectators to support a glitzy show, delivered a “very impressive” production. The ease with which he got to the venue, whisked across France via rail with nary a care in the world, contrasts with the challenge of coaxing journalists to Riyadh in the middle of Summer.

London calling?: And while Scheuermann sang Paris’s praises, he also indicated that it is unlikely to be the last time the cup is contested on foreign shores. “We want to make sure that the cities or the countries can actually achieve what we need to make this platform grow, and it doesn’t need to be a single location,” Scheuermann said, opening up the possibility of joint hosts of the cup. “But what we ultimately want is that we can achieve our targets of making this platform grow. So, yes, it could be multiple cities, it could be rotating. I wouldn’t say we have any restrictions to that, as long as the infrastructure and the operations and the fandom can be built.“ Could we see it hosted in a city like London or Shanghai? “Absolutely,” Scheuermann replied.

Soft power-ly does it

More questions: On this occasion, shifting the Esports World Cup to Paris made sense from both a safety perspective and on the basis that it could relatively easily – and incredibly willingly – put on a show. But does moving the Esports World Cup to Paris change its role within the esports ecosystem? And does its move from Riyadh say anything about Saudi Arabia’s appetite for backing big digital sporting events, or for its wider video game strategy?

Tourist destination: Scheuermann told me that the Foundation remains confident that the EWC will remain the central event in the global esports calendar in a new location. “While we already had a lot of global fans coming to Riyadh, of course, with Paris and a lot of tourists there are a lot of tourists there, especially in the July-August time. We’re expecting a very high diversity of fans coming to see the different tournaments.”

Centre of gravity: His confidence has been boosted by the reception to the global Road to the EWC tournament series, which puts leading esports teams into competitions in regions like Eastern Europe, Latin America and Southeast Asia alongside traditional esports hubs. The tournament’s wider gravitational pull, powered by its $75m prize pool, the downstream support for hundreds of esports organisations through Foundation initiatives, and the ability to apply pressure on publishers to support competitive play due to the critical mass of the event, makes the EWC durable wherever it is hosted.

A genuine return on investment: Interestingly, Montague agrees that the competition is sustainable irrespective of the mood. In fact, he told me that the tournament’s move to Paris is not a sign of esports becoming a victim of growing Saudi disinterest in its sport strategy; it’s an attempt to retain its value. “The issue here is that esports isn’t like the other things we’ve seen [within Saudi Arabia’s sports portfolio],” he said. “LIV Golf, for instance, Saudi Arabia spent $5bn at least on something that wasn’t a success and didn’t achieve any of the aims of Vision 2030. These things were nebulous at best when it came to Vision 2030 and doesn’t move the needle when compared to Saudi GDP.”

Presidential Power Plays: ”Esports is different. It clearly does. It brings investment, it brings jobs for young Saudi people, and more was invested in the infrastructure around games than was made in all of its sports investments combined,” Montague continued. “The issue here was, can you really host an event when there is such instability in the Middle East. I don’t think you can. I think it’s an issue of safety for this year; Paris makes sense. But the fact that it was President Macron negotiating directly with MbS, who is a digital native and gamer, shows that it isn’t trying to downgrade the investment in esports; it’s actually trying to save it. It’s saying ok, this is going to Paris but we are very much still involved in this space.”

A durable soft power asset: So even though the Esports World Cup’s first foreign move may have happened earlier than expected, its success, or otherwise, is loaded with significance for Saudi Arabia’s soft power strategy. And with the country’s wider sporting endeavours crumbling away, a successful international EWC – backed by the French President, no less – would likely make it the central pillar of the country’s reputation-building project. That raises big questions now, and likely some even larger ones in the future if the French expedition proves to be a hit.

News in brief

Game on(line): Ukie has released a statement confirming it has submitted to the UK government’s consultation exploring the possibility of a social media ban for teens. In a LinkedIn post, the trade association stated that “video games are not social media. It went on to say that they “differ fundamentally in purpose, design, and impact”, that games “offer real, well-evidenced social and developmental benefit”, and that conflation with social media “inadvertently harms one of the UK’s most important creative industries.” Games definitely aren’t social media. But as one of the engines that drives it, the industry will need to show how effectively it is moderating its spaces to avoid getting hit in social media’s regulatory blowback.

Ball’s in motion: In a rare ‘not including this in the Moving On’ section, Xbox has hired Matthew Ball of That PowerPoint Presentation We All Read And Talk About At The Start Of The Year fame to head up its publishing push. It’s an eye-catching hire, which puts one of the industry’s biggest thinkers towards the top of one of its biggest companies.

Broaden your Horizon: The European Game Developer Federation has published a lengthy and handy guide to a series of European funding calls through Creative Europe and the Horizon research programme. Creative Europe has funding open for narrative game projects, something that can be tapped by companies based in EU member states or a surprisingly broad list of partners (hello, Armenia). Perhaps more interestingly, Horizon Europe has funding open for video game researchers thinking about issues like media literacy, protecting democracy and fostering creative alliances. That funding should be open to researchers in the UK following its return to the programme earlier this year.

That’s a big number: HoYoVerse, creators of Genshin Impact, is reportedly set to invest *checks notes* $14.6bn into artificial intelligence tooling over the next three years. A report in the Chinese outlet Gamelook, which has also been written up on GI Biz, said that the company’s founder Liu Wei outlined the vision, detailing plans to build its own AI infrastructure from scratch to avoid leaning on external models. VGIM says: That’s a lorra money, lads.

Unfortunate Destiny: And finally, the last rites are being read for Destiny 2 as it prepares to shuffle off this mortal (live-service-led) coil from the beginning of next month. Dom Peppiatt at Eurogamer has written an excellent eulogy for the shooter, charting its unsteady start as a full-blown Destiny sequel, its sudden ascent to the heights of multiplayer shootybang action, and its steady decline as community goodwill evaporated in the face of strange corporate decisions.

Moving on

Caroline Miller is stepping back from frontline operations at UK PR firm Indigo Pearl as it merges with Fortyseven Communications. Craig Sinel has relocated to London to lead the new 47 office, with Anita Wong stepping into Caroline’s formidable (and fabulous) shoes…Aisha Ahmed has been appointed Influencer Marketing Manager at FORMAT Group…And we missed this a couple of weeks ago, but Maarten de Koning was appointed Chief Commercial Officer at People Can Fly…

Jobs ahoy

Great Ormond Street is hiring a Senior Gaming Manager to support its fundraising efforts…Hangar 13 has a post open for a Lead Producer…The NFL has a post for Senior Manager, International Game Development open in London…Nintendo is hiring a Senior Manager, Central Communications, in its office in Richmond…And intriguingly, the Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations has a post open for a Serious Game and Policy Game Specialist…

Events and conferences

• Power Play Book Tour, UK - Multiple dates, May-July

• Games Industry Law Summit, Berlin - 2nd-4th June

• Summer Games Fest, Los Angeles - 5th-8th June

• Develop, Brighton - 14th-16th July

• VGIM Business Breakfast, Brighton - 15th July

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Games of the week

• 007: First Light - Be stirred (not shaken) by IO Interactive’s twist on the James Bond formula, available across all platforms.

• Crashout Crew - Co-op forklifting party game from the team behind Peak crashes onto Steam today.

• Pictonico - Nintendo’s Wario Ware-esque party game that uses your photos to power the play lands somewhat intriguingly on app stores this week.

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Before you go…

Could political instability in the UK cause problems for the video game industry? Mickey Carroll from Sky News asked the question.

Your humble writer did his best to answer it.

Keep up with VGIM: | Linkedin | Bluesky | Email | Power Play |

• The Anti-Defamation League discusses tackling anti-semitism in games

• China bans latest Nvidia gaming chip during Trump’s state visit

• Forza Horizon 6 screeches its way to the top of the week’s releases

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Hello VGIM-ers,

Welcome to you from noisy North London. It turns out that when Arsenal win the Premier League A LOT of people honk horns in Wood Green.

Anyway, I have a smidge of news about South London book events that I think you’ll like.

I’m heading to Backstory in Balham on Tuesday 16th June to chat about Power Play. And I’m being interviewed by a very special guest.

Keith Stuart, gaming correspondent at The Guardian and thoroughly brilliant author, will be politely questioning/grilling me about all things video games and geopolitics.

Tickets to the event are £15 or £35 if you want to throw in a hardback copy of the book.

You can join us for our chit-chat here.

The big read - Combatting antisemitism in games

Grim statistics: Antisemitic hate and violence have been rising around the world. In December 2025, 15 people were murdered in Sydney in an anti-semitic attack. In London, there have been arson attacks on ambulances owned by a Jewish charity and stabbings in Golders Green – an area considered home to a large amount of the capital’s Jewish population. Antisemitic assaults also reached a record high stateside in 2025.

Hate within game spaces: Hate has also, unfortunately, found its way into video game ecosystems. In 2024, the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) revealed that Steam was hosting 1.8 million unique instances of hateful content across its platform. This included thousands of groups, millions of avatars and user profiles containing references to Nazism, approving of ‘white power’ or glorifying violent extremists. The ADL criticised Valve for ‘failing to systematically address the issue of extremism and hate on the platform.’

A new tool: After publishing its research, the ADL began to build a tool to assess games and game platforms for hateful content. This resulted in the creation of the Online Gaming Leaderboard, a resource which rates 10 popular games for how their policies and tools handle antisemitic hate. It then pops out a rating and report card to alert the company about the issues identified by the organisation, and to provide parents and players with information about the game they’re playing. Big winners included Call of Duty, Minecraft and Grand Theft Auto Online. Counter-Strike 2 and PUBG, by comparison, scored poorly.

Pertinent questions: What goes into the rating system that the ADL has created? What has the leaderboard taught us about the approach of leading developers towards antisemitic and extremist content? And where does it go from here? I chatted with Daniel Kelley, Senior Director, Center for Technology and Society at the Anti-Defamation League, to find out more.

How the system works

Filling a gap: The ADL created its Online Gaming Leaderboard to transparently assess how games handle antisemitic and hateful content. “There was previously no robust public-facing resource to evaluate the safety of online multiplayer games as digital social spaces,” says Kelley. “The leaderboard is the first-ever comprehensive public evaluation of how leading video game companies address antisemitism and hate in their online multiplayer games.”

Assessing social spaces: The leaderboard is designed to inform people about the nature of the online spaces they’re about to play in. “Our goal is to measure the efforts of video game companies to make their online multiplayer games safe, especially in terms of the social aspect of these spaces,” he said. In parlance that’ll be familiar to British readers, it’s about rating the atmosphere in the pub rather than what’s on the telly.

Lost to the ether: The ADL found it hard to measure exactly what was going on via in-game communication because of its ephemeral nature. “Most online game spaces are not persistent in the way that traditional social media is — when a match of Fortnite ends, for example, all of the interactions that happened during that match are no longer visible to anyone, including researchers,” explained Kelley. This led to it focusing on the framework and technologies used by developers to police hate instead.

Points on the board: Its scoring system reflected this focus. “Games were evaluated on criteria in two broad categories: policies to prevent antisemitism and hate and in-game tooling to prevent antisemitism and hate,” Kelley told me. Titles were assessed by eight core criteria, divided into four in each category. On the policy front, the leaderboard awards different levels of points for policies countering antisemitism and hate, policies expressly forbidding terrorist or extremist content, whether it displays an in-game code of conduct and if the company has documented plans on when it escalates to law enforcement. In-game moderation tools, meanwhile, were rated on their effectiveness in filtering out antisemitic or violent anti-Israel usernames. The ADL also assessed how well blocking, muting and reporting worked within games. It also applied demerits to games where it identified a disconnect between policies and user reality, such as the presence of antisemitic experiences on a user-generated content platform.

An important clarification: At this point, I paused to check with Kelley how the ADL defined ‘violent anti-Israel usernames’ in its testing process to determine whether it risked eliminating critical free speech of Israeli leadership (e.g. I hate Netanyahu) or implied criticism of its policies (e.g. a phrase like Save Gaza). Kelley told me that the two terms they tested were “Killzionists” and “murderIsraelis”. This provided meaningful clarification that satisfied me that the system was focused on hate and wouldn’t inadvertently suppress reasonable freedom of expression (whether knowingly or otherwise).

Procedure generated: With the system in place, the ADL picked its ten titles to measure, created its report and produced a scorecard for each game. It then contacted games companies ahead of publication to offer them a chance to correct elements of the organisation’s rating system, or engage on areas of concern identified.

Lessons learned

And the scores are in: I headed to the ADL’s leaderboard to check the ratings of the 10 games it investigated. In its traffic light scoring system, four games achieved a green Advanced Protections rating (Fortnite, Call of Duty, Minecraft and Grand Theft Auto Online), four games reached a middling Moderate Protections amber score (Roblox, Madden NFL, Valorant and Clash Royale), and two came out with red Limited Protections ratings next to their names (Counter-Strike 2 and PUBG).

Defying expectations: One of the things that immediately stood out to the ADL was the fact that games with violent content or reputations were often better at protecting players from hate. “A game’s public reputation regarding content does not necessarily mirror its commitment to safety,” Kelley said. “For example, two of our top-rated games are Grand Theft Auto Online and Call of Duty. Both of these games deal with adult content — crime and war — so it may seem strange that these are “safe” online games to play. But what we found is that both companies that make these games have done a significant amount of work to create robust policies and user tools, possibly because of the nature of the content of their games.” This contrasted with a platform like Roblox, which Kelley said, “only had moderate protections according to our evaluation.”

Constructive conversation: Kelley also told me that game companies were often more responsive to concerns raised via the leaderboard than they expected them to be. “Prior to launch, we met with almost all of the video game companies whose games we were rating,” Kelley said “In the conversations, we wanted to ensure that our ratings were accurate and to advocate for them to do better in terms of the gaps we pointed out. Notably, EA and Take Two acted based on our first round of engagement prior to launch in fairly significant ways.”

Raising the bar: Although the industry has engaged with the issue, the ADL did find other companies to be less responsive. Kelley wants to see more support for people in the biz who are pushing for concerted efforts to counter hate. “While reviewing the criteria for the leaderboard with experts in the field, we heard broadly that these were an effective baseline of expectations for online multiplayer games, but that in the future, we should raise the bar,” he argued.

Ahead of the social media game: However, Kelley was also keen to speak favourably of the industry’s overall approach – especially in comparison to social media businesses who are quietly backsliding on addressing hate on their platforms. “In the past, I have said that the game industry is behind social media in terms of its maturity in dealing with these issues”, Kelley said “Given the game industry’s continued commitment to leaning in on these issues, and the huge steps back traditional social media companies like Meta and others are taking around hate, I would reverse that perspective: the game industry is actually being a lot more thoughtful and forward looking on these issues at present.”

On the board

Building on the foundation: According to Kelley, “the launch of the leaderboard is just the beginning” for the project. Kelley told me that the ADL plans to assess more games against its criteria, update its report cards for the 10 games that it has rated so far, and check how useful it is for the leaderboard’s main audiences as it moves out of beta testing.

Widening the net: My feeling is that the ADL’s work is a useful starting point for a much bigger conversation about how we cultivate safe digital spaces in general. Its overall approach towards countering antisemitism and hate is understandable given the organisation’s focus. But with other specific forms of hate, such as misogyny, racism and homophobia measurably making spaces more dangerous – and building pathways to radicalisation or violence in the process – the initiative feels like one piece in the puzzle rather than the full jigsaw.

Serious games: Still, one of the central conclusions of Power Play is that civil society doesn’t take the power of video games as a digital third place capable of influencing reality seriously enough. This is, at the very least, an expression of what happens when an organisation does. And if that can meaningfully reduce hate online and harm in our streets, I’d like to see the approach rolled out more widely in the future.

News in brief

Huangway or another: An FT exclusive reveals that Beijing banned Nvidia gaming chips during Jensen Huang’s visit. Last week, Huang hopped onto Air Force One to join Donald Trump’s trip to China, and the People’s Republic responded by quietly adding the RTX 5090D V22 chip to their customs list of banned goods. As both countries battle it out for AI domination, China is loading up on chips from domestic companies Huawei and Cambricon. While the tech CEO is betting that the “market will open” after the US thumbs up licenses to sell H200 chips to China, no chips have actually been shipped due to regulatory hiccups.

Victory Royale?: David smashed Goliath, Muhammad Ali knocked out Frazier, and now Fortnite shimmies its way back into Apple’s app story everywhere – except Australia. Epic Games and Apple have been hashing it out since 2020, when the latter removed Fortnite from app stores for bypassing platform fees and offering their own in-app payments. Epic parried by accusing the company of forcing “junk fees” and anticompetitive practices. Now the game is back, so long as Apple holds up their end of the bargain and publicly discloses its fee structure…

Pirating players: Hackers broke into a podcaster’s PlayStation Network account, locking him out of hundreds of digital games. Colin Moriarty, host of Sacred Symbol and ex-editor for IGN, posted about the cyberattack on X. Despite Sony fixing the issue swiftly, the attack shows how surprisingly easy it is for hackers to take over PSN accounts. Last year, a French journalist was hacked and realised that cybercriminals could bypass 2FA and reset access simply by phoning up customer service, handing over the account username and reading out an old transaction number. Sony has said diddly squat about the whole hoo-haa, so keep an eye out for any irregular transactions on your account. As the pirated profile warned, “you’re next.”

OKRE’s Computing: Ukie teamed up with OKRE and BFI to publish a report on video game impact. Turns out, we don’t know all that much about games, neither on their “economic value” nor their social and cultural influence. Mostly, this is down to a lack of accessible industry data. “As a result, decisions about and within the sector are based on a limited, partial view,” they claimed. It’s ok, guys, we just need to lock in.

Game guides for everyone: Discord has dropped a shiny new Player’s Guide, complete with Wellbeing Principles. This library of resources is there to help navigate digital discourse, online relationships and empathy through handy tip sheets. Plus, they’re thrown in a course on empathetic communication, which has tips like saying “mh-hmm” during calls and actually helpful stuff for navigating suicidal chat. Built with Crisis Text Line, ECPAT (a global charity for child safety), The Christchurch Call and Gamersafer, among others, the guide hopes to make online chat friendlier.

Moving on

Luella Moore has started as the Senior Producer for Melbourne International Games Week...Rob Vicars now has the title Director, Global Gaming and Creative Sync at Warner Music Group…Ana Vasquez is the EMEA Communications Manager for Niantic, working on Pokémon Go…And John Ciancutti is Roblox’s brand new Chief Growth Officer…

Jobs ahoy

Soul Assembly has an Executive Producer gig in Leamington Spa…Miniclip has reposted its opening for a Senior Legal Counsel, Product & Regulatory…Roblox is hunting for a Senior Manager Policy Comms on a short-term contract…Discord wants a Director of Product Communications in its SF office…And Take-Two still has a Director, Global Affairs (Europe) post open…

Events and conferences

• Power Play Book Tour, UK - Multiple dates, May-July

• BitSummit, Tokyo - 22nd-24th May

• Games Industry Law Summit, Berlin - 2nd-4th June

• Summer Games Fest, Los Angeles - 5th-8th June

• VGIM Business Breakfast, Brighton - 15th July

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Games of the week

• Forza Horizon 6 - Power slide around an open-world version of Japan in the latest entry in Playground Games’ ever-popular racing series.

• LEGO Batman: Legacy of the Dark Knight - Watch Traveller’s Tales develop the DC game Rocksteady probably should have made next, but with a lot more LEGO involved.

• Yoshi and the Mysterious Book - Flip through this puzzle-packed, family-friendly adventure with more than a hint of Yoshi’s Island on the Switch 2.

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Before you go…

Kingdom Come: Deliverance developer Warhorse Studios has confirmed that it is working on a brand new role-playing game set in Middle-earth.

VGIM can confirm that we’re already excited at the prospect of sacking off its world-defining main storyline to spend hours manually sharpening virtual swords at a nearby blacksmith.

Keep up with VGIM: | Linkedin | Bluesky | Email | Power Play |

Thanks to Anna Mahtani for scribbling the news, checking for typos and constantly topping up our water cups in the office this week.

• We assess what UK political chaos means for the industry’s prospects

• Roblox signs education-focused MoU with Saudi-backed Savvy Games

• I’m hunting for meetings in Brussels next month

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Good morning VGIM Insiders,

Another paid subscriber-only email on Sunday? What’s going on? The answer is a long-term scheduling change.

I’ve decided to shift the distribution day for paid VGIM newsletters from Friday to Sunday.

The move helps me with my production schedule, it fits nicely with the ‘longer view’ that this paid content takes, and it gives each newsletter a bit more room to breathe in a busy media schedule.

I’ve also found out that plenty of my readers save VGIM for a quiet moment on the weekend, so why not lean into that, eh?

If you’d like to read this newsletter, get access to extra content, receive early access to VGIM events and score 10% off all VGIM stuff, including sponsorships, then you’ll need to sign up as an Insider below.

But with all that admin done, we can now get on with this month’s big read.

The big read - What does the Labour leadership crisis mean for the UK games biz?

Blimey: What on earth is happening in British politics? And how’s that going to affect video game lobbying efforts? In an attempt to keep the UK and international video game industry commenteriat informed of what the heck is going on, I decided to dive in and give you our lowdown.

Read more

• Console makers wobble, Tencent surges and Capcom breaks records in latest financial results

• eBay rejects GameStop acquisition bid, calls it “neither credible nor attractive”

• Subnautica 2 emerges in early access as our pick of the week’s releases

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Hello VGIM-ers,

Well, I’m back from holiday. I spent a week in Paris drinking cidre, gulping down galettes and attempting to order pastries in French without the staff immediately responding in fed-up English. The results of the latter? Comme ci, comme ça.

Anyway, it’s one month until Power Play launches and things are gathering pace. The hardback is being printed. The audiobook is done. And the tour starts at Hay Festival in under two weeks. Gulp.

So, now’s a good time to reveal some of the endorsements for Power Play to coax you into a pre-order.

I outlined five of them in full on LinkedIn. There are approximately a dozen rolling out over the coming month. But here are three abridged tasters for you.

• “Power Play is essential reading for anyone trying to understand where the next influence operation is being built.” - Eliot Higgins, Founder, Bellingcat.

• “Frequently surprising and utterly absorbing whether you’re a gamer or not.” - Jonn Elledge, Sunday Times bestselling author of A History of the World in 47 Borders.

• “Anyone who still thinks that video games are trivial will learn from this book exactly why they are not.”- Keza MacDonald, Video Games Editor, The Guardian.

Ready to pre-order? Hit the button below to get the book on Thursday 18th June.

Buy Power Play

The big read - Video Games Industry Finance Cheat Sheet: Spring 2026

Uh-oh: The latest set of games industry financial results has dropped. Once again, they paint a picture of an industry battling to find its way through tough times. And this time, it feels like the sector is being buffeted by things beyond its control.

Shifting sands: Whereas the problems in the industry after the Covid boom could largely be laid at its feet, the latest set of results shows that the business of selling games is being seriously affected by both global geopolitics and the emergence of an immensely well-funded – and component-guzzling – AI industry. The result is disruption in some of the sector’s core heartlands, which is arguably accelerating its tilt away from its traditional markets towards a new world of players.

Note: As per usual, two big explainers for the cheat sheet. I’ve reported all results in dollars first and placed any accompanying currency values next to them in parentheses for the sake of ease. Net bookings in a video game financial context pretty much = spend on in-game currencies and relevant redeemable purchases.

Far from consoling

Executive reshuffle: The most obvious losers in the current markets are console makers, whose ‘sell cheapish hardware and make loads of money on games’ model has been borked by AI businesses guzzling GPUs. Xbox is taking the hardest battering, though that is largely due to its own failures. According to Microsoft’s results for Q3 of the 2026 financial year, Xbox content and services revenue slid by 5% year-on-year (7% in constant currency), and its hardware branch saw an alarming 33% drop in revenue. It’s the fourth time in the past six quarters that the company has reported a downturn in its game revenue. The results led to Asha Sharma, the recently appointed Xbox big boss, to announce a serious shake-up of its executive team. Let’s hope they like chucking buckets of water over the sides of boats.

Pricing in a downturn: Hard times aren’t limited to Richmond alone. Nintendo also finds itself in something of a bind, despite its impressive performance in the last financial year. Its net sales of $14.6bn (¥2.3tn) and gross profit of $5.7bn (¥909bn) for the full year ending 31st March 2026 smashed 2025’s results into a pulp. But despite Switch 2 sales exceeding forecast and some surprising hits strengthening its performance (Pokémon Pokopia), the company’s share price slid by 7% after it announced price increases for its nearly one-year-old handheld. Investors will be crossing their fingers that a rumoured Ocarina of Time remake and a new mainline Mario game will land in this coming year to provide some much-needed cheer.

Crossing fingers for a return to Vice City: PlayStation maker Sony had little cause for cheer either. The company reported ‘flat’ net sales of $29.9bn (¥4.7tn) in its Games and Network Services division, an increase of just 0.3% year-on-year. And while it reported that its operating income grew 12% in its games division to $2.9bn (¥463bn), it also recorded a $765m impairment loss on Bungie across the financial year due to underperformance of Destiny 2 and problems getting its latest shooter Marathon out the door. It also forecast an expected 6% drop in its games and network services revenue segment in the next financial year. Avoiding such a precipitous drop will hinge on whether Grand Theft Auto VI is released and if the company is forced to raise console prices again if component costs keep climbing.

Across the video game world

Servicing its audience: The shifting nature of the global games market isn’t only being felt in the console sector. Soon-to-be Saudi-owned service games publisher Electronic Arts posted an interesting set of results at what is likely to be its final set of public year-end accounts. Its overall performance across 2026 was mid, with net revenue climbing just 1% to $7.53bn, net bookings up by a more impressive 9% to $8.03bn and net income down by a slightly concerning 20.9% to $887m. But the company’s net income grew by 81.5% in the fourth quarter of its fiscal year, driven by the wild success of Battlefield 6, ongoing strong performance from Apex Legends and steady single-digit revenue growth across its sports portfolio. Good news for its comparatively cash-strapped new owners.

The cost of establishing trust: Meanwhile, Roblox’s results gave a full picture of how its platform is both eating the industry alive and creating entirely new challenges for an entertainment business to wrestle with. Headline growth figures for Q1 2026 looked strong. Daily active users hit 132m for the quarter, up 35% from this time last year, while hours engaged grew by 43% to hit 31bn across the three months ending March. Revenue was up by 39% to $1.4bn, with bookings up 43% to $1.7bn. But the company’s net loss for the quarter grew from $216m last year to $248m in Q1 2026, with trust and safety spend growing 47% year-on-year to hit $197m due mostly to cloud-infrastructure costs. That’s the cost of growing a nation-state-sized games platform for you.

Video game superpower latest: The rise of China as the true superpower of the global games industry was underlined in Tencent’s latest financial report. Revenue in its Value-Add Services (VAS) division, where all its game stuff is nested, grew by 16% year-on-year to reach $54.3bn for the year (RMB 369.3bn). Domestic revenue leapt by 18% to $24.2bn (RMB164.2bn) after a strong launch for Delta Force and ongoing success with Honor of Kings, Peacekeeper Elite and cross-platform Valorant. International game revenue jumped by an impressive 33% to $11.4bn (RMB 77.4bn), with Supercell’s game portfolio and the mobile version of PUBG doing the business. The company said its strong performance was boosted by the rollout of AI across the business, which “accelerated our content production, improved the user experience and enhanced our marketing efficiency.” Get ready for an online bunfight in five, four, three...

Balancing act: And for those looking for one final look at what life is like in the console heartlands, three Asian giants showed the importance of nailing your business proposition for a narrowing market of traditionalists. Lovely, lovely Capcom once again smashed it out of the park, with its tight focus on repeatable hits in series like Resident Evil, Monster Hunter and Street Fighter powering it to $1.24bn (¥195.3 billion) in net sales and an operating profit of $476.5m (¥195.3 billion) — a record financial year for the Japanese developer. Korean dev Pearl Abyss saw revenue jump fivefold to $210.6m (₩328.5 billion) for Q1 as a result of its surprisingly popular open-world game Crimson Desert pulling in over $170m bucks. But in contrast to these good news stories, SEGA recorded a net loss of $31.6m (¥5.7 billion) in FY 26 due to impairment costs on Angry Birds publisher Rovio and StakeLogic, as well as wider underperformance across its game portfolio. This resulted in the cancellation of a mysterious, but massive, ‘super game’ project reportedly valued at $800m.

Change is here

More to come: Results season for the industry isn’t over just yet. Take-Two will be unveiling its financials later today, batting away question after question about what’s happening with GTA VI. Ubisoft will drop its results next week as it continues to transform from a slightly confusing megapublisher into a slightly confusing Embracer-style portfolio business.

Bluffer’s guide to the results: But the latest results tell us a lot about the direction of travel of the industry at large. The console sector is being dragged forcefully away from its comfortable low-cost roots towards becoming a more expensive prestige product, whether or not its biggest players are ready for the change. The main growth in games is coming on new platforms with much lower barriers to entry and within China’s sphere of influence. Businesses that want to succeed in the market have to tighten or clarify their proposition, both to sell games and to keep the confidence of shareholders seeking value in a shifting market.

Challenges ahead: And while there is a chance that disruption within, say, AI could shift the dynamics of the industry, it’s pretty clear that the industry is at the mercy of transforming technology and geopolitical machinations in a way it hasn’t experienced before. Navigating that while still achieving the core challenge of making fun games people want to buy ain’t gonna be easy, that’s for sure.

News in brief

Gamestopped: eBay has rejected GameStop’s $56bn acquisition offer on the basis that it is “neither credible nor attractive.” Bloomberg reports that the company rejected the video game retailer’s offer because of ‘uncertainty’ around its financing plan, the risks of an acquisition and its potential impact on eBay’s growth. The fact that GameStop is a quarter of the size of eBay and that its acquisition offer was almost entirely vibes-based suggests that the rejection was probably for the best.

Building games for EU and me: Arjan Brussee, the co-founder of Guerrilla Games, has said that he plans to build a “European alternative” to video game engines Unity and Unreal. Speaking to delightfully named Dutch podcast De Technoloog, Brussee said that “no one is currently making an engine that is fully European-hosted, built by Europeans, and complies with European rules and guidelines” and claimed this is a problem because of the widespread use of game engines across wider society. One for European policy bigwigs to keep an eye on.

Widening the GNET: One for the academic/policy-minded among you. The Extremism and Gaming Research Network has formally joined the Global Network on Extremism and Technology, based out of the Centre for Statecraft and National Security at King’s College London. The move won’t change the way the network functions, but it will increase access to institutional support and access to a research ecosystem to continue its important work.

I said I’ve been to the year 9999: Thinking of playing an accidentally leaked early version of Forza Horizon 6? Think again. Playground Games released a statement on social media confirming that players who have accessed the game, which appears to have been leaked by accident rather than through a more malicious hack attack, will be barred from all Forza games until 31st December 9999. The game releases next week, just in case you think you want to run the risk of a multi-lifetime ban.

Spread the Wordle: Wordle is about to get its own TV show. NBC has confirmed that the game will be adapted into a quiz show hosted by US news host Savannah Guthrie. Filming is set to take place in Manchester, with the show broadcast in both the UK and the US. Jimmy Fallon’s production company, Electric Hot Dog, is bringing the show to life ahead of its launch in 2027.

Moving on

Former Tekken head honcho Katsuhiro Harada has formed a new studio with the help of SNK…Felix Baker is Director, Data Services at SEGA Europe…Amy Graves is now Senior Partnerships Manager over at Mythwright…Tom van Dam has been appointed as Avia’s VP of Business Development…And Stephen Hey, Laura Harper, Louise Andrew, Michael Pattison, Carl Jones, and Caroline White have all been appointed board members for the newly formed Manchester Games Network. Let’s hope they get their lobbying asks and dance moves nailed before Andy Burnham heads south, eh readers?…

Jobs ahoy

BBC Studios is looking for a Producer, Gaming and Interactive in London…Lego Digital Play has been advertising a Game Design Director role for a couple of weeks…Hasbro is hiring a Senior Writer in Austin, Texas…Bad Robot Games has posted a Senior Producer role in the States…And IGN Entertainment has a rare Guides Editor posting in Australia…

Events and conferences

• Power Play Book Tour, UK - Multiple dates, May-July

• Gamesbeat Summit, Los Angeles - 18th-19th May

• BitSummit, Tokyo - 22nd-24th May

• Summer Games Fest, Los Angeles - 5th-8th June

• VGIM Business Breakfast, Brighton - 15th July

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Games of the week

• Subnautica 2 - The sequel at the heart of a lawsuit featuring the most hilarious misuse of generative AI ever, finally enters early access.

• Battlestar Galactica: Scattered Hopes - It’s FtL but with a fleet of ships from Battlestar Galactica and procedural storytelling. What’s not to like?

• Indiana Jones and the Great Circle - Rip-roaring Indy adventure lands on Switch 2 and pulls off a Cyberpunk by actually looking pretty good.

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Before you go…

A video game satirising the Trump regime has been installed in an arcade machine in Washington D.C., sparking global mirth in the process.

Operation Epic Furious: Strait to Hell has been installed on the National Mall by the Secret Handshake Group.

It allows players to make meaningful choices as the Commander-in-Chief, such as invading Iran or, erm, just ordering a Diet Coke instead.

You can play it online here.

Keep up with VGIM: | Linkedin | Bluesky | Email | Power Play |

Ok, ok. So there’s not a Proper VGIM this week because I’m on holiday.

But good news: I do have details about the return of the ever-popular VGIM Business Breakfast.

Hosted on Wednesday 15th July at Loading Bar in Brighton between 8:30am and 10:00am, and sponsored by the fantastic folks at PXN, the VGIM Business breakfast will this year dive into how publishers themselves are standing out in a competitive market.

We’ll be grilling publishing experts about the state of publishing today, how publishers are honing their own stories to connect with game developers and what this all means for developers looking to fund their dream title.

Our panelists include:

• Harvey Elliott, CEO, PlayStack (Balatro, The Case of the Golden Idol, Mortal Shell)

• Joe Robinson, Communications Director, Hooded Horse (Manor Lords, Heroes of Might and Magic, Rebel Inc)

• Ariel Pai, Senior Product Scout and Business Development Manager, PQube (Cat Quest, Guilty Gear Xrd REV 2, Tormented Souls)

• Olly McGowan, Chief Technology Officer, PXN (clients include Bethesda, Nintendo and Xbox)

There’ll be breakfast pastries, warm beverages and cold drinks aplenty for anyone who comes along.

And in an exciting addition to this year’s event, I’ll be hanging around signing copies of Power Play until 11am for anyone who wants to get some extra ink on their hardback.

Want to join the VGIM Business Breakfast? Sign up for your free ticket below.

Join us at the VGIM Business Breakfast

Keep up with VGIM: | Linkedin | Bluesky | Email | Power Play |

• EU’s Digital Markets Act gets an average review score, like Balan: Wonderworld

• Xbox to become more “affordable, personal and open”, says bigwigs

• Housemarque’s Saros delivers shooty fun in the week’s releases.

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Hello VGIM-ers,

An easy introduction this week because I have two (2) things to tell you about.

First, the Power Play tour ticket page has gone live for your purchasing amusement.

The page has direct ticket links for the first four dates of the book tour – Hay-on-Wye, Balham, Cambridge and Norwich – for you to hit. It will also be updated every time a new date gets added. Join me at one of those dates by grabbing your spot here.

Second, and I ask you to remain calm about this, there will be no VGIM next week.

I am going on holiday before all the book madness truly kicks in. And the only way I can take proper time off is by punting all my work, including newsletter writing/editing, into the sea for a bit.

You may get one short email from me next week promoting a future VGIM event. But if you’re looking for a full-fat newsletter, you’ll have to wait until the 14th May.

The big read - DMA Defined

Keep calm: Hurry! Wake the kids! It’s here! Yes, the most exciting day of the video game and policy year has arrived: the European Commission’s first review of the effectiveness of the Digital Markets Act (DMA).

It is 14, going on 15 (pages): Ok, there’s not really any way I can dress a relatively dry 14-page policy document up as anything other than, erm, a relatively dry 14-page policy document. But the DMA matters for the games biz. Its rollout in 2023 shifted the competitive landscape of the global industry, cracking open app stores in Europe and sparking waves of similar legislation in Brazil, Japan, India and the UK.

A little bit complicated: So two years on from platforms meaningfully changing to adapt to the new rules, has the DMA delivered what it said it would for Europe? And is it likely to deliver ongoing benefits for games companies, or shift its focus elsewhere? According to the Commission, it’s doing a tip-top job. But for everyone else who is regulated under the law, isn’t marking their own homework and works in the games biz, it’s a little more complicated than that.

A quick run-through

Jerry good performance: The Commission announced the findings of its review on Tuesday 28th April. In its press release accompanying the publication of the report, it said: “the DMA remains fit for purpose and has opened up new opportunities for businesses and developers.” Teresa Ribera, Executive Vice-President for Clean, Just and Competitive Transition, said the DMA “has begun delivering tangible, positive results” for European citizens. And Hennu Virkunen, the Commission’s Executive Vice-President for Tech Sovereignty, Security and Democracy, claimed it had delivered “concrete changes for innovators and citizens.” These comments reminded me of the episode of Rick and Morty where clones of Jerry, Morty’s inept Dad, immediately start shaking hands with one another after a misjudged attempt to sound heroic.

Setting out the terms: So let’s ignore the spin for a second and examine the review against its own terms. On its opening page, the Commission restates the DMA’s purpose to provide “a targeted set of harmonised rules applicable to digital platforms with gatekeeper position.” It aimed to make “digital markets in the EU fairer and more contestable” by getting dominant Big Tech players who control the infrastructure of the internet – like search engines or app stores – to stop using their market dominance to behave unfairly. By designating certain enormous platforms as ‘gatekeepers’ and slapping them with duties to stop being so naughty, the Commission hoped that cracking open digital markets would turbocharge business innovation and give more rights to people across Europe. It also hoped that Big Tech would live with one set of EU-wide obligations, rather than run the risk of 27 countries writing laws all on their lonesome.

Gatekeeping: Between 2023 and 2026, the Commission identified seven gatekeepers (Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Booking, ByteDance, Meta and Microsoft) running 23 core services that fell under the act across the continent. Many of these services serve the games industry, including the app stores (Google Play and the App Store), digital advertising platforms (Google, Amazon and Meta), social media platforms that drive game discovery (TikTok as a prime example) and operating systems (including Android, iOS and Windows). All were meant to follow best practices like allowing their platforms to easily work with other services, increasing the amount of data businesses can pull from them and allowing companies to point to offers or services outside the platform. They were also meant to stop naughtiness from gatekeepers, like promoting their own products more favourably.

Big benefits?: At this point, the report begins to identify general benefits that the DMA has delivered. It highlights a noticeable uptick in the number of alternative browsers and app stores available to businesses and consumers via previously locked platforms. It celebrates that users can now ditch pre-installed apps, download interaction data from social media more easily and cross-pollinate their data from platforms with a wider array of services. It shows that there is greater transparency in areas such as advertising cost and effectiveness via platforms, or through regular annual reporting from gatekeepers into their practices.

They fought the law and the law kinda won: The Commission also tips its hat to the enforcement actions it has launched through the DMA, including efforts to stop Apple and Google from preventing businesses ‘steering’ customers away from their stores to alternative platforms (a big deal for game companies seeking to sell direct to consumers). It goes on to argue that it believes the DMA prevented a costly counterfactual scenario, where fragmented efforts to strengthen rights in digital markets across the bloc would prove hella complicated for all involved.

Keeping a low-profile

Someone is shy: Yet despite all this, there’s definitely something a bit odd about the review. It is oddly vague for a big assessment of a landmark law. Some of its ‘big’ successes seem laughably small, such as the less-than-impressive announcement that 40 companies have used data portability rules to roll out new features. It’s also curiously shy in places, burying the details of high-profile Big Tech enforcement action that had been celebrated with noisy media releases in the footnotes.

Dodging the drafts: The circumspection has a few root causes, said a couple of Brussels-based contacts whom I hit up over WhatsApp. The first is that the Commission always ends up drafting its review documents like this. The urge to self-congratulate clashes with a need to be evenhanded as part of a formal three-year process. The result is a document similar to the Commission’s first review of the effectiveness of GDPR in 2020: an exercise in half-hearted boosterism that eventually gave way to a less positive second review that sparked efforts to tweak the rules.

Bully boys: There’s more to it than a clash in drafting though. One contact made it clear that the absence of detail is almost certainly a by-product of the Commission’s ongoing clashes with Trump’s Big Tech-backing administration. Until late 2024, the EU’s legislative moves were considered a global regulatory backstop. After Trump arrived, businesses have been emboldened to criticise the DMA either directly through companies like Amazon or via trade associations like the Computer & Communications Industry Association, whose bread is richly buttered by the same companies. Big Tech has some reasonable fears about the nature of the DMA, including getting locked into a form of double jeopardy where they’re regulated under both its rules and separate national laws. But the strength of their criticism shows that they think Trump’s more muscular (read: idiotic) approach to Europe could force concessions, encouraging the Commission to keep its head down.

Missing its potential: But perhaps more importantly than that, there is simply a question of whether the rules are actually that effective at all. The Commission is keen to celebrate its wins, but on page nine it states that the act has “still not reached its full potential”. It says that while it has had a “real positive impact”, it also states that the DMA is still so wet behind the ears that its impact can’t fully be measured yet. And given that the scope of the act has completely missed cloud computing and AI services (the latter, admittedly, which exploded after the horse-trading over the act), the review leaves a dangling question of how much meaningful value the DMA has delivered in the 1000 or so days since it rolled into law.

Playing with the rules

Some good news: And so we arrive at whether the DMA has been handy for the games business. Based on the review, which doesn’t mention games once, you might guess it hasn’t. But actually, it’s somewhat more positive than that.

In on the games: Fortnite’s return to the app stores across Europe was a result of the law, something Epic Games keenly communicated. Forcing the bad boys of Big Tech to allow developers to use third-party services like payment providers has significantly opened up the direct-to-consumer model, meaningfully boosting revenues for game developers able to steer customers to their own stores. The act also encouraged companies to bring their own app stores to mobile, even if Epic’s store has struggled a bit (and Microsoft’s mobile store ambitions seem to be fading by the day).

Limited impact: However, the DMA’s overall usefulness to games companies remains in question. Jari-Pekka Kaleva, President of the European Games Developer Federation, gave the DMA one tick of approval for its enforcement actions when he examined a review in a post on LinkedIn. By contrast, he suggested that improvements to access to alternative infrastructure and data portability rights only amounted to a ‘half measure’ of success. He would go on to criticise the DMA for failing to capture many services in games that are essentially gate-kept (e.g. game engines), for failing to provide truly transparent data access and for not successfully defending democratic norms. He went on to suggest that the Commission was “still moving too slowly” and that it was necessary to prod them further.

DMA long road ahead: So two years on, the DMA’s impact is contested. It has nudged the needle in a few places, but its impact appears to be limited compared to the ambitious objectives set when it was rolled out (and is being underplayed because of the fighty rhetoric from Big Tech trying to hide behind Daddy Trump to avoid following the rules). Games businesses may have benefitted more than most from the DMA’s changes, especially through access to that sweet alternate distribution and monetisation framework. But without a careful focus on consolidating gains, there’s a risk that the DMA keeps expanding to try to capture new parts of the tech landscape without understanding where its impact can truly be felt. And if that happens, the limited gains in games may remain just that for the years to come.

News in brief

Opening up the platform: Xbox’s new plan is to offer players an “affordable, personal and open” platform for players, according to company big bosses Asha Sharma and Matt Booty. In a half-hour interview for Stephen Totilo’s Game File, the execs said that the company was planning a “return to Xbox” by strengthening its core console, PC and software offering. There was, however, little mention of mobile despite a determination from Sharma and Booty (a great name for a pirate-themed fashion brand) to grow the platform’s daily player base. Read Neil Long’s eloquently furious thoughts on this over at mobilegamer.biz.

Risen feathers?: Shenanigans continue regarding the future of the Wuchang: Fallen Feathers franchise. The game, which is a Soulslike set in China, rose to prominence last year after successfully breaking out in the West. But after a series of odd occurrences – including a content update that stopped violence being meted out on Chinese historical figures that lined up very closely with censorship mandates and the development team walking away from the studio shortly after – Italian games publisher Digital Bros has reportedly acquired full ownership of the IP for €4m. Given the Chinese authorities’ general dislike of international businesses buying up local assets, I’d keep an eye on this one.

Interesting content policy decision of the week: Epic Games has agreed to refund people who have bought a skin of a musician currently charged with the murder of a 14-year-old, but has said they won’t remove the content from the game. The company has agreed to hand back cash to players who bought a skin of David Antony Burke (D4vd) after the news that he was being charged with the crime, as well as possessing child pornography. But it so far has not committed to removing the content from the game, which feels like the kind of indefensible position that’s really not worth expending reputational capital on.

Unfortunate news: The suspect charged with attempting to assassinate Donald Trump at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner is an independent game developer. 31-year-old Cole Thomas, who described himself as a mechanical engineer and teacher, released a game called Bohrdom on Steam in 2018. PC Gamer reported that its Steam page briefly became a hub for conversation after the attempted assassination, but the posts have disappeared since it reported on the game. Funny that.

Righteous Cause: And finally, a hat tip to Alex Calvin-Forbes for his interview with Wayne Emanuel about opening up a new platform called Cause+Select to connect charities more effectively with the game industry. Given the success of charity fundraising within games and the practical challenges of getting those kinds of initiatives off the ground, it’s a welcome development.

Moving on

Jason Parmar has become Client Partner, EMEA at Discord as it pushes its ad business…Yusif Ali has been promoted to Senior Community Manager at Jagex…Harriet Baker has shifted roles at Ubisoft, becoming its Content Creator Specialist…Meanwhile, Benoit Richer has left Ubisoft to co-found Servo Games with Luc Tremblay, Alex Drouin and Dany Marcoux…And Ukie has announced the membership of its Esports Advisory Panel, which is chaired by Andy Payne and will aim to give the UK government the lowdown on competitive video game play…

Jobs ahoy

Rockstar Games needs a Communications Coordinator…SEGA Europe is hiring an Associate Content Producer…Unity is looking for a Director of Content Marketing over in New York…GamingBible has an opening for an Editorial Lead up in Manchester…And you could become the President of the ESRB Rating Board, if you fancy it…

Events and conferences

• Power Play Book Tour, UK - Multiple dates, May-July

• Gamesbeat Summit, Los Angeles - 18th-19th May

• BitSummit, Tokyo - 22nd-24th May

• Nordic Game, Malmö - 26th-29th May

• Summer Games Fest, Los Angeles - 5th-8th June

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Games of the week

• Saros - Fast-paced, cinematic action shooter from shmup-adjacent Finnish funsters Housemarque lands today.

• Invincible VS - Think, Mark, think about buying this decent-looking beat-em-up based in the Invincible universe.

• MotoGP 26 - Cane turbo-powered motorbikes around race tracks in the latest entry of the annual sports franchise.

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Before you go…

Andrea Lai loves Football Manager. For the past 20 years, Lai has played the game obsessively. And this year, he took his obsession one step further.

The Italian gentleman travelled to Northern Ireland to watch Coleraine FC play, after establishing a virtual love affair with the team during an FM save.

And even though he has only managed them in the digital world, Lai was given a chance to meet the real-world manager and players as a thank you for his fandom.

Wholesome stuff.

Keep up with VGIM: | Linkedin | Bluesky | Email | Power Play |

• Call of Duty cut from Day One Game Pass as part of subscription shake-up

• Warner Bros shareholders unanimously approve Paramount’s $111bn deal

• UK game market grows to record high of £8.76bn in 2025

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Good morning VGIM Insiders,

It’s the end of April, so it’s time for a Debrief.

As per usual, we’re providing you with summaries of the top news stories, biggest deals, juiciest data, the best cultural commentary and all the VGIM Insider gossip.

If you’d like to read the Debrief and get other key VGIM perks – such as more newsletters, early access to events and 10% off all VGIM stuff – grab a membership for just £50 a year below.

And if you can’t support VGIM as an Insider, make sure to catch up on our most recent editions for free below.

• Games for Change London: Schedule Announced, 02/09/2026

• War (Meme) Games, 09/04/2026

• Three lessons from Games for Change London, 16/04/2026

• Roblox’s Age-Based Accounting, 23/04/2026

Microsoft pulls Day One Call of Duty from Game Pass

Read more

• Age assurance innovation, tech improvements and regulatory pressure behind new Roblox Age-Based Accounts.

• Xbox drops day one Call of Duty from Game Pass to plug a $300m hole

• Causal Loop offers up time echo-y puzzling thrills in the week’s releases

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Hello VGIM-ers,

I’ve been in a studio all week reading the audiobook version of Power Play.

It’s mostly been fun. It’s sometimes felt tiring. And it only occasionally felt like a form of cruel and unusual torture. But overall, I think it has come out pretty well.

Make my pain worthwhile by pre-saving it on Audible, Spotify or your favourite indie audiobook outlet now.

I also got to present my book at a special swanky book showcase hosted by my publisher on Monday evening this week.

Booksellers from across the land grabbed all of the copies of the uncorrected proofs that were laid out there, which was lovely to say.

And one British comedian who is firmly in ‘national territory’ treasure told me that they were looking forward to reading it. Swanky.

But enough of the relentless self-promotion. Here’s the big read.

The big read - Roblox’s Age-Based Accounting

Accounting for everyone: Last week, Roblox announced a fundamental change to the way its platform functions for under-16s. It revealed Age-Based Accounts, a dual-tier system that sifts 5-8 year olds and 9-15 year olds into versions of the platform that limit access to communication features, certain content, and strengthen parental controls.

Under pressure: The rollout of Roblox Kids and Roblox Select comes after the platform has come under big regulatory and legal pressure. The platform has been subject to bans in countries such as Algeria, Egypt and everyone’s favourite Gulf oil power, Iran, on child safety grounds. It has been subject to numerous lawsuits across the world, including a high-profile ding-dong with the Attorney General of Texas for allegedly putting “paedophiles over profits”. It’s also come under scrutiny in Australia following its social media ban in a manner that is arguably a touch unfair, after it was broadly okayed by its eSafety Commissioner last year.

Great Scott: Does the introduction of the new two-tier system meaningfully change the experience of accessing Roblox for kids? Is it proactive leadership from the platform, or a reaction to wider circumstances? And will it meaningfully change the regulatory conversation around Roblox and the games biz more widely? I hopped on a Zoom call with Tim Scott, Senior Director of Public Policy EMEA at the company, to find out.

Select Your Roblox Player

Calling Dr Langdon: Roblox’s new Age-Based Accounts work through a simple triaging system. When a user enters the platform, they are asked to verify their age. If they’re above 18, they’re given access to full-fat Roblox. If they’re above 16, they’ll be handed keys to most of the platform apart from 18+ content. Parents will also be able to check who 16 and 17-year-olds are friends with, how much time they’re on the platform and what they’re spending until they hit adulthood.

Criteria explained: If you’re under 16, though, you’ll be sorted into one of two account categories. Roblox Kids is reserved for the wee kiddiwinks aged between five and eight. The account limits them to content rated Minimal or Mild by the platform. It hands parents an expanded suite of parental controls to manage their account. It also turns off chat by default, unless a parent or caregiver provides permission. Anyone who refuses to age-verify is put in ‘no chat prison’ too, until they prove how old they are. There is definitely no chance that’ll backfire.

Taking the biscuit: Roblox Select (which definitely sounds like a Marks & Spencer Christmas biscuit tin) expands content and chat access for older players. Anyone aged between 9 and 15 gets access to Moderate experiences and safeguarded chat, depending on regional rules. Parental controls, meanwhile, gradually loosen after the age of 12 to align with developing data rights. Users will also automatically graduate from category to category, meaning that an eight-year-old would move from Kids to Select on their ninth birthday.

Feeling content: The platform is also strengthening its content rules to try to keep age-appropriate content in each bucket. Experiences will only be included in Kids or Select once a developer has verified their identity via the Roblox Plus subscription system, once it has been tested in real-time by a group of 16+ users and once it has been assigned a rating in line with the company’s moderation system. A forthcoming partnership with the International Age Rating Coalition (IARC) will transform those labels into a relevant local content rating, like PEGI or ESRB.

Assuming direct parental controls: Finally, the rollout also coincides with a strengthening of parental controls. Parents can manage access to chat and to specific experiences until a user’s 16th birthday. It also, interestingly, gives parents the ability to allow children to access certain content that otherwise wouldn’t be available to their age category. This is similar to the law around physical game retail in the UK, which stops kids from buying games they’re not old enough for but allows parents to do so on their behalf. Sometimes, this is feckless parenting. Other times, it’s pretty reasonable (e.g. buying a 15-year-old who has an 18-year-old sibling a 16-rated game).

Highly effective age assurance policies?

Cabined if they would: The measures are comprehensive. They bear a strong resemblance to Epic’s Cabined Accounts, which limit access to the platform’s features to under-13s until a verification process has been passed. However, the combination of verification, multiple account tiers and a strengthening of the ecosystem means that Roblox’s approach has arguably surpassed Epic’s previously best-in-class approach. So, the obvious question: why now?

Gotta have faith: Confidence in the effectiveness of age assurance technology has helped Roblox push the policy change. “Technology is enabling it,” says Scott. “When the Online Safety Act was first talking about the need for highly effective age assurance, companies were trying to build it behind closed doors and saying the tech isn’t there yet, and the privacy isn’t up to scratch until now. But actually, we now have good faith in the reliability and accuracy of the technology for chat verification. This gives us the confidence we can do it for content.”

Estimation gains: That confidence has grown as it has rolled out age verification across the world. According to Scott, more than 50% of Roblox users have completed an age check since it became platform policy. The accuracy range for an under-18 user is now “roughly 1.4 years.” That’s obviously not perfect. But it is more accurate than for adults, where estimating a range is harder. The figures are also improving as systems evolve, suggesting the range will shut more closely.

A bigger vision: Roblox argues that age assurance is only one part of the picture. Another source in its trust and safety team has repeatedly told me of their frustration with accusations that measures like this are ad hoc rollouts bodged together by engineering in response to headlines. They argue that wider work in the business continues to make the platform safer, including long-term efforts to build parental controls and roll out measures to limit chat to younger users; the implementation of AI-powered content moderation systems to catch inappropriate experiences; formation of advisory groups, like its recently announced global Parent Council, to advise its work. Having seen Roblox’s trust and safety team grow from one person half a decade ago to a sprawling team of global experts, its investment in safety is sincere.

Answering the question: For Scott, the rollout of age-based accounts is part of a wider move by the company to embrace its unique position in the games landscape. “We’re in an odd position,” he explains. “We sit in the weird world of being a user-generated content platform, being on mobile, on Xbox and PlayStation. So, who is the gatekeeper? This is our answer.”

Honest opinion: But while I do think the business is much more sincere about safety than generally credited, it doesn’t mean that the ongoing legal, media and reputational firestorm dogging the business isn’t front of mind. “I’d be disingenuous if I didn’t say policy mattered,” Scott said when I asked him if legal and regulatory battles were forcing the company’s hand. “But the industry has always had age ratings, parental controls and other ways to keep players safe. We’re keeping in line with the safety piece that games companies have taken more seriously [than other social media platforms].

Examining the layers: And when you cut through the announcement, you can see the layers of the policy cake that have shaped Roblox’s approach. The content rating approach broadly lines up with self-regulatory content systems like PEGI, with arguably only the 7+ rating fitting a little squiffliy in the Kids and Select categories. The gradual weakening of parental oversight after the age of 12 clearly aligns with the cutoff for COPPA, the US child online safety law, which protects children under the age of 13. Roblox Select’s cut-off for 16-year-olds also clearly aligns with the preferred age for most mooted social media bans. The platform may well be doing a lot on its own initiative. But when the announcement came just shortly before the platform cut a deal with the state of Nevada to get out of legal hot water, no one benefits from pretending that legal pressure isn’t driving the agenda.

Looking ahead

We’ll be back after this short break: So, does this mean Roblox’s problems are solved forevermore? Not really. I asked Tim when the two-tier account system was being rolled out. The answer was ‘soon’, which turned out to be June 2026. It’ll take some time to see whether Kids and Select do make a meaningful difference to how Roblox works for young ‘uns (and which hacks and workarounds people inevitably discover to get around the system).

Meandering thoughts: For me, Roblox’s move brings up three big thoughts about the direction of tech policy. The first is that complying with global tech policy increasingly looks like matching up platform rules with the ‘gold standard’ set by one country (e.g. Australia and 16 as the social media cut off) and assuming that’ll carry everywhere else. The next is that there is a meaningful intersection between approaches to age assurance and rating game content, justifying PEGI’s move to follow the German age body USK in rating ‘contextual’ mechanics in games. Roblox’s announcement should also encourage policymakers that they can meaningfully drive innovation by regulating. Whether they can do so strategically, rather than by throwing a 300-page-long act into the faces of companies and hoping one of the provisions in there sparks a race-to-the-top, is a different question.

Define ‘good’: It also raises the question of what ‘good enough’ looks like to regulators governing online spaces. Whatever Roblox’s precise motivation – which clearly is a mix of a desire to do good by their users and an attempt to thwack away scrutiny that’s damaging the business’s growth prospects – I can’t think of a game business dealing with the issue of child safety with greater seriousness. I’m just not sure whether it can ever satisfy safety regulators with its work, when much of online safety policy has – with the best of intentions – succumbed to Helen Lovejoyism.

Setting standards: For now, I don’t predict that this change will suddenly wash away Roblox’s problems. But if the ‘worst’ platform in games for child safety is doing this kind of stuff, the rest of the industry will pay close attention – especially if it is expected to follow suit in the years to come.

News in brief

Do not Game Pass go: Microsoft has confirmed that it is yanking Call of Duty from releasing on Day 1 on its Game Pass subscription service. Cecilia D’Anastasio confirmed the decision in Bloomberg, after previously reporting that the decision to put the immensely popular multiplayer shooter on the service from launch cost the business a cool $300m. Ouch.

Compliance or die: BAFTA has claimed that a last-minute decision to pull a video game trailer from last Friday’s BAFTA Game Awards was a “compliance decision.” Alyx Jones, developer of The Quiet Things, posted on LinkedIn that her game, which features themes of self-harm and sexual abuse, was removed from the showcase by the organisation while on her way to a nominee’s party last Thursday. BAFTA said they removed it because they couldn’t provide appropriate trigger warnings before the awards. Considering the game has long listed its content prominently on its storefront and BAFTA has long allowed challenging content within its wider award programme, this decision looks more like a knee-jerk reaction aimed at avoiding the kind of debacle that engulfed this year’s film awards — rather than a reasonable creative choice.

To the Moonton and back: Boffins at Drake Star Partners have reported that mergers and acquisitions in the games business reached a 15-month high in the first quarter of 2026. The firm reported $100bn of activity, highlighting Savvy Games’s acquisition of Mobile Legends maker Moonton as the biggest dedicated video game deal. That said, its inclusion of Paramount’s acquisition of Warner Bros in its list of games deals is ever so slightly wonky, given how little video games featured in the discussion around the acquisition.

BARBed Wired Employees?: Build A Rocket Boy has found itself in hot water again as it faces accusations of deploying surveillance software against its own staff. The video game union, the IWGB, is taking legal action against the company, alleging that it smuggled a tool called Teramind onto employees’ computers earlier this year without their consent or knowledge. The company reportedly installed the software after accusations that ‘saboteurs’ had undermined the launch of its game Mind’s Eye and announced it’d be removed months later, only after employees had discovered it on their devices. BARB hasn’t responded to the allegations at the time of writing.

Crashier number 1983, please: Doom creators Brenda and John Romero recently said that the crisis that has swept the games industry is “definitely crashier” than 1983. But are they right? Joost van Dreunen argues compellingly that it isn’t, suggesting that what we’re experiencing isn’t a crash in demand. Instead, it’s a business model that’s completely failing to supply players with what it wants in a business-savvy way.

Moving on

Roblox has hired Joost Hagesteijn as its new General Manager for Europe, the first person to head up business operations for the company in the region…Leading industry egghead Piers Harding-Rolls has been promoted to Head of Games Research, Senior Research Director at Ampere Analysis…Kirsty Gibson is now Director of Engagement at UK Games Talent and Finance…Lauren Kaye has been hired as an Account Manager (Creators) at Swipe Right PR…Oh, and a little-known company called Apple has announced that John Ternus will replace Tim Cook as Chief Executive in September…

Jobs ahoy

Bethesda Game Studios has a Live Producer post in Austin for any fans of RPGs and breakfast tacos…Rockstar Games is looking for a Principal Investigations Analyst…In a full circle moment, Google is hiring a Game Designer, Games to work with the DeepMind team…Deck 13 Interactive is recruiting a Lead Game Programmer…And EA has a role open for a Cinematic Animator in Stockholm…

Events and conferences

• gamescom Latam, São Paulo, 29th April - 3rd May

• Gamesbeat Summit, Los Angeles - 18th-19th May

• BitSummit, Tokyo - 22nd-24th May

• Nordic Game, Malmö - 26th-29th May

• Summer Games Fest, Los Angeles - 5th-8th June

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Games of the week

• Causal Loop - Echo-powered sci-fi puzzler featured in last week’s Galaxies showcase lands on Steam this week.

• Jay and Silent Bob: Chronic Blunt Punch - Side-scrolling brawler channels Streets of Rage, Scott Pilgrim and the awesome power of 90s nostalgia.

• Masters of Albion - 22cans returns for one final roll of the God game dice, flipping between city building and tower defence-y stuff.

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Before you go…

Police in Westlake, Ohio, feared the worst last week, when they were called to check on a 91-year old woman who failed to respond to calls from family and a local elderly support program designed to check in on frail individuals.

Turns out, they had nothing to fear. The woman had not suffered a fall or, lord forbid, died. She’d instead been so engrossed in beating a high score in a bubble shooting game that she forgot to answer the phone.

VGIM, and its thousands of readers, salute you.

Keep up with VGIM: | Linkedin | Bluesky | Email | Power Play |

• We provide all the gossip from LGF’s Opening Night reception

• I run back the tape on an, erm, interesting Sky News interview

• We discuss why Asian game publishers are leading the charge in Roblox

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Good morning VGIM-ers,

Now, I know what you’re thinking. Sunday? For a newsletter? What’s going on, George?

Well, the London Games Festival was so busy that I was only able to wrap up this newsletter late on Friday. And rather than sending it out in the dying hours of the working week, I thought it’d make sense to shove it over to you as some sleep Sunday morning reading instead.

In this month’s edition, we pay homage to the 30th anniversary of the release of the classic Simpsons episode 22 Short Films About Springfield by sending you three politically tinged stories from the Festival with an anthology-like feel.

VGIM Insiders can read all of the stories below AND get early access to forthcoming VGIM events, extra content and 10% off advertising spend. Sign up via the form below.

Once you’ve done that, make sure to steam yourself a ham Albany-style and enjoy the newsletter.

Opening night gossiping

Read more

• We wrap up three big lessons from Games for Change London

• Video game spend hits £8.76bn in the UK, says Ukie

• We’re excited to play Vampire Crawlers at New Game Plus this week

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Hello VGIM-ers,

London Games Festival has been taking place this week. That means things have been busier than working the morning shift at the Pitt.

We’ll give you a speedy rundown of what we learned at this week’s Games for Change Summit shortly. But I’ve got a few things to tell you about.

I’m currently in a taxi on my way to Sky News to talk about the economic impact of the video games industry. I’ll be live at 8:40am UK time today, unless I get bumped for something more interesting (note: that is eminently possible).

Next, the first London tour date for the Power Play book tour has been announced.

Join me on Tuesday 16th June at Backstory in Balham to hear about the making of the book, why games have become a channel for political influence and nab your hardback two days before launch by buying a ticket here.

Finally, and somewhat excitingly, I’m heading into the studio next week to record the audiobook version of Power Play so you can listen to me read it/fall asleep to my witterings after Thursday 18th June.

However, that does mean I’ll be forced to spend four days in a padded room talking to myself. Expect a shorter VGIM next week as a result.

The big read - Three lessons from Games for Change London

We need a big lie down: Well, we did it. After two months of hard work, many emails and only a handful of meltdowns, Games for Change London went off with nary a hitch.

Full house: Over 200 industry professionals piled into the Leonardo Hotel near Tower Bridge to attend a day full of talks, roundtables, panels and workshops designed to channel the power of video game communities to deliver good in the world. All of it was ably supported by the event’s partners Roblox, Xsolla, the Good Game Club podcast, Ubisoft, the Christchurch Call and Tiltify.

Get ready to learn: But what on earth could we learn from all those fabulous talks? Here are three things that VGIM learned from the day that we think you’d be interested in.

We need to solve the 80/80 dilemma if we want to win over parents and policymakers

80/80 vision: Robert Steen knows the power of video games. The story of his son Mats Steen, who found friends, love and purpose in video games when a degenerative muscular disease would have otherwise stopped him, reached millions through the documentary The Remarkable Life of Ibelin. But Steen thinks that the impact of such stories can’t reach beyond games until the industry resolves a thorny problem: the 80/80 dilemma.

Major misunderstanding: “The 80/80 dilemma is that 80% of our teenagers are regular gamers, but 80% of parents don’t know what they’re doing online,” he told documentary film-maker Alysia Judge. “The most popular leisure activity is not understood by parents. You’ve read Lord of the Flies, you can see what young people can do without them [present in those spaces].”

Social solutions: But unlike many with a background in politics, Steen believes that the solution to the problem cannot be found in restrictive laws. Instead, it’s about working with civil society to celebrate when players reach standards within games that resonate with the behaviour in the physical world that we love to see.

Prime Minister of life: In Norway, this led to the creation of a civil society award called The Ibelin Prize, which celebrated a young person who made an outstanding positive contribution to Norwegian life via a game community. And with Steen seeking to recreate a prize that was built on the direct instruction of Norway’s Prime Minister and Culture Minister around the world, the industry has an opportunity to resolve the 80/80 dilemma in partnership with key audiences – rather than in opposition to them.

Games have been changing society for a lot longer than you think

The long game: Games for Change is a new addition to the London Games Festival. But the idea that games have the potential to drive change is older than I am.

Well into adulthood: In the opening session of the conference, Alan Gershenfeld, President of E-Line Media, and Susanna Pollack, President of Games for Change, showed that Games for Change’s 25-year-long life span started decades after the first game-changing titles entered the market.

Still shaping our play: Gershenfeld highlighted a number of games from the 1980s that were developed before the concept of serious games or games for social impact had coalesced into a movement. Titles like Oregon Trail, Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego and Sid Meier’s Civilisation shaped the way players learned decades ago. But the impact of these games — and the many sequels, spin-offs, and successors they inspired — is still being felt today because they established why games can teach ideas in a way that no other medium can.

Doing games: “Game mechanics are verbs,” explained Gershenfeld. “They can be action verbs. They can be thinking verbs. They hit the organic alignment between game mechanics and learning goals.” And though the games for change movement has grown and evolved considerably since those early forays into history-tinged titles in the 1980s, Gershenfeld’s opinion on the peculiar power of game mechanics was shared by hundreds of people in the room, explaining the growing impact of the industry across society.

Consistent community campaigning is more effective than one-offs

All the live long year: Community campaigning isn’t just for Christmas; it’s effective all year round. Or at least, that’s the conclusion of Maya Hofree and Deborah Mensah-Bonsu from Supercell, who’ve turned its farming game Hay Day into a year-round canvas for community campaigning.

Keep it simple, stupid: After successfully engaging its community in social impact campaigning through Playing for the Planet’s Green Game Jam, Hofree’s team has built a seasonal calendar to engage players with causes they care about. Operating on the principle that “if you can’t explain it in a sentence, it’s too complicated”, Hay Day’s team created a range of seasonal activations targeted at supporting causes close to the community’s heart: conservation, animal welfare and hunger relief.

Pure performance: The results were impressive. The Let it Bee campaign, which aimed to preserve habitats in line with the Green Game Jam, led to a 3% increase in player engagement during the campaign and a 10% boost in what Supercell called ‘helping behaviour’. A Halloween Haunted Feast campaign with the World Food Programme engaged 90% of players and led to the donation of 200,000 meals (well in excess of the forecasted 50,000). And a Christmas campaign supporting loveable pet dogs across the world (featuring an in-person photo op for players and their pups) drew participation from 92% in players, a 7% increase in engagement and, most interestingly of all, a 4% boost to revenue.

Ready for more: But while each campaign performed effectively in isolation, Hofree and Mensah-Bonsu argued that the cumulative impact of consistent campaigning grew from activation to activation. And by consistently offering players the chance to do good, the Supercell team saw players shift from saying that they were enjoying the campaigns to actively asking for further opportunities to do good.

Best of the rest - Games for Change London

Ambitious goals: I chaired a panel featuring Ben Golant from Tencent, Dr Rachel Kowert of Psychgeist, Andy Robertson of the Family Gaming Database, and Susanna from Games for Change, all about helping parents to raise good gamers. The session, which followed Robert Steen’s genuinely inspiring chat about Ibelin, doubled down on the importance of communicating to parents on their terms, with resources that help them and encourage them to reframe games. Tencent and Games for Change’s Raising Good Gamers Initiative announced that new resources will be rolled out this summer, alongside a white paper authored by Kowert. And they set themselves the lofty goal of reframing the way parents think about the positives of video games in five years.

Prosocial systems: A big theme for the conference was how wider systems or tools designed for change are more successful when they’re tailored to the game and community. A panel about Prosocial design featuring Laura Higgins from Roblox, Meredith Ford from Jagex, Anna Rafferty from LEGO and Shuli Gilutz from UNICEF agreed that tools like the RITEC child-friendly design framework are handy for developers seeking to make games that respect all the rights of players. But equally, the worlds of Runescape, the experiences within Roblox, and LEGO’s numerous games each offer tangibly different environments from one another. That means shared objectives like striving for safer game worlds must be as flexible as games themselves are to ensure that they can be built into them effectively.

Fishing in other places: There’s a tendency for games for good practitioners to go fishing for cash from corporate social responsibility budgets. However, Great Ormond Street Hospital’s Ben Austwick and Sarah Bissell suggested another way forward. The charity tapped up video game companies and brands outside the sector to match-fund donations for The Curious Case of the Copper Key creator-led fundraising campaign, which also featured star turns from Gordon Ramsey, Tim Peake and Emma Bunton. But rather than go the usual route, the charity instead hit their marketing and advertising budgets because the stream comfortably reached an enormous audience. The result? Great Ormond Street raised £469,282 over the course of the livestream.

Planning for engagement: Games for Change was graced with an appearance by Lord Gascoigne, a member of the House of Lords and chair of the Built Environment Committee, for a session about using video games to build more effectively in the real world. The session, which featured reps from Arup, Publica, Brightwild Ventures, Ubisoft and The Block by Block Foundation, explored how video games like Assassin’s Creed, Roblox and Minecraft encourage participation in the understanding and design of urban spaces. By the end of it, Lord Gascoigne, who has a bee in his bonnet about Britain building new towns with a vision behind them, was directly asking how policymakers could do more to use games to inform their work. Positive signs indeed.

The beautiful games: Finally, I really enjoyed the chat between Special Effect, Xsolla and Special Effect about their charity partnership (which resulted in the first team wearing a specially branded kit in a recent home game against Blackpool). As a keen football fan, someone who loves games and who has done plenty of fundraising for the charity by running many miles, it was a lovely fusion of my interests (and a reminder in the best way possible that there really is no distinction between physical and digital communities).

News in brief

The Great British Game Spend: The UK consumer video game market grew by 7.4% to reach £8.76bn, according to new research from industry trade association Ukie. Hardware, software and game culture spend all grew, as the launch of the Switch 2 and the arrival of the Minecraft Movie raised the 2025 market tide. Ukie also reported that mobile game monetisation ticked upward, despite a decline in overall downloads within the territory.

Doki Doki Literature Clubbed: Google Play has whipped cult horror game Doki Doki Literature Club from its store for terms of service breaches relating to sensitive content. The visual novel, which combines a cutesy aesthetic with some deep psychological horror, has a PEGI 18 and has openly advertised the nature of its content since arriving on the Play Store last December. But developer San Salvato and publisher Serenity Forge Team have confirmed that the game was removed last week and remains delisted at the time of writing.

Dr Oh No: Story spoilers for IO Interactive’s 007: First Light and hundreds of other games are circulating online after another cock up from Indonesia’s video game rating board. Hours of in-game footage, thousands of documents and private email addresses of industry staffers were leaked online after someone got access to the board’s sophisticated back-end system of *checks notes* a load of Google Drive links. Gulp.

Hack attack: Hacker group Shiny Hunters has released confidential telemetry data relating to Rockstar Games on the dark web after the company refused to respond to a ransom request. Kotaku reports that the hacked data, which appears to have been sourced by exploiting the company’s cloud server provider, relates to the spending habits of players of games such as GTA Online. No information about GTA 6 appears to have been released by the group.

I don’t think any of us expected him to do that: Sony has announced that it is making an R-rated film adaptation of Bloodborne, which perhaps isn’t too unexpected given the consistent success of video game IP on the silver screen. What is unexpected is that JackSepticEye, content creator and From Software enthusiast, has a co-production credit. This can only go well…

Moving on

Haley Uyrus is now Head of Marketing at Critical Reflex…Thaine Lyman, Katya Baukova and Michał Gembicki have joined Bloober Team as Head of Studio, Director of Business Development and Head of Publishing as it gets ready for growth...Jennifer Estaris, Sara Veal and Haz Dulull are three of the eight people selected for this year’s Ensemble showcase…And congratulations to Illka Paananen of Supercell, who is picking up this year’s BAFTA Fellowship during tomorrow’s awards…

Jobs ahoy

Electronic Arts needs a Senior Game Designer to work on The Sims…Or if game modes and online functionality are more your cup of tea, Sega is looking to snaffle up a Game Designer too…Sony Interactive Entertainment has a Senior Manager, Production and Localisation QA open…Games Workshop is hiring a Background Writer…And video funsters RKG has a rare position open for a Video Producer…

Events and conferences

• BAFTA Games Awards, London - 17th April

• gamescom Latam, São Paulo, 29th April - 3rd May

• Gamesbeat Summit, Los Angeles - 18th-19th May

• Nordic Game, Malmö - 26th-29th May

• Summer Game Fest, Los Angeles - 5th-8th June

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Games of the week - New Game Plus edition

I’ve picked out three games that I’m looking forward to playing at New Game Plus, when/if I successfully rock up there tomorrow morning.

• Vampire Crawlers - First-person turn-based deckbuilder with roguelite elements based on the exceptionally moreish Vampire Survivors? Inject it into my veins.

• The Restricted Index - Discover a hidden truth as Britain’s last librarian by recommending, banning, or burning books under the glare of an authoritarian regime.

• Tournamentris - Clear blocks by matching them up via tournament brackets in a puzzler that looks like a pleasing blend of Tetris and a New York Times word game.

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Before you go…

What happens when players of a popular shooter stop fighting each other and start talking instead?

The Guardian’s Keith Stuart unpicks the emergence of an intriguingly peaceful subculture within the hit multiplayer shooter Arc Raiders, something that’s caught the attention of psychologists in the process.

Keep up with VGIM: | Linkedin | Bluesky | Email | Power Play |

• White House’s video game memes perform twice as well on social as its usual content does, according to VGIM boffins

• Apple pulls billing from Russia after breaking sanctions rules with payout

• Pokémon Champions battles its way to the top of our release round-up

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Hello VGIM-ers,

Welcome back to the latest edition of the newsletter. There are two things to tell you about before we get on with the Big Read.

Tickets for Games for Change London are close to selling out, which means you’ll really need to get a move on to grab a pass.

If you want to get your place at next Wednesday’s conference alongside the likes of LEGO, Jagex, Tencent, Ubisoft, Roblox, UNICEF, Great Ormond Street Hospital, Tiltify, The Christchurch Call, and many more, buy a ticket here.

I’m also pleased to say that the North American version of Power Play has gone to print. Its front cover is delightful, and its words are mighty.

If you want to buy a copy, you can pre-order it ahead of its 21st July launch here. And if you want me to speak in your city or state when I confirm my touring plans later this year, hit me up at george@videogamesindustrymemo.com.

The big read - War (Meme) Games

Yes, this really happened: The White House’s use of video game memes to promote its pointless, idiotic, and ruinous war in Iran grabbed news headlines last month. Footage from games like Grand Theft Auto, Call of Duty, and *checks notes with an exasperated look on his face* Wii Sports Resort was cut together with footage of combat operations from the Middle East, sparking consternation and column inches in outlets such as The Guardian in the process.

Super effective: But how effective are video game memes in promoting the perspective of the Trump administration? The answer is surprisingly so. VGIM analysis of the output of the White House’s Instagram account has found that video game memes which feature titles that closely align with the interests of male MAGA fans perform approximately twice as well as the administration’s usual output.

Emboldened to act: And while there are limitations to the effectiveness of such content, our investigation suggests that the administration will likely be emboldened to keep using game content to reach its audiences – necessitating a response from industry in the process.

Numbers video games

Sampling its content: Earlier this week, I analysed the view count from a sample of 60 posts from the White House’s Instagram Reels account over the past month and produced the mean average views from that sample. We then removed the top and bottom five posts from the sample to create an average based on the performance of 50 posts within that range. On average, the White House generated approximately 1.9 million views per reel across the original sample of 60 videos. However, that average dropped to approximately 1.57 million views when content at the upper and lower ends of the range was removed.

Popular cultural appropriation: We then examined the average performance of content posted by the White House, which appropriated content from wider popular culture to spread its messages. We identified five videos that met that criteria, including a Seinfeld meme featuring Marco Rubio and a clip of a fake bowling alley strike animation referencing war messaging. Albeit with a notably smaller sample size, the average views on such content were a million views higher than the baseline average at 2.56 million views.

Games on: Finally, we looked at five video clips which referenced video game content directly: a Call of Duty killstreak inspired reel, a GTA: San Andreas meme, a Wii Sports-inspired version of Operation Epic Fury, a supercut of creative content featuring Master Chief and Mortal Kombat voiceover lines (e.g. the use of the phrase “fatality”, and a clip of Donald Trump as an Animal Crossing character for agriculture week.

Ahead of the competition: On average, video game-inspired content attracted 3.4 million views. This is more than twice the baseline average for content posted across the account generally, and over 800,000 more views than creative content in general. And while none of the video game posts accounted for the most viewed content across the period analysed, the Wii Sports clip (4.8 million views), the Call of Duty content (4.5 million views), and the GTA reel (3.1 million views) outperformed the majority of videos glamorising the content. Only a handful of clips, including one of a bomber taking flight to the tune of the Macarena, generated more views.

Gamer-fication of propaganda

General principles: It is undoubtedly weird as hell to see the White House’s comms pivot from fuddy-duddy top-down institutional content to indulging in what is best described as shit posting. But why do this? Well, at its most basic level, the content works because it does what a lot of good social content does. It riffs on widely known popular culture to get cut through in the way many popular memes do. It has a chaotic, anarchic tone which suits the channel it’s in. It is transgressive in a way that delights the administration’s supporters and infuriates its rivals. And it feels all the more edgy because the formerly stuffy White House social channels have been turned into a place where this kind of stuff circulates freely.

All of your electoral base are belong to us: This partly explains why video game content is being riffed on by the White House. But there’s more to it than that. A big reason why this is happening is that Trump’s online base is deeply embedded in ‘gamer’ culture. As I’ve written about in one of the chapters of Power Play, a big chunk of the modern political right in America emerged from Gamergate. The hate movement was brought into the political fold by Steve Bannon and Breitbart after it showed how it is possible to wash extreme talking points into the mainstream political environment. Its members became online ‘shock troopers’ for Trump, as well as becoming foundational figures in the alt-right and nuttier fringes like QAnon. And as they’ve grown up, the almost entirely young men who made waves back in 2014 are now in positions of power on the right. This allows them to shape the online narrative, encouraging them to reach a fresh generation of men through an increasingly fragmented social media ecosystem that allows transgressive macho ‘manosphere’ content to trend.

What happens when you read the comments: The use of video game imagery and aesthetics to promote the Iranian War demonstrates the symbiotic relationship between the current administration and those closed, predominantly young male-only communities who respond to this ‘gamer-fication’ of communication. The top comments on the Call of Duty kill streak clip are sarcastic wry remarks like “even the white house knows old COD was peak” (5000+ likes) and “we got Call Of Duty reel on WH page before GTA 6😭” (over 25,000+ likes). The discussion underneath the GTA meme, which flashes up the phrase Wasted over a clip of the sinking of the Iranian warship the IRIS Dena, features prominent remarks like “I’m pretty sure this social media manager is my soulmate” (3500+ likes). And the non-Iran war-related Animal Crossing meme’s most liked comment reads “Illegal crossing ❌ Animal Crossing ✅” (6000+ likes). The administration’s authoritarian immigration policy is therefore being promoted to millions of viewers by Trump’s grassroots supporters, whether that wider audience likes it or not.

Rage bait: Video game content gets a lot of traction amongst Trump’s domestic and international support base because it’s part of the culture of the ‘in-group.’ But it also gets traction precisely because it attracts the attention of everyone else as well. The popularity and cultural significance of games within the wider online world draw plenty of Trump’s critics to the pages as well. On the Wii Sports Operation Epic Fury parody page, the most liked comment appears to be “this is extremely unprofessional, war is not a game” (7,300+ likes). Even if the posts are disliked, they’re attracting plenty of attention.

Media multiplied: And this comes down to the other big reason why these posts work so well for the regime: the content is then multiplied to millions more people by the media. While all of the White House videos which plunder cultural content for political gain tend to be referenced within the media, the use of video game content is particularly juicy for outlets looking for another ‘shocking’ angle on the administration’s comms. And as with Gamergate, the effect of the likes of the BBC picking up such content is to wash a clip that might have been sealed off within social media to millions more people worldwide. This allows the administration’s talking points to spread, achieving much greater reach than conventional comms would.

Taking action

Limitations aplenty: The White House is proactively using video game imagery, aesthetics, and community channels to promote its messaging. But there are limits to its effectiveness. The most obvious is how repeatable it all is. The sample of video game-flavoured content we found is small, amounting to a fraction of the administration’s overall output. Putting more game-themed propaganda into the world would likely diminish its effectiveness overall. Content that riffs on games that don’t align with the community of MAGA male gamers aligned to Trump looks like it may perform poorly, as seen with the comparatively low 1.7 million view count on the administration’s Animal Crossing clip. It’s also worth noting that the most viewed videos were for clips that were more archetypally Presidential, such as a clip of a chat between the President and the crew of Artemis II (11m+ views). Positive, friendly comms clearly still have their place.

Battling back: Game companies can blunt the effectiveness of such propaganda by drawing a clear line between their titles and the actions of the administration. The Pokémon Company did this effectively, releasing a public statement which was critical of the White House’s use of Pokopia fonts to promote Make America Great Again via its X account. Other game companies affected need to follow suit, both to protect their IP and communicate to their communities that promoting war via video game aesthetics isn’t great.

Know the enemy: And we can collectively limit its effectiveness by understanding why the administration is creating this content, what it is aiming to achieve with it, and how to prevent it from spreading further. There is an irony in writing this piece in the knowledge that it will push the regime’s clips to thousands of other people. But the more we understand that clips like this aim to appeal to an in-group, goad rivals, and attract attention, it becomes easier for us to counter. The more we understand the aim of these antics, deny it breathing space and find ways to promote less maliciously aggressive narratives to our audiences, the better off we’ll be in the long term.

Counter offensive: The White House’s use of video game aesthetics within its war communications is the surest sign yet that video games have achieved impactful cultural cut-through, both online and off. It’s down to us to make sure that the warmongering narratives being promoted on the back of our medium are countered in the strongest possible ways.

News in brief

Bitten off more than it can chew: Apple has pulled App Store billing in Russia, preventing consumers in the market from paying for in-app purchases or subscriptions. Craig Chapple from PG Biz reports that the move came after the company’s UK and Ireland subsidiary was fined £390,000 on Monday 30th March for making a £635,000 payout to a sanctions-breaching streaming service called Okko. Merely hours later, Ukrainian news outlet UNITED 24 noted that Russian officials had ordered mobile operators to stop customers from topping up their Apple ID accounts using phone balances. In the words of a former State Department official whom I spoke to for Power Play, there’s no such thing as a coincidence when it comes to the Kremlin.

Taken-Two out back: The head of Take-Two’s AI team has been laid off, alongside an unconfirmed number of colleagues. Luke Dicken, the company’s AI lead who joined the business from subsidiary Zynga, announced that his and his team’s time at the business “has come to an end”. But as Tommy Thompson writes at AI and Games, there’s much more hot air about generative AI than actual analysis of the restructure within the majority of the games media.

I drink your video game! I drink it up!: Papers Please creator Lukas Pope has said that he’s stopped posting about the video games he is working on to make sure his work isn’t “slurped up by AI”. Pope told Mike Rose and Rami Ismail from, erm, the Mike & Rami Are Still Here podcast that he no longer feels comfortable about posting updates, just in case someone (or some large language model) is pinching his ideas.

Meanwhile, in Jakarta: Roblox has committed to rolling out Indonesia’s imaginatively named Indonesian Game Rating System (IGRS) as regulator pressure increases on the platform worldwide. Experiences will feature both an age rating from the IGRS (e.g. a 13+ or 15+) and a Content Maturity Label (e.g. Mild or Restricted) from the platform itself. But the IGRS ratings have come under fire due to significant inconsistencies, something that’s covered in detail by the fine folks at Niko Partners.

Gold coins everywhere: Remember last week when we said that the critical panning for the Super Mario Galaxy movie wouldn’t make a blind bit of difference to its box office performance? Turns out we, and the rest of the world, were right. The film made $375.2m globally on its opening weekend. That’s slightly down on the original’s performance, but still means it was good enough to i) return its budget three times over and ii) become the biggest animated launch since last year’s bafflingly popular Avatar: Fire and Ash.

Moving on

Rukshana Pervin Hoque has been appointed Regulatory Counsel at Tripledot Studios…Lana Zgombić has popped up as Senior Production Coordinator: Technology at Rockstar London…Andrew Sinclair has been promoted to Senior PR & Product Executive at Sports Interactive…Tom Goldberger has been appointed the new Vice President, Gaming at creative agency DDA…And one we missed from last week: Clemens Mayer-Wegelin is now Chair of Video Games Europe…

Jobs ahoy

Take-Two Interactive has an opening for a Director, Global Affairs (Europe)...Discord is recruiting for a Senior Public Policy Advisor (APAC) in Australia…Turtle Rock Studios is hiring a Narrative Lead…Knock it out of the park as the Senior Director, Business Development, Gaming and VR at Major League Baseball…And Tencent has a post open for a Senior Communications Manager, Southeast Asia in Singapore…

Events and conferences

• London Games Festival, London - 13th-19th April

• Games for Change Summit, London - 15th April

• BAFTA Games Awards, London - 17th April

• gamescom Latam, São Paulo, 29th April - 3rd May

• Summer Games Fest, Los Angeles - 5th-8th June

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Games of the week

• Pokémon Champions - Free-to-play spiritual successor to Pokémon Stadium that appears to be perfectly optimised for eSports, is waiting for you on Switch 2.

• Starfield - Channel your inner Artemis II by playing Bethesda’s alright-after-you ’ve-put-ten-hours-into-it space-faring RPG on PlayStation 5.

• Beyond Words - Word-based rogue-like from that guy you shot in the face hundreds of times while playing GoldenEye drops on Steam.

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Before you go…

I enjoyed two helpings of ‘unexpected references to top video games in other forms of culture’ over the past week.

The Rest is History chose to open their latest series about the samurai with a reasonably deep chat about Ghost of Tsushima.

And beloved British comedian Bob Mortimer revealed that he used to play the Resident Evil games in a chat with comedians Sam Campbell and Romesh Ranganathan during the second series of the UK’s Last One Laughing.

Great references to popular video games that aren’t coming from the White House?

Shh. It’s just magic.

Keep up with VGIM: | Linkedin | Bluesky | Email | Power Play |

• We do a really deep dive into the 45+ speakers joining us at Games for Change London

• Build a Rocket Boy’s chief goes a bit QAnon with accusations of corporate sabotage

• Super Meatboy 3D splatters its way to the front of a quiet week of releases

Hello VGIM-ers,

The Easter weekend is here. I’ll be taking most of it off to visit family, scarf down vast quantities of Mini Eggs, and run on some mercifully flat ground for once.

I had a great time hosting the first-ever VGIM webinar earlier this week, which was all about building healthy video game communities with the help of Catalyst from the Christchurch call.

If you want to catch up with the session to find out about the importance of cultivating healthy communities and get an early heads up on a free training programme rolling out for moderators very soon, you can watch it back in full here.

And if you want to reach VGIM’s audience of engaged (and lovely) readers, I’m looking for partners to support future webinars and events on topics at the intersection of games and policy.

If you’d like to discuss opportunities to work with us, email me at george@videogamesindustrymemo.com. I’ll pick up with you when I’m less full of chocolate.

Oh, and speaking of stuff that VGIM is helping out with…

The big read - Games for Change London schedule announced

Drum roll, please: It’s taken two months of hard work, sweat, and the sending of some emails while I was on holiday in Mexico. But I’m delighted to announce that the full schedule for Games for Change London on Wednesday 15th April is locked down. And if I don’t mind saying so myself, it’s a corker.

A thank you to our partners: The conference, which is supported by Roblox, Xsolla, The Good Game Club, Ubisoft, Tiltify, and Catalyst (hey, we know those guys!), is taking place at the Leonardo Tower Bridge Hotel in the heart of London and is offering up two tracks of content dedicated to the theme Community Channelled.

It’s bigger than that George, it’s large: Every session aims to help our 150+ attendees think about how to use the power of their communities – whether they’re playing your games or making them – to create meaningful, positive impact in the real world. And to help us achieve this, we’ve got over 45 honking big names from the world of games, civil society, and even the ruddy House of Lords chipping in.

Speaking out

Pithy pitch: Our main conference room is offering up talks, fireside chats, and panels designed to get you thinking about the power of game communities broadly, to consider how to create impactful digital environments for them to thrive, and to then direct that impact into building a better world.

The Games they are a Changin’: To kick proceedings off from just after 9am, we’ve got three scene-setting sessions. Susanna Pollack, Games for Change’s President, will be talking about the organisation’s work over the past 25 years with Alan Gershenfeld, Co-Founder of BAFTA award-winning impact-focused game studio E-Line Media.

Truly Remarkable: They’ll then be followed by an interview between documentary filmmaker Alysia Judge and ex-Norwegian politician Robert Steen, who’ll be talking about what society can learn from the lessons of the documentary The Remarkable Life of Ibelin, its forthcoming feature film adaptation starring Stephen Graham, and the success of Norway’s Ibelin Prize in celebrating positive community behaviour.

Parent power: The opening chunk will close off with a chat about the importance of parents to the video game community, featuring Susanna once again, Dr Rachel Kowert of VGIM webinar fame, Andy Robertson from the Family Gaming Database, and Tencent’s Senior Director for Global Video Game Policy Ben Golant. I’ll be on moderating duties for that one.

The RITEC stuff: And from 10am onwards, a special workshop targeted at game developers and designers making games for youngsters will kick off. The 90-minute-long Designing Gaming for Children’s Well-Being workshop, hosted and facilitated by UNICEF, LEGO, and the Joan Ganz Cooney Center, will give designers a chance to learn how to apply the RITEC Design Toolbox, which aims to enhance children’s well-being through play. There are only 50 spaces available for this highly interactive workshop, so you'd better be in the room nice and early if you want to come along.

London’s community calling

Making Hay Day: After our morning break, we’ll head into three sessions discussing how you can build community impact within games themselves. The session will open with a talk from Maya Hofree, General Manager of Hay Day, and Deborah Mensah-Bonsu, Supercell’s Social Impact lead and Games for Change London advisory board member, about empowering Hay Day’s community to take meaningful social action. A great contribution from a relatively new part of the London games scene.

Oh my GOSH: Our attention will then turn to the fundraising success story of Great Ormond Street Hospital, one of the UK and London’s most beloved charitable causes. Benjamin Austwick and Sarah Bissell will talk through the ins and outs of a creator-powered campaign which raised nearly half a million pounds for the hospital by leaning into the power of play.

Powerhouse prosocial panel: We’ll then wrap up the morning with a panel all about how to build game communities with prosocial values in mind. Matt Vernon-Clinch from Preloaded will be speaking to a powerhouse panel featuring Roblox’s Senior Director of Community Safety & Civility, Laura Higgins, LEGO’s SVP of Consumer Engagement Anna Rafferty, Shuli Gilmutz, a Programme Specialist from UNICEF focusing on RITEC, and Ben Cowley, Associate Director of Social and Community at Runescape makers Jagex.

Multiple choice

Branching pathways: With lunch behind us, the conference schedule will open up to offer talks and roundtable discussions across our two rooms. Depending on what you’re interested in, of course.

Doing the Lord’s (construction) work: In the main room, our schedule will open with a panel discussion about using games to help communities around the world interact with and design real-world spaces that work for them. James Delaney from the Block by Block Foundation will host this session, where he’ll be joined by Lord Gascoigne, Amy Jenkins-Le Guerroué from Ubisoft, and planners and designers such as Nissa Shahid from ARUP and Tessa McCann of Publica.

Playful partnerships: There will then be a session dedicated to how playful communities from games and sports come together. Special Effect and Stevenage FC will be speaking about their charity partnership alongside the team’s shirt sponsor Xsolla. Alex Moyet, London Games Festival board member, will interview Liam Lawler from Special Effect, Berkeley Egenes from Xsolla, and Stu Dinsey of Curve Games (and Stevenage FC) about how the two communities have merged digital and physical communities for mutual gain.

Final talks: There will then be three final sessions to round off proceedings in the main conference room. Ximeng Fang from Oxford University will discuss research conducted with Sony Interactive Entertainment, which explored whether video games can meaningfully encourage people to make sustainable food choices. Jude Ower MBE, Chief Strategy Officer at PlanetPlay, and Mathias Gredal Nørvig, CEO of SYBO, will be chatting with Anjali Bhimani, Overwatch cast member and Critical Role contributor, about how video game stories can support diverse communities across the world for a live episode of the Good Game Club podcast. Maria Sayans, CEO of ustwo, will then round the day out with a panel about putting advocacy into action, talking to UK video games hall-of-famer Meghna Jayanth, Trailmix’s Tristan Clark, Sona Bona’s Rosa Carbó-Mascarell, and Olivier Mauco of the European Video Game Observatory.

Join the conversation: But if more interactive sessions are your speed, the second room will be hosting roundtable sessions while the main agenda is running. Between 2pm and 3pm, you’ll be able to join six fantastic conversations about reimagining public health through interactive storytelling (Sarah Ticho and Ross O’Brien from the XR Health Alliance), community-led game development (Tomas Rawlings), games and social mobility (Declan Cassidy of Into Games), creating civil spaces with the health of parents (Laura Higgins from Roblox and Dr Michele Veldsman of Playroom), strengthening learning through interactive entertainment (Justin Edwards of Minecraft fame), and creating IRL impact from digital communities (Tom Downie from Tiltify).

Rounding off the tables: And finally, there will be one last batch of roundtables between 3:30pm and 4:30pm for you to enjoy before everyone heads back for the final main talk of the day. Those will explore the dos and don’ts of social impact in games (Wayne Emanuel, CTRL+IMPACT), how to support neurodivergence in game communities (Cinzia Musio, Ukie), boosting games leadership (Mel Phillips from Games Leadership), how to harness player communities through green game content (Louie Keight from Playing for the Planet, plus reps from Supercell, TreesPlease and SYBO) crafting safer communities in partnership with players (Galen-Lamphere Englund alongside Dr Rachel Kowert), and the importance of game preservation to telling our industry’s story (John O’Shea, The National Video Game Museum).

Join us at the conference

Scholarships aplenty: Phew, what a lot of great speakers, eh? So, how can you attend the conference? Well, the good news is that dozens of our attendees have had their passes to Games for Change subsidised by our scholarship partners. The UK Game Angels, YRS TRULY, and Futurlab have helped fund attendees from community organisations like Limit Break, IGDA London, Out Making Games, Into Games, and the University of Manchester to open our doors to as wide a community as possible.

Plugging that ticket link: But if you’re looking to buy your pass (or want to check out the full timings for the event, which should be online now), you can do so on the Games for Change London microsite. We’re selling tickets for industry professionals and corporates for £99+VAT, while also offering a concession rate for students, indie developers, and not-for-profit attendees of just £69+VAT. Thwack the tactically placed button below (and scroll down the ticketing page a teensy bit) to buy now.

Buy Your G4C London Pass Now

News in brief

I don’t think any of us expected him to say that: Build A Rocket Boy’s CEO and CTO Mark Gerhard has told GamesBeat that it will be using a forthcoming mission in its game MindsEye to address alleged ‘corporate sabotage’ affecting the game. Gerhard claimed that the company had “very strong evidence” that the negative reception to the game’s launch was coordinated and that “the authorities” are considering what to do next. He also confirmed that a new mission called Blacklist will “share some of the evidence of the sabotage with the community.”

Aussie don’t-call-it-a-social-media-ban update: Australia’s eSafety Commissioner has published a Social Media Minimum Age: Compliance Update to tell the world how its social media ban for under 16s is coming along. It found that the number of parents reporting that their children had at least one social media account had dropped from 49.7% to 31.3%, and that 4.7 million accounts had been removed or restricted. It also found that a “substantial proportion of children under 16 retained accounts on age-restricted platforms” and that the happiness of some youngsters at having their accounts deactivated was balanced by those “celebrating” successfully circumventing age restrictions. Who’d have thunk it, eh?

DRAMatic price increase: Sony has announced it is significantly raising the price of its PlayStation console hardware due to the ongoing worldwide economic mayhem. The company has announced that a base-level PS5 will increase in cost from £480 to £570, with similarly eye-watering increases for the digital edition, the Pro, and the Portal. Rumours that the men in grey suits on VGIM’s board sanctioned the acquisition of a PS5 Pro before the price increases kicked in are almost entirely unfounded.

Nice cash if you can get it: Saudi-backed not-for-profit The Esports Foundation has announced that 40 esports organisations will receive a share of $20m as part of its 2026 Club Partner program. The funding, worth up to $1m for some teams, has been made available to clubs worldwide, alongside less tangible benefits such as “strategic support” and “international exposure opportunities.” Whether those exposure opportunities are “international” or “Riyadh-based” is unlikely to be much of a question (unless the Iranian conflict runs into the summer, that is…)

Mamma Mia: And finally, the Super Mario Bros Galaxy Movie has been tanked by the critics ahead of its release this week. Empire’s Helen O’Hara appears to be representative of the consensus about the movie’s overall quality, describing it as a “humourless, hysterical trudge” before saying that its plot amounts to nothing more than “a series of moments scavenged from multiple games that happen one after another.” Given that the first movie was not exactly beloved by the critics and still made money hand over fist, don’t expect this critical shoeing to slow its momentum too much.

Moving on

Alexander Rehm has a new position as Product Director, Epic Online Services, Web & Tools at Epic Games…Charlotte Willis has been promoted to Creator and Community Director at Diva Agency…Siân Harding has a new title at Mishcon de Reya as a Managing Associate… Mathew Jones has been promoted to Senior Social Producer at IGN Entertainment…And Sidharth Kedia has been appointed as Chief Strategy and Investments Officer at esports biz Nodwin Gaming…

Jobs ahoy

The LEGO Group is still searching for its Creative Play Lead…Get ready to fight every comms person going for the Associate Director of Communications, UK and Ireland post at Rockstar…Or if that doesn’t float your boat, why not become the Senior Associate Director - Gaming at WPP-owned Burson…Playdemic has opened a post for a Senior Development Director…And let us round off a comms-heavy jobs round with Supercell’s hunt for a Communications Strategist, Games Communications in New York…

Events and conferences

• London Games Festival, London - 13th-19th April

• Games for Change Summit, London - 15th April

• BAFTA Games Awards, London - 19th April

• gamescom Latam, São Paulo, 29th April - 3rd May

• Summer Games Fest, Los Angeles - 5th-8th June

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Games of the week

• Super Meat Boy 3D - Die over, and over, and over, and over again in this super hard platformer. This time in 3D!

• Darwin’s Paradox - If you prefer your platformers to be a bit more mascoty, why not give this relatively well-reviewed octopus-’em-up a go.

• GRIME II - Loved the first GRIME metroidvania? Then chances are you’ll probably like this one too (ok, it’s a thin week for releases, I’ll admit it…)

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Before you go…

Hey, everyone! Game Maker’s Toolkit is back! And Mark is giving us what we all desperately want: a deep dive into Zelda.

In his first video since becoming a Dad (congrats!), Mark asks what’s next for the adventure series now that Breath of the Wild and Twilight Princess have completely exploded its traditional formula.

Keep up with VGIM: | Linkedin | Bluesky | Email | Power Play |

• NVIDIA’s DLSS announcement annoys most of the video game industry

• Saudi Arabian subsidiary snaps up 5% of Capcom

• Preliminary dates and locations for the Power Play tour announced

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Hello VGIM Insiders,

I’ve got a few quick things before we get into this month’s Debrief.

The first VGIM Webinar takes place later today at 3pm UK time with the support of Catalyst from the Christchurch Call Foundation.

Join us for a free session about building healthier video game communities by signing up here.

Games for Change London is just two short weeks away. We’ll be announcing the full speaker line-up in Thursday’s VGIM. Get your ticket to the conference on the 15th on the London Games Fest website.

And finally, the Debrief is an exclusive email for VGIM Insiders.

If you want to get all the news from the past month in games, other subs-only newsletters like Playing Politics, early access to events, and a look at this month’s Insider Track (featuring some early book tour dates), sign up as a paid VGIM supporter using this link.

You can also read all of March’s free editions of Video Games Industry Memo below.

This month’s Free-GIM

• Panic consultations!!!, 05/03/2026

• From bug catching to billions: 30 years of Pokémon power, 12/03/2026 - George Young

• An ever Resident Evil, 19/03/2026 - Tom Regan

• The Not-so-Great British Games Biz?, 26/03/2026 - George Osborn

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Nvidia’s DLSS 5 announcement annoys games industry

Read more

• New TIGA report paints a miserable picture for UK games biz

• Epic Games lays off 1,000 staff as Fortnite falters

• Footy-themed deckbuilder NUTMEG! is our self-indulgent pick of the week

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Hello VGIM-ers,

It’s nice to be back in your inboxes. I’ve returned from Mexico considerably happier and much heavier than I was before. God bless tacos.

Before we dive into the big read, I wanted to remind you that we’re hosting the first-ever VGIM webinar on Tuesday 31st March in conjunction with Catalyst.

Now taking place at 3 pm UK time due to popular demand, we’ll be joined by Galen Lamphere-Englund, Dr Elizabeth Newbury, Dr Rachel Kowert, and Izzy Jagan to talk about building healthier video game communities.

After briefly introducing you to Catalyst and the work of the Christchurch Call, we’ll run through some new ‘digital bystander’ training for game professionals before rounding off with a chat about how to support the creation of positively playful communities. Lovely stuff, I’m sure you’ll agree.

The webinar is free to attend. Register for free here.

And finally, I wanted to let VGIM Insiders know that this month’s Debrief will be dropping at the top of next week instead of its usual final Friday slot.

Blame my sluggish, birria-blighted brain for the delay.

The big read - The Not-so-Great British Games Biz?

Uh-oh: The UK video games business is one of the longest-lived parts of the global games industry. It’s also in a wee bit of trouble.

Alanis Morrisette called: TIGA, one of the UK’s video games industry trade associations, has published a new report called Making Games in the UK. Somewhat ironically, it’s concluded that fewer people and fewer companies were making games in the UK in 2025 compared to 2024. Eep.

On the slide: According to its research, the sector’s workforce headcount fell by 4.5% from 28,516 to 27,347 between May 2024 and September 2025. The loss of 1,537 development jobs led to a further 2,810 roles lost across the wider supply chain, amounting to an estimated 4,347 job losses across the reporting period. For fact fans out there, that’s the first time that TIGA has recorded a decline in the UK games industry headcount over the past 14 years.

Bearing the brunt: The majority of job losses stem from what TIGA calls ‘larger studios’. Nearly 1,800 people working for studios with 15 or more staff were let go during the period, with nowhere near enough job creation elsewhere to make up for the fall. The association also reported that “almost every UK region lost development jobs”, with London (571), the South East (387), and Yorkshire (178) hardest hit.

Slowing start-ups

Trailing off: The decline in headcount across the UK games industry was matched by pretty supine business growth numbers. TIGA reported that the number of game development studios active in the UK has declined from a peak of 2,175 companies in 2023 to 2,110 businesses in 2025.

A little concerning: The downturn appears to be driven by two things. A total of 206 game companies closed down or left the games biz during the research period. By contrast, only 137 new video game start-ups were recorded over the same time. That’s considerably lower than the total of 281 start-ups recorded in the previous year and the worst figure recorded in 15 years.

A little optimistic: Admittedly, smaller game companies appeared to fare better than their larger counterparts. The smallest studios of between 1 and 4 employees nudged their headcount up by 3.2% over the period. Companies with 5-15 staff also saw their staffing count grow by 9.2% between May 2024 and September 2025. This supports the idea that nimbler game businesses have been better placed to weather an industry-wide realignment than their larger counterpart.

Lacking security: But despite the uptick amongst micro-businesses, job losses at bigger businesses still comfortably dragged the number of full-time employees across the UK games biz down. And while the number of freelancers serving the games biz in the UK climbed to 4,245 people, that figure itself paints a picture of the UK games business as less stable and less secure to work in than ever.

Policy problems

Strategic problems: Whether you’re based in Blighty or elsewhere in the world, you’ll agree that these are some yucky numbers. Unlike other parts of the world, the wavering fortunes of the UK’s games biz are a direct problem for the British Government. The sector was identified alongside the wider creative industries as a high-growth sector in June 2025’s industrial strategy. While it is undoubtedly true that public policy has a long tail and takes time to affect market conditions, these findings are bad news for a Government desperately pinning its hopes on economic growth to dig itself out of a financial hole.

Not exactly taxing: TIGA claims that the problem can be solved by pouring more money into the games industry. Alongside its trade association rival/frenemy Ukie, it argues that the baseline rate of Video Game Expenditure Credit - the country’s main form of tax relief - should be bumped to 39%. It also argues for a rate of 53% on projects valued below £23.5m. In both cases, it estimates that the measures would add in excess of 6,000 jobs and pay for themselves through increased tax receipts. While the first measure may be tougher to argue for in constrained financial circumstances, an enhanced credit for smaller game businesses would line up nicely with a similar credit for independent filmmakers. Equalising relief across the creative industries makes lots of sense.

A long list of problems: However, the suggestion that tax reliefs alone will arrest the slide in the UK games business doesn’t reflect the reality of a global realignment within the games industry. The sector’s traditional strength as a console games making market has turned into a weakness, with the previously affordable ‘razor and blades’ model withering considerably in the face of free-to-play mobile games and increasingly premium console costs. Western consumers have considerably less power to shape the future of the global games business, with China’s $50bn+ market dragging players, studios, and investment towards Asia. The consolidation of the video game publishing market into the hands of a few global supergiants has transformed many British businesses into supplicants, giving them little control over their destiny. Brexit made the UK considerably less attractive to international talent by significantly toughening up immigration rules, with the situation worsening every time a Nigel Farage-fearing Home Secretary opens their mouth. And the maturing of the games market in the West is leading to a structural change in the way the business works, leading to an environment where there is less space for larger companies with hefty full-time headcounts to support the sector.

Strategic storytelling

Traditional strengths: Therefore, the UK games industry needs more than just extra funding to climb out of the hole. It needs to reposition itself. The core strengths of the sector remain. There is an abundance of experienced game development talent in the country, as well as a rich seam of writers, performers, artists, and other creative professionals emerging from the rest of the country’s creative industries. It still has outstanding access to world-class professional services capable of setting up, securing funding for, and helping to grow games businesses. And even with the challenges of the self-imposed idiocy of Brexit, the UK’s literal geographic position as the English-language bridge to Europe (and the centre of global time) means we have natural trading advantages that national and global game businesses can benefit from.

Time for a game plan: But we will only hold onto this if industry and government pull together to create a coherent, realistic strategy for the sector to adjust to our new reality. Softening immigration policy, supporting scalability amongst games businesses to retain their independence for longer, empowering grassroots developers working on growing user-generated content platforms, providing targeted funding to the country’s local clusters, and folding the cultural power of the industry’s games into the UK’s wider soft-power strategy could provide a new story for the country’s games economy. In a year reportedly set to feature a new Bond game, the latest release in the Fable series, and a small title called Grand Theft Auto, it wouldn’t be a bad time to start telling one.

Pertinent question: But as with all established video game sectors around the world, the UK’s games industry must answer one question clearly: what does it want to be in a mature, increasingly specialised market whose centre of gravity is shifting away from its market? If it can’t provide a clear and realistic answer, there’s a risk that all the money in the world wouldn’t be able to stop the sector’s short-term slide from turning into a much bigger long-term problem.

News in brief

Epic losses: Speaking of job losses, Epic Games has announced it is laying off 1,000 staff. In a note to employees, Big Boss Tim Sweeney apologised for launching another round of layoffs, suggested that the main reason for the cuts was underperformance within Fortnite, and dismissed the notion that AI-related cost-savings were a factor. The company also quietly announced it was shuttering three Fortnite spin-off game modes: Ballistic, Rocket Racing, and Festival Battle Stage.

Sora point: OpenAI has said that it is shutting down its video-making app Sora. The BBC reports that the company claims that the move will allow it to focus on developing tools “that will help people solve real-world, physical tasks.” The decision has prompted Walt Disney to withdraw from a $1bn investment into the business. More pertinently for video game fans, Sora’s downfall has prompted a wave of gleeful Kingdom Hearts memes from people celebrating the service’s end.

Taking a ByteDance: Savvy Games has confirmed that it is set to buy ByteDance-owned games business Moonton for $6bn. The makers of Mobile Legends have been acquired by the Public Investment Fund-backed publisher, adding a Southeast Asia-focused mobile business to a portfolio which already includes Scopely and Niantic. Remind me what I was writing earlier about the centre of the global games business shifting towards Asia…

Robloxing brands in: Roblox is reportedly set to charge creators a fee for publishing brand integrations within its games, irrespective of whether a deal is signed independently. According to GamesBeat, Roblox’s brand team has tried to justify the move as part of its efforts to ensure that all experiences within the platform are transparent and age-appropriate. But with competition regulators across the world keen to test the openness of game stores and platforms, there’s a risk that the company may be about to walk itself into one of the first true competition tests of the user-generated content economy.

PEGI, He’s Keen: Finally, Bert Purchese at Eurogamer has written a lovely feature about Richard Wells, the voice of PEGI. He discusses Wells’ career, how he became the voice of PEGI, why the age rater bumped up his pay when the information world changed, and whether the line ‘PEGI 18’ is the most heard sentence in the world.

Moving on

Harry Smith has been appointed as an Associate at Reed Smith…Cathy Magnien-Ledesma is the Senior Director, Regional Marketing, Magic: The Gathering at Wizards of the Coast…Carmen Martino has been appointed People Operations Manager at PlayStack…Anny Gomes is the IP Strategy & Global Partnerships Lead at YoDo1 Games…And Jeff Simpkins has been hired as the National Team Manager for Great Britain’s Esports Nations Cup team…

Jobs ahoy

Apple is hiring a Business Manager Games, App Store, Central Europe, based out of Berlin…Unity is on the lookout for a Senior Video Content Developer…Netflix needs a Senior Manager, Games Licensing Operations…Roblox is recruiting a Senior Producer in San Mateo…And MrBeast apparently wants to recruit a Writer - Gaming…

Events and conferences

• PAX East, Boston - 26th-29th March

• London Games Festival, London - 13th-19th April

• Games for Change Summit, London -15th April

• gamescom Latam, São Paulo - 29th April - 3rd May

• Summer Games Fest, Los Angeles - 5th-8th June

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Games of the week

• NUTMEG! - A 1980s/1990s football-themed deck builder? A trailer narrated by Jim Rosenthal? And it’s out on a Thursday in time for VGIM? Be still, my beating heart.

• Super Mario Bros Wonder - Switch 2 edition of the game adds some perfectly passable DLC to a great game with only a handful of infuriatingly hard levels.

• Life is Strange: Reunion - Latest entry in Square Enix’s long-running slice-of-life narrative adventure series arrives today.

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Before you go…

The first tour date for the Power Play promotional tour has been announced. And it just happens to be at one of the biggest literary festivals in the world.

I’ll be speaking at the Hay Festival on Wednesday 27th May at 7pm to former foreign correspondent Robert Nisbet about the book and how video games are shaping geopolitics in surprising ways.

And if you do come along, you’ll have a chance to buy a copy of the hardback a full three weeks before launch. Lovely stuff, eh?

Tickets are available for £16 here, if you fancy coming along.

Keep up with VGIM: | Linkedin | Bluesky | Email | Power Play |

This week’s Video Games Industry Memo is supported by Catalyst

A large-scale consortium project led by the Christchurch Call Foundation addressing misogynistic pathways to violent extremism

• We explain how Resident Evil has stayed at the top of the horror game for three decades

• Baseball, sand and Norman Reedus lead the games of the week

• And we ponder the implications of a vat of human brain cells playing Doom

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Hello VGIM-ers,

Tom here, back once again in the VGIM Pilot seat, manically pressing all the buttons in a bid to steer us through another week.

As I pen today’s edition in a rainy south London, it somewhat pains me to know that Big George™ is lounging around in Mexico, presumably sipping margaritas and eating his body weight in tacos.

It seems unfair, however, to let George have all the fun. So, as well as celebrating my 35th birthday today (in what some are declaring ‘Regan Day’), I thought I’d gracefully let another ‘R’ take centre stage this week - the daddy of video game horror, Resident Evil.

This year, Capcom’s creepy classic turns 30. While many franchises born in the ‘90s have vanished without a trace, much like the shuffling undead, Resident Evil remains a phenomenon that simply refuses to die. Age 30 is usually when we all start making worrying groans of our own, yet as Resident Evil hits over 183 million sales, Capcom’s zombie-led horror still appears to be in rude health - peeling flesh and mutating cranium aside.

So, for this week’s big read, dim the lights, grab a potted herb and join me and some spin-kick-happy guests as we delve into what makes Capcom’s seminal survival horror so unkillable…

The big read - Resident Evil at 30 - Why decades later, Capcom’s seminal survival horror series refuses to die

And a happy birthday to you too, Tom: It’s long been theorised that during times of global upheaval, people turn to fictional horror in a bid to find cathartic comfort. In 2026, as Gaza lies in ruins, Ukraine toughs out its fourth year of Russia’s invasion, and a US-Israel coalition drops countless bombs on the Middle East, by that logic, there couldn’t be a better moment to release Resident Evil: Requiem.

Dawn of the Digital Dead: While Silent Hill is the hipster virtual horror favourite, when it comes to blockbuster scares in video games, Resident Evil is really the only franchise that matters. Starting life on the PlayStation in 1996, Capcom’s John Romero-inspired opus combined action, zombies, puzzle-solving and unparalleled tension - with a distinctly B-movie twist. While video games had attempted to scare players silly throughout their nascent steps into existence, adventure games’ crude visuals and languid pace meant that they rarely translated into anything truly harrowing. It wasn’t until 1989, with Japanese RPG Sweet Home and 1992’s Alone In The Dark, that the medium successfully managed to unsettle players. Both games were huge inspirations for a young game developer named Shinji Mikami, whose aim was to harness PlayStation’s 32-bit tech to deliver truly visceral virtual scares.

Uncanny horror valley: “Back in the early days, when I was making the first Resident Evil, I spent three months studying the psychology of horror,” Mikami told The Guardian in 2014. “With Resident Evil, we went with human and human-shaped enemies because people are generally more scared by other people, rather than some obscure creature that we don’t recognise.”

Direct to the point: It’s a theory that undoubtedly paid off. When Resident Evil hit shelves, it proved that video games could scare audiences as much - if not more - than their Hollywood horror counterparts, forcing players to willingly put themselves in danger.“I loved the look of the game: the camera angles, the characters, the zombies, says Special Gun Productions and ex-Video Gamer Editor, Steve Burns. “Back then, people were banging on about games being ‘like movies’, but Resident Evil’s camera angle choices - the sense of it being properly ‘directed’ - made it closer to an interactive movie than any of that FMV tat of the time. In the mid-1990s, that was a big deal to a film dork like myself.”

Clench for success: While games weren’t short of guns and monsters before 1996, Capcom tied them together with a secret ingredient - tension. With limited bullets, scant healing items and infamously fiddly tank controls, navigating every new corridor and opening each new doorway became an exercise in sphincter-clenching terror. It’s why even 30 years on, the original Resident Evil remains a masterpiece, still oozing atmosphere in a way that many ‘90s games simply can’t emulate. It was also a runaway hit, shifting four million copies in its first year and spawning two PS1 sequels - single-handedly transforming the horror video game from a niche prospect into a highly bankable blockbuster.

Life long fear: “I don’t think it can be stated enough how smart Capcom has been about the series. “ reflects RPGSite owner and veteran games journalist, Alex Donaldson, “If you look at Resident Evil’s peers, those games that either debuted or exploded in popularity on the PS1 both inside and outside the horror genre, it has endured uniquely well.”

Over-the-shoulder of giants: While Mikami and his team laid the foundations for the survival horror genre that later Capcom titles Dino Crisis and Onimusha and rival franchise Silent Hill would emulate, in 2005, Capcom shocked the industry by redefining action games, dropping tank controls in favour of tight, over-the-shoulder gunplay in Resident Evil 4. It’s a game that not only changed the series forever but also set a lofty new standard for the entire action genre, inspiring countless imitators. “Resident Evil 4 essentially codified what we expect from third-person shooters,” says Burns, “A game so good you can do anything to it: remake it, put it in VR, etc, and it’s still the best thing you’ve ever played.”

Why Resi doesn’t stay dead for long

Fighting to keep up: Following Resident Evil 4’s success in the 2010s, it seemed as though Capcom had abandoned horror entirely. After Japanese developers led the way creatively during the early noughties, the dawn of the HD gaming era saw studios in the land of the rising sun struggling to adapt to the increased artistic and technical demands of creating HD-quality games. As Gears of War spawned a wave of third-person shooter imitators, Capcom followed suit, toning down the series’ horror elements to raise the action bar higher than they did with Resident Evil 4.

A change of perspective: Much like the tentacle monstrosities that explode out of its zombies’ heads, a large reason for Resident Evil’s continued success is that it’s a series that constantly evolves, adapting itself to the modern gaming landscape in order to survive. After 2012’s bombastic Resident Evil 6 failed to land with critics or consumers, Capcom turned its eye to the indie horror scene for inspiration. Taking their cues from Hideo Kojima’s P.T and 2013’s Outlast, 2017’s Resident Evil 7 shifted survival horror into first person, combining classic Resi gameplay staples with a newly cinematic sense of dread - winning back fans in the process.

Perfectly on trend: “A big problem we see time and time again now is games taking so long to build that by the time they release, the trends they chased are outdated,” reflects Donaldson, “RE7 is the perfect example of a developer and publisher reading the room, making adjustments, and catching the new trend at perfectly the right time - and it speaks to the overall approach that has made this series so successful in general.”

Emerging from the ditch: “After Shinji Mikami and his team boldly reinvented the series with Resi 4, it slid into a bit of a ditch quality-wise,” agrees Andy Kelly, PR Manager at Devolver and author of Alien Isolation book, The Perfect Organism, “ But with RE7 and almost everything that’s come since, Capcom have revitalised the series again and I’m as excited by it as I ever have been. I especially like how the series has become an almost anthology-like vessel for experiments in horror gameplay, environment design, and storytelling.”

Dream for a Requiem: The ninth mainline entry in the series - and 30th overall release - Requiem, continues this anthology-esque approach, seeing the franchise fuse its newer, first-person horror iteration - continued in 2021’s Village - and the bombastic action it popularised with Resident Evil 4. While not as critically acclaimed as Capcom’s lavish 2024 Resident Evil 4 Remake, Requiem is already a bigger hit, shifting 5 million units in less than a week.

The (survival) horrors persist

Zombie horde-ing your attention: Thanks to Resident Evil, zombies are now utterly unescapable in video games, paving the way for House Of The Dead, Dying Light, Left 4 Dead, Call Of Duty’s zombie mode, and a little franchise called The Last Of Us - stop me if you’ve heard of it.

The sound of fear: While Resident Evil’s mainline films, straight-to-streaming releases and cringe-inducing Netflix shows are largely memorable for all the wrong reasons, Resident Evil’s soundtrack continues to captivate, taking over London’s Hammersmith Apollo in December as part of a 30th anniversary concert tour. “Music might not be the first thing that comes to mind when most people think of Resident Evil (shout out to the Japan exclusive musical theatre production, Musical Biohazard: Voice of Gaia) but audio (or the lack of) is an incredibly important part of the franchise, given its survival horror setting,” says Mat Ombler, head of Music and Gaming partnerships at Laced Records and author of the MusicEXP newsletter. “The save room themes throughout the series are some of my favourite pieces of video game music; the literal sounds of safety and respite.”

A big tent: Thanks to its hugely varied strands of series DNA, post 2017, Capcom has wisely ensured that there’s always something for its varied fans to love. “By having different strands and styles of Resident Evil, Capcom both creates an incredible strength and a challenging weakness - there are a lot of fans of a lot of different styles of games, all of whom need to be addressed.,” reflects Donaldson, “But all of those people are engaged, and if you don’t like one you know the next isn’t far away, thanks to the nippy development cadence - which is a great position to be in.”

Ever-creative: Locked into a clever cadence of alternating between releasing lavish remakes and genre-blending new entries, it seems as though Capcom isn’t close to running out of ideas for the seminal survival horror series just yet. “As someone who has worked with Capcom and has seen how it creates its games behind the scenes, I’m confident that it will keep making great titles”, says Burns. “Like other long-running franchises that keep reinventing themselves, Resi has the knack for crafting noteworthy characters, particularly villains,” Burns continues. “Nemesis, Wesker, that tall lady with the hat: like the baddies in the best Bond movies, the games have compelling antagonists that stick in the memory, and that’s before you even get to the heroes and their (suplex-driven) evolutions between games.”

An ongoing inspiration: As studios shutter each week and once seemingly untouchable AAA juggernauts like Ubisoft repeatedly fail to recoup investments, Resident Evil serves as the rarest proposition in 2026 - a consistently bankable AAA blockbuster. “In this world of live service games that live forever, we need more examples of great-quality, critically-acclaimed, and wildly-successful single-player games.” Donaldson reflects, “Resident Evil has become the sort of thing that could become a north star: reasonable scope, smart budgets, a good release cadence, and a strong sense of variety within those releases. Resident Evil provides a strong example of what can work in the space - and if that example went away, the industry would be poorer for it.”

Events and conferences

• PAX East, Boston - 26th-29th March

• London Games Festival, London - 13th-19th April

• Games for Change Summit, London - 15th April

• gamescom Latam, São Paulo - 29th April - 3rd May

• Summer Games Fest - Los Angeles - 5th-8th June

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Games of the week

• Crimson Desert - Not to be confused with Crimson Dessert, the Red Velvet baking sim, Pearl Abyss’ latest open-world RPG is a prequel to the hugely popular MMO Black Desert Online. Expect dynamic combat, arcane foes, and presumably, a lot of sand.

• MLB The Show 26 - Long-running baseball game MLB The Show is back, bringing virtual baseball to the masses. Will it be a home run? Or just one of the bad things that happens in baseball? Either way, I’m very much out of my depth.

• Death Stranding 2 - Nine months after its initial PS5 release, Hideo Kojima brings his surrealist Norman-Reedus-starring delivery sim to PC, taking the goo-battling babysitting to giddying new heights. Lord knows how modders will attempt to make this game any weirder, but I look forward to seeing them try.

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Before you go…

Australian startup Cortical Labs is doing its bit to grow the global video game audience by, checks notes, getting petri dishes full of human brain cells to play Doom.

The Guardian has taken a closer look at the company’s work, pondering whether this blob of human matter is displaying true sentience.

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