• 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.

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

• Loot boxes rated as 16 following PEGI age rating changes

• House of Lords social media ban amendment shot down in the Commons

• VGIM Insiders get early access to an event taking place later this month

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Hello VGIM Insiders,

Welcome to the latest edition of Playing Politics.

As many of you know, I’m on holiday in Mexico with the ambitious mission of consuming my body weight in tacos. But that isn’t stopping me from serving up VGIM’s usual slice of monthly political insight.

In this month’s edition of PP, we’ll run the rule over two political stories shaping the games business. We’ll also give Insiders early access to an event taking place later this month, which aims to foster healthier video game communities that are able to face some of the biggest challenges we face online.

If you’d like to read the newsletter, get early access to said event, and secure a load of other perks, then you'd better become a VGIM Insider for £6 per month or £50 per year here.

Let’s get on with the newsletter, shall we?

Read more

• VGIM kicks off an anniversary two-parter with a deep dive on all things Pocket Monsters

• Fatal Frame II tops our games of the week, as publishers’ penchant for remaking horror classics continues

• And we round things off with a whimsical font becoming the butt of the joke

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Hello VGIM-lings

True VGIM heads will know from that customary introduction that it is I, the other George, back this week for your video gaming industry pleasure.

Over the next two weeks, Tom Regan and I will be blessing your inboxes with a double-whammy of big boy 30th anniversary breakdowns that prove the oldies are very much still the goldies.

First up, as the title suggests, I will be exploring how Satoshi Tajiri’s ball-bound bugs evolved from a rural pastime into arguably the biggest entertainment franchise in the world. The series is so ubiquitous that a whopping 76% of Britons can recognise Pikachu, the electrified yellow rat, as a Pokémon, according to YouGov.

But how did The Pokémon Company make its Pika Pals into the highest-grossing media franchise of all time, clocking in $115bn compared to Mickey Mouse’s paltry $61.2 billion (at least according to the partially reliable Wikipedia)? Well, you’ll have to read on.

The big read - From bug catching to billions: 30 years of Pokémon power

Humble beginnings: The story of how the bug-bonkers Tajiri came up with the monster-battling franchise is so well documented that I won’t repeat it here. But it is safe to say that his unique idea for a JRPG where beasts battle on behalf of poorly-parented school-age children quickly captured people’s imagination - turning the series into a franchise with its own anime, manga, and a plethora of merchandise for players to tuck into.

Passion for catchin’: At the heart of the game’s success is one simple, but important, thing. There are few fanbases as fanatical as Pokémon’s. I was invited to an event in London to celebrate Pokémon’s 30th anniversary with many other beastly fans. The screams of delight from the crowd when someone won a plush from the claw machine or pulled a rare card from a TCG pack were unmatched and intoxicating.

Pikachu everywhere: Yet Pokémania has rarely been confined to official events alone. Since the series broke out in 1996, fans have found myriad ways to celebrate a series that has had an unusual hold on its fanbase. There are Pokémon-themed holidays, Pokémon-themed weddings, and even Pokémon-tinted breakups. Joe Merrick, founder of Serebii, told Polygon that he dipped out of his own stag do to write up the latest Pokémon Go news. Fans have a level of commitment to the franchise that other entertainment empires can only dream of.

Time and money: The secret to its success is how much has been invested in the series. Not just the financial investment from The Pokémon Company into its franchise, of course (although that certainly doesn’t hurt). Instead, Pokémon encourages and rewards the multiple ways that players have invested their time, passion, and - yes - their cash into the series. The tribalism that people feel towards their favourite Pokémon links all the way back to their first choice — which of the two editions of each game that a fan starts with (Editor’s Note: the correct answer is Pokémon Red, fight me readers).

Double money: Cynics point to Pokémon’s choice to sell two flavours of each game with some jealousy, seeing it as a ruthless cash grab. They position The Pokémon Company as money-grabbing; knowing the fans are so devoted to the franchise, they will buy two games and two consoles to go with it. There are some players who certainly do this, but it’s not the majority. The version differences serve another purpose. Firstly, it bonds the player to their choice, and secondly, and most importantly, it forces social interaction by encouraging players to trade with people who own the other version of the game. This creates a rich social community, something Keza MacDonald argues beautifully in favour of in her recent book Super Nintendo.

Buy then justify: It’s not just about justifying your financial choice. The growth of The Pokémon Company’s empire is intrinsically linked to video games’ interactive medium. Ask the Pocket Monster-loving Millennial or Zoomer in your life, and they’ll tell you they established a historic bond with each beast as they win, lose and adventure together. Pokémon fans have invested emotions, time, and ultimately, lots and lots of money into the franchise. It becomes so wrapped up with your history, we’re all in too deep to let go.

Pokémon friendships are magic

Forever friends: The depth of these relationships is a by-product of the series's longevity. The majority of Pokémon fans are in their twenties and thirties, with each new generation of games introducing a new generation of humans to the franchise. I asked multiple people from all areas of the fanbase what Pokémon means to them, and the same answer kept coming back to me: community and friendship.

Time together: “I grew up in a very religious household where Pokémon wasn’t a thing,” Jupiter Hadley, author of The Best Life Adventure Games, tells me. “When I was travelling and learning more about games, Pokémon Go came out… I downloaded it ahead of everyone and [they] thought I was wicked cool. Since then, I started joining communities in Pokémon Go, and I’m currently a community ambassador… I’ve had a lot of fun just making friends and being together and enjoying that community aspect that isn’t prevalent in a lot of games.”

Social psychology: Pokémon Go is very explicit in its community messaging, forcing people to go outside and team up to take down powerful raid bosses. However, there are communities based around every aspect of Pokémon, whether you’re into catching ‘em all, difficult challenge runs, battling, or trading cards; you need to work with others if you want to find success. This social aspect feeds back into the choice of games.

Shared interests: The Pokémon games, including the many, many spin-offs, are social at their core, and often in different ways. “[Pokémon is] a massive part of my life and I’ve had a lot of lifelong friends through the game,” says Hadley. As someone who met their partner when they were looking for someone to play Pokémon with, I would have to agree.

Perfect match: Gaming is perceived as an isolating hobby, but Pokémon’s strength lies in its complete opposition to this stereotype. It offers people a shared passion to connect over and opportunities, both online and in-person, to meet similarly minded potential playmates. It’s something that goes beyond your average game. It’s something that will always keep people coming back for more.

Entering the real world

Game to merch pipeline: Like any savvy billionaire, Pikachu diversifies his investments. Video game revenue is just a tiny slice of the Poképie, though I’m sure this portion has increased significantly since Pokémon broke into the mobile market, particularly its two heavy hitters: Pokémon Go and TCG Pocket. For Pokémon, the money has, and very likely always will be, in the merchandise. And considering some bits of merch are now selling for $16.5m a pop, that commitment to churning out stuff you’ve got to buy will run on and on.

Savvy or cynical: However, Pokémon’s money-making-merch-machine isn’t entirely cynical. For many people, they grew up playing Pokémon as a form of escapism, wishing desperately that its world were real. The merchandise offers another path towards making this dream come true.

Real adventure: Nathan Ellingsworth, the man behind WhatCulture’s Pokémon channel CultureDex, explains how Pokémon feels real through play. “To me, [Pokémon offers] this sense of adventure. It’s this sense of a multitude of choices and a scale that I just hadn’t really been captured [before],” he says. “I still feel that sense of adventure that I had as a kid.”

They live on: The curious thing about Pokémon is that they are real. Tech bros tried to create the concept of trading image data with unique characteristics, but Pokémon had beaten them to it thirty years earlier. The crypto industry wasn’t just late to the party when they tried to cash in on collectibility through NFTs; it entirely missed the reason why pixellated Pokémon feel so valuable to those who play. The value is derived from player interaction. You can trade the exact Pokémon you finished your first game with all the way to your current one. This emotional bond isn’t something people feel for their Bored Apes.

Making the invisible, visible: Pokémon Go most easily shows how the digital version of a Pokémon is real to players. They roam the real world, even if you can only see them through your phone. And if playing with your Pokémon in the virtual world isn’t enough, then you can also buy the life-size version of your pocket pal, which brings us back to the merchandise.

Pokémon now: Not only do Pokémon feel real in-game (and look it when sat on your shelf), but it’s part of both our wider cultural conversation. It’s the word of mouth that makes Pokémon a tangible part of our world. YouTuber Tahk0 describes the phenomenon in an interview with Eurogamer. “Pokémania is like, the closest thing to a fictional thing being real… where everybody everywhere is enjoying this thing together, at the same time, for a long time,” he says. “That feeling is probably the thing I’ve been chasing forever.”

Living a Pokémon life

Serious business: More than anything, Pokémon is a medium through which people tell stories. Almost 5 million people have watched the three-hour movie of how pChal defeated one of the hardest Pokémon games, elating in his wins, and feeling the losses acutely. PChal invokes literary greats between chapters of the story, even quoting Goethe in his native German. It’s not cynical. It works.

Win with your favourites: And just like how the stories from the game bleed out into the real world, there are legendary stories of real-life Pokémon fame. People are still talking about how Pachirisu and its trainer, Sejun Park, slayed dragons to win the 2014 Pokémon World Championships. The Pokémon Company continues to memorialise Park’s mighty squirrel, and you can buy bundles based on his winning team 12 years on.

It’s in the game: Pokémon’s esports scene is becoming increasingly popular, and each major event has larger attendance numbers than the last. The games are blending with real life as fans that aren’t invested in the competitive scene come to watch, just like how crowds of NPCs gather around your character for the games’ toughest challenges.

Ash’s Pikachu, Wolfe’s beast: Blurring lines further still, when a player wins a big tournament, The Pokémon Company distributes a ‘mon from the winning team carrying the player’s name. Famously, when the most popular and arguably best Pokémon trainer of all time, Wolfe Glick, narrowly won the European International Championships with his most hated Pokémon, Incineroar, everyone earned the opportunity to taunt him with it by sending out Wolfe’s beast into battle.

Tough competition: This leads to the final reason for the series’ endurance: the way its popularity has allowed its biggest fans to earn their living serving a community authentically. For example, Pokémon video game tournament commentator and caster Charlie Merriman, who describes the competitive battles as “chess meets poker”, has turned his passion for the series into his day job.

The reality: “When I finished my A Levels, my treat to myself was a Pokémon game, when I got into drama school after university, my treat to myself was a Pokémon game,” he said. “When lockdown was announced, and I had to start shielding due to my cystic fibrosis, my treat to myself was a Pokémon game - and that last treat developed into making a career partly out of Pokémon, commentating and presenting on competitive video game tournaments.”

Hobby to job: Looking at the plethora of people that have turned Pokémon into their jobs, whether that’s content creators like pChal, casters like Merriman, or champions like Glick, it’s hard to dismiss Pokémon as mere fantasy. The franchise is so big that it has created its own economy, with the many creatives of the Pokémon fandom making a living from developing their art.

A dream no more: Full-time YouTuber and streamer 360Chrism also explicitly thanks Big Pikachu for his career. “Pokémon, in a way, changed my life… [It has] given me the ability to turn my hobby into my job.” Stories like these give the average fan the feeling that Pokémon could be something bigger for them, too. Personally, I have earned plenty of work by dint of my extensive knowledge of Pokémon, and I am just one of a huge number of people who can say the same.

Every facet: Pokémon is not just a video game; it’s a large part of many people’s daily lives, whether that’s through their childhood nostalgia, their relationships with others, their creative output, or even work. Pokémon digs its claws into many parts of its fans’ lives.

The story begins: Merriman explains it best, when he says, “What comes up time and time again is growing up and going through the ‘too cool for Pokémon’ phase before realising that embracing it is the quickest path to happiness. If you let it, Pokémon can change your life.” Three decades on from its release, that feels more true than ever.

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

• Fatal Frame II: Crimson Butterfly - Hoping to take advantage of the most popular games in their libraries, Crimson Butterfly joins the ever-growing line-up of horror classics receiving the remake treatment.

• Collector’s Cove - For those who need to calm down from all of the ghost snapping action, Collector’s Cove is a cosy farming sim that takes place on the back of Nessie.

• Monster Hunter Stories 3: Twisted Reflection - In another game about bonding with huge beasts, the third entry in the Stories sub-series gives the world of Monster Hunter a more traditional JRPG twist.

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Before you go…

With the recent release of Pokémon’s latest spin-off Pokopia proving to be a rip-roaring success, it was inevitable that the game would spawn memes.

What wasn’t inevitable is that someone would create a Pokopia font generator, promptly leading to people creating horrifying messages to juxtapose the cheery text design.

Check out the responses to the font’s release on social media at your own risk.

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

• UK consultation on banning social media for under-16s puts video games in the crosshairs

• White House mulls forced Tencent divestments on national security grounds

• Pokémon Pokopia channels pocket monster Animal Crossing vibes to top this week’s releases

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Hello VGIM-ers,

Drum roll, please. I’m chuffed to announce the first three sessions taking place at this year’s Games for Change Summit in London on Wednesday 15th April.

The conference, which boasts the theme Community Channelled, is all about using the power of games and our communities to do good stuff in our digital and physical worlds.

To get the ball rolling ahead of the full schedule this month, I’m allowed to talk to you about three sessions that we’ve put together already.

First up, we’ve got documentary filmmaker Alysia Judge interviewing Robert Steen about the documentary The Remarkable Life of Ibelin. Alysia will be asking Robert how the death of his son, following a degenerative disease, revealed the depth of connection within digital communities. They’ll then go on to discuss how it inspired the creation of a ‘Nobel Prize for video game communities’ backed by Norway’s Prime Minister and a forthcoming film adaptation that’ll see Stephen Graham of Adolescence-fame play Robert.

Next, we’ve got Jude Ower MBE and Matthias Gredal Norvig of Sybo interviewing Anjali Bhimani, the voice behind Symmetra in Overwatch and a Critical Role regular, about the importance of inclusive storytelling in creating properly powerful game communities for a live episode of The Good Game Club podcast.

And finally (at least for now), Ximeng Fang, a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Oxford University’s Saïd Business School, will be revealing the results of longitudinal research conducted with Sony Interactive Entertainment to discover whether players can be inspired to make sustainable food choices in their communities simply through playing games.

We’ll be revealing the full slate of talks, panels, roundtables, and fireside chats in a few weeks. But if you want to come along, make sure you grab a ticket while you’ve got a chance.

Oh, and one last thing before we go into the newsletter. I’m on holiday for the next two weeks because it’s my birthday tomorrow.

So, Tom Regan and George Young will be filling in with a couple of newsletters celebrating some prominent video game anniversaries taking place this year.

The big read - Panic consultations?

Jumping on the ban-wagon: The UK Government has launched a consultation to explore whether it could ban social media for under-16s. And unfortunately for the games industry, parts of it are very much in the crosshairs.

Consulting the masses: The Department of Science, Innovation, and Technology’s (DSIT) Growing up in the online world survey will consider how children use digital technology with the intention of expanding upon the provisions of the already hefty Online Safety Act. The consultation aims to explore areas such as whether there should be a minimum age for social media use, if the digital age of consent should increase to 16, the impact of certain mechanics on how young people use social media, and how technologies like age verification or assurance could support a ban.

In the game: The consultation undoubtedly has social media platforms at the heart of its remit. But it also raises the prospect of age restrictions on access to ‘gaming sites’ and games where users can create their own content: potentially dragging big chunks of the industry into a much tighter regulatory environment in the process.

Relatively measured

Pretty good: On the face of it, DSIT’s consultation is pretty reasonable. In comparison to the EU’s kangaroo court Digital Fairness Act consultation, the bulk of the industry-focused part of Growing up in the online world is fair. The paper accompanying the consultation consistently identifies positives about social media interactions, while using neatly precise language to explain specific areas of concern. The 62 questions posed to industry and civil society are tightly focused on the consultation’s brief, but offer plenty of room for discursive or dissenting opinions beyond ‘ban this sick filth.’ VGIM-approved policy wonks like Dr Celia Pontin have also noted that DSIT’s briefing document highlights obvious positives of young people accessing online games, such as the educational value of games like Minecraft and their wider value as a social space.

Targeted action?: That said, the consultation document makes it clear that its evidence gathering on social media very much has games in mind. As part of its aim to “ensure children are protected on the services with the features and functions that are most likely to increase their risk of exposure to harmful content”, DSIT says that sites and apps where children can “play, create, or share games” are up for assessment. It doesn’t explicitly say “we might want to regulate Roblox.” It just happens to perfectly describe a platform that could be in scope and was initially omitted from Australia’s landmark social media ban that kicked this conversation off. Hmm.

On the mind: Aside from giving Roblox and Epic’s public policy teams the wobbles, DSIT’s questions about whether certain design features should be restricted for young people capture practices seen across the wider games industry. The most obvious risk here is potential concerns over age-restricting ‘stranger-pairing’, which, in the absolute worst-case scenario, risks making pretty much any form of online multiplayer problematic for younger players. But the consultation’s decision to raise questions about the appropriateness of in-service purchasing for under 16s (especially loot boxes), the impact of ‘affirmation’ mechanics that could include in-game achievements, and whether there’s appetite for a China-style curfew on online access. The subtext is simple: games might not be the focus here, but they’re definitely in scope. That means the results of the consultation and the regulatory reaction on the other side will definitely land on our doorsteps.

Surveying troubles

Policy-based evidence making: And in bad news for the games industry and social media more generally, the industry-focused consultation only partially reveals DSIT’s intent. The department’s decision to launch separate surveys for parents and carers concerned about social media and for young people aged 10-21 makes perfect sense from an evidence-gathering perspective. Unfortunately, both surveys are designed in ways to generate figures that will almost certainly support deeper regulatory action - rather than offer up a meaningful evidence base to build policy on.

Consistency is key: As with the main consultation, the player and parent surveys cover the same areas addressed in the industry-oriented document. There are questions about social media platforms in general. There are posers about the impact of certain design features on users. It asks about targeted subject areas like AI chatbots, usage of Virtual Private Networks, and support for mobile phone bans in school. It also directly asks about 16 as the age for digital consent and comfort, or otherwise, about the use of age assurance or age verification technology to govern the limit. Both surveys also ask demographic questions to understand who is responding to the questions.

Ironic age verification mishap alert: But in its efforts to be accessible, the surveys make some glaring methodological errors. Outside of asking a few questions that are designed to prove you’re not a bot, neither survey has any meaningful way to identify who is actually responding to the consultation. This is particularly the case with the young people survey, which somewhat ironically uses a slider to declare age (rather than, say, using an age estimation tool). It raises the realistic prospect that the dataset will contain respondents who aren’t who they say they are, gently polluting the sample size.

Useless data?: More problematically, many of the survey questions are written in a way that’ll produce handy headline numbers rather than meaningful data. For example, one of the questions in the young people’s survey asks people “how much time do you think you spend on social media”, defining it as all of “browsing the internet, using social media, streaming videos, playing online games” (before excluding doing homework or studying). That breadth, which is mirrored in a similar question on the parent survey about screen time, is raising fears that the figures that’ll come back from the survey response will generate headlines but won’t support nuanced evidence-based decision-making. “These questions are useless,” said a source, who is an academic familiar with surveying methodology. “You’ll get numbers, you’ll get responses. But you can’t know from that question whether you’re getting accurate data.”

Black and white thinking: And while the wider consultation allows for discussion, the two surveys are designed in ways that steer respondents towards answers that strengthen the case for the ban. Both forms ask what they think young people would do without social media, presenting wholesome or healthy answers like “reading for pleasure”, “helping out at home”, or “sleeping”. One of the questions on the parents’ survey about what’s the best way to protect young people offers ‘blanket social media ban’, ‘minimum age for the most risky functions’, and ‘restrictions to time spent on screens like curfews’. And while parents are given some welcome granularity to answer whether they think the digital age of consent should range between 13 and 16 years old, young people are pressed on whether they think 16 is the right age to be accessing social media. The public polling element of the consultation appears to be worryingly narrow, running the risk of making the Government’s mind up for it.

Get involved

On rails outcome?: So, what should game companies make of it all? Ultimately, the direction of travel feels pretty set. Social media bans are popping up all across the world. The Government is under pressure to act, both from the House of Lords and through wider public concern. There will be few tears shed if limits are imposed on social media companies after more than a decade of rogue state behaviour. And even though online games themselves are likely to have ways to mitigate or limit harm, game-friendly social platforms like Discord and Twitch will almost certainly be affected. This pretty much guarantees that any regulation to emerge from the consultation will hit the industry, even if it does so indirectly through the infrastructure wrapped around it.

Wriggle room available: However, that doesn’t mean the situation is hopeless. There are enough clues within the consultation to suggest DSIT is open to avoiding a blanket ban. The parent and young people surveys may feel like they’re trying to generate headline stats to batter social media with, but they still allow respondents to express positive sentiment about social media (e.g. young people being able to express possible downsides to a cut-off at 16). There are questions about the value of safety features like parental controls or teen accounts, suggesting the Government is open to mitigation or exemption from the worst of the rules for companies that do seek to protect users. And while the Government is under political pressure to act, influential online safety advocacy groups like the NSPCC and the Molly Rose Foundation have expressed caution or directly opposed blanket bans on social media use for teens. This gives it flexibility to divert course from totally banning young people from online environments, something that could play favourably for game companies (whose usually limited and policed in-game communication channels compare favourably to wider social media).

Submit (or else): So do make time to respond to the consultation before it closes on 26th May. Whether your game has in-scope features or you’re simply worried about your community being cut off from Discord, it is worthwhile submitting your thoughts as an individual, as a company, or to a relevant trade association before the deadline. It’s certainly true that games aren’t the main focus of the move to ban social media access for under-16s. But given that the medium relies upon thriving online communities to succeed, and that policymakers across the world will be watching what happens in the UK, making sure your voice is heard will increase the likelihood that the industry will get a fair crack of the whip when the evidence is sifted through later this year.

News in brief

Tencent trouble: The White House is considering forcing Tencent to sell its stakes in several popular video game businesses. It has been reported that the Trump administration has held high-level meetings to ask whether the company’s US and Finnish game investments represent a national security risk on data transfer grounds. There is no word yet on whether the Trump administration plans a similar investigation into the Public Investment Fund’s proposed acquisition of Electronic Arts. Funny that.

Uh-oh: Netflix has claimed that Paramount’s hefty acquisition of Warner Bros will result in cuts “in excess of $16bn” in the next 18 months. Ted Sarandos, the company’s CEO, made the claim in an interview with Bloomberg, where he provided his reflections on being gazumped by a debt-laden bid fronted by Trump allies and allegedly backed by Middle Eastern cash. Will the likely commercial pain that is coming Paramount’s way spell bad news for WB’s game studios? We’re likely to find out soon enough.

Computer should say no: UK press watching publication Press Gazette picked up last week’s news that the owners of the formerly good games media site VideoGamer punted all its staff out the door and replaced them with bots. The story landed just days before Aftermath reported that Australian games site GamesHub had been similarly flipped, with its new owners using it to churn out content related to online gambling. The NPC era of news writing is here, and I’m really not a fan of it.

Valve’s New York State of Bind: Valve has found itself at the centre of another lawsuit. This time, New York’s Attorney General Letitia James has filed a hefty wadge of documents claiming that the company’s lucrative combo of loot boxes and a massive open-market for skin trading means its business model constitutes ‘quintessential’ gambling. The Financial Times’ Alphaville has covered the story comprehensively and entertainingly, with a Simpsons reference for the ages to keep sad millennial readers like me happy.

CAPping a busy week off: Speaking of loot boxes, the UK’s Committee of Advertising Practice published an enforcement notice telling mobile game companies to disclose loot boxes properly by 26th May or face sanction. The enforcement action suggests that games rated with PEGI, which must feature the ‘paid random item’ descriptor if the game contains loot boxes, should be fine. But with Apple’s App Store having its own rating system that doesn’t really account for prominent disclosures, Flux Digital ponders what this means for app store listings (and particularly the ‘read more’ text at the top of them).

Moving on

Jenniver Ivan is Sony Interactive Entertainment’s new Vice President, Legal - Product, Privacy, & AI Governance…Jim Hendriks is now the Senior Producer at Avalanche Studios Group…Ekrem Shahin has hopped over to Grant Thornton to become an M&A Tech and Media Partner…Nathan Mills is PQube’s new Communications Manager…And congrats to Luke Lancaster, who has been appointed Head of International Games Week at Aussie screen culture institution ACMI…

Jobs ahoy

Netflix is snapping up a Senior Manager, Games Licensing Operations…Google has opened up a role in New York for a Strategic Partnerships Development Manager, Gaming Publishers, YouTube…Miniclip needs a Publishing Manager…Supercell is hunting down a Head of Creative Studio (Marketing) for its London office…And Tripledot is looking for a brave soul to become Studio Manager in its Berlin office…

Events and conferences

• Game Developer Conference, San Francisco - 9th-13th March

• 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

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Games of the week

• Pokémon Pokopia - As near to a dead cert money-printing life simulation game from the pocket monster purveyors lands on Switch 2 today.

• Marathon - Bungie really hopes that it isn’t a sprint for its newly released, but relatively troubled, extraction shooter.

• Slay the Spire 2 - Sequel to one of my favourite games enters Early Access on Steam…just days before I board a long-haul flight? Delightfully devilish, Mega Crit Games.

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Before you go…

How do you win The Traitors television show? Play video games, of course.

NME has an interview with the winner of the Irish iteration of everyone’s popular backstabbing series, who claimed that a lockdown love of Among Us battle hardened them for reality show success.

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

• Phil Spencer and Sarah Bond to leave Microsoft in major reshuffle

• Warner Bros set to be snapped up by Paramount

• 67% of the British public know who Pikachu is, says YouGov

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Hello VGIM Insiders,

It’s been a rather busy month in the video game world.

So, come and take a moment to unwind with the latest edition of the Debrief, which provides you with everything you need to know about the games business in February in under five minutes.

If you’d like to read the Debrief, you’ll need to sign up as a VGIM Insider here. You’ll also get our regular Playing Politics email, early access to VGIM events, 10% off anything we’re flogging, and the warm feeling you get from supporting independent writing in this economy.

And if you can’t sign up as an Insider, don’t fret. Instead, catch up with every issue of VGIM from the past month for free below.

• Games for Change is coming to London, 05/02/2026

• Why Nintendo is Super, 12/02/2026

• Games Industry Finance Cheat Sheet: Winter 2026 edition, 19/02/2026

• Fighting Russia’s video game warfare, 26/02/2026

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Read more

• We explore new research showing the extent of Russia’s hybrid warfare in games

• Spencer and Bond out in major Xbox reshuffle

• There’s a Requiem for Resident Evil in the week’s big releases

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Hello VGIM-ers,

Welcome back to the newsletter. We’ll dive into a serious big read shortly.

Before we do, though, I’ve got three things to tell you about.

• Games for Change London speaker submissions close today. If you would like a chance to speak at the conference, submit your session here before the clock hits midnight.

• The next VGIM Insider newsletter lands tomorrow morning. If you’d like to get it, sign up as a paid supporter of VGIM here.

• And as always, we’re looking for companies to sponsor the newsletter to help us keep VGIM free for all. Email george@videogamesindustrymemo.com if you’d like to support this esteemed organ’s mission to insert thousands of puns into the sector’s bloodstream.

Let’s get down to reading.

The big read - Fighting Russia’s video game warfare

A grim landmark: This week marked a grim anniversary. Four years ago, on the 24th February, Russia embarked on an unprovoked full-scale invasion of Ukraine. It failed in its attempt to wipe out a neighbour whom it has been attacking and undermining since 2014. But its failure has come at an extreme cost to Ukraine, which has suffered years of fighting, bombardment of its cities, and upwards of half a million casualties as it has defended itself against unjustified aggression.

Hybrid war theory: However, the limitations of Russian hard power in the face of Ukrainian resistance have forced the Kremlin to expand the front in unexpected ways. The country has engaged in ‘hybrid warfare’ against Ukraine and its allies in an effort to expand beyond the front where it has suffered a million casualties. By sabotaging Ukraine’s supply chains across Europe, coercing rivals through threatening displays such as fly-bys, and waging information warfare through digital channels to subvert democratic norms, Russian actors have brought the war into all of our lives.

The video game frontline: And somewhat despairingly, the Kremlin has turned video games and video game communities into an effective channel to pursue its hybrid warfare goals. Recently published research from the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) shows that Russia has steadily escalated its assault on Ukraine via video games over the past half-decade. This has brought its war to our medium, turning games, related social spaces, and our communities into a digital frontline in the process.

Under attack

Contested information space: In a post published on 13th February, Galen Lamphere-Englund and Petra Regeni argue that Russia’s “weaponisation of video games for recruitment and influence is no longer a theoretical risk.” They say that “the political and cultural reality of online games as contested information spaces” makes them a potent arena for a state to spread its perspective. And because video games are seen as apolitical or less culturally relevant by audiences worldwide, Moscow has been left with “ample room to exercise hybrid tactics against audiences abroad” within games. This has allowed it to recruit, influence, and spread its stories into games and out into our wider digital discourse, with little pushback from democratic actors.

Exploiting Discord: RUSI’s piece was prompted by an article published in Bloomberg in January 2026. Antony Squazzin reported that the Russian military successfully recruited two South African men to fight in the Ukraine war via video game communities in 2024. The men were Discord users who chatted online together while playing the military simulator ARMA 3. They were approached by a user with the handle Dash, who convinced them to join the war effort. After heading to the Russian consulate in Cape Town, the men flew to Russia via the United Arab Emirates and signed up to fight in the war in September 2024. Within weeks, one of the men was dead. The other person’s whereabouts are currently unknown.

A pattern emerges: There is absolutely no suggestion that Discord or the creators of ARMA were responsible for what happened to the two men. Nevertheless, Lamphere-Englund and Regeni zeroed in on this case because Russia’s recruitment tactics bore similarities to research they had previously conducted regarding the radicalisation of violent extremists via games. The men were targeted because of their interest in realistic military simulation games, providing the recruiter with a pool of targets who could have a cultural, political, or economic grievance to play into. They were persuaded to join with messages that leaned into the cultural tropes of the games they love, a tactic used by the Wagner Military Group to recruit drone pilots. After ‘meeting’ the men within Arma 3 and its related communities, they built their trust to move them ‘off-platform’ to spaces where implicit conversation can turn into an explicit call to action. And while the recruitment campaign has all the characteristics of a state-led campaign, the authors argue that using layers of video game communities to tap up fighters offers “minimal state-level diplomatic fingerprints and greater plausible deniability.” After all, Russian actors wouldn’t operate on services that its censorship body felt necessary to ban…right?

Fighting on multiple fronts: However, the Kremlin’s sophisticated use of video game channels to recruit foreign fighters for its grim ‘meatgrinder’ is not a one-time problem. Instead, Regeni and Lamphere-Englund argue that it is a microcosm of Russia’s wider weaponisation of video games against Ukraine. The state has funded and supported the development of games which promote internal Russian narratives, such as The Best in Hell (a first-person shooter based on a propaganda film created by the Wagner Military Group). It has encouraged pro-Russian players and content creators to spread their own version of its messages on its behalf, whether through video streaming platforms or by misusing user-generated content services like Minecraft or Roblox. And though it is not mentioned in RUSI’s piece, Russian actors have also attacked Ukrainian developers in an attempt to dominate the narrative within the video game space. For example, GSC Gameworld, the developers of the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. series, has been attacked by hackers, smeared by state-backed disinformation campaigns, and even threatened with bans by Russian politicians for simply becoming a symbol of Ukrainian pride under fire (read more in Power Play in June).

A growing threat: And unfortunately, there is no sign that Russia’s aggression through video game channels is set to end. As the war grinds on, its efforts to influence audiences via our medium appear to be growing. In July 2025, The Guardian reported that a game called Berloga, which is notionally about a bear defending itself from a swarm of bees, was being used as an aptitude test to put children on the pathway to becoming drone pilots. Lesta Studios, which runs the Russian version of the popular online multiplayer game World of Tanks, was seized by the Russian government in June 2025 on grounds of ‘extremism’ because its long-since separate sister company Wargaming had raised funds for Ukrainian ambulances. It has since ended up in the hands of Boris Dobrodeev, the former CEO of Russian social media service VK and the son of a man who owns one of the country’s state-run media conglomerate VGTRK. And in Autumn 2025, Ukrainian researchers released an in-depth analysis of Russia’s use of video games for propaganda purposes. It found that the volume of propaganda and its aggressiveness grew considerably after 2022, transforming the medium into “another channel for frontline propaganda aimed at domestic and foreign audiences.” As the Kremlin’s hybrid warfare has intensified, so have its efforts to dominate the video game information space — presenting problems to all of us in the process.

Rolling back the video game frontline

Time to act: Regeni and Lamphere-Englund conclude their article by arguing that “intervening in Russia’s weaponisation of gaming ecosystems is both a tactical necessity and strategic imperative” if we want to roll back its hybrid warfare from our entertainment frontier. The question is how to intervene in a way that supports Ukraine, that protects our players, and keeps us all safe.

Acknowledge the problem: “The first step is to acknowledge that there are state actors that are very interested in using video games for propaganda and malign influence, said Dominik Swiecicki, a Counsellor in Psychological Defence for Sweden’s Psychological Defence Agency. He told me that “Kremlin-backed video games have had limited spread among western gamers,” but that Ukrainians have “experienced serious Russian malign influence.” Accepting that this is happening and taking action now will stop us from making what Swiecicki describes as the “naive mistake” made by social media platforms in 2016, when they proved utterly unprepared for their platforms coming under attack from actors keen to disrupt democratic elections around the world.

Responding at all levels: How we avoid making this mistake depends on where we are in the chain. At the top of it in the heat of government, RUSI recommends that state organisations like law enforcement, intelligence agencies, and the military need to develop much better knowledge of games to monitor and combat hybrid warfare. Game professionals, studios, and platforms also need to develop better processes to defend themselves and their communities from cognitive warfare. This includes warning players of the risks of being influenced by state actors, working with partners across society to track influence campaigns when they land in games, and doing everything possible to stop user-generated content platforms or video game storefronts from hosting blatantly propagandising games (many of which deliberately skirt terms of service to try to stay online).

Play for freedom: Players, meanwhile, have their own valuable role in pushing back against Russian aggression. While civil society and businesses must equip them with the skills to spot, resist, and report influence campaigns to push back against hybrid warfare, Lamphere-Englund told me that players have plenty of power to push bad actors out of the spaces they love to unwind in. “People who play games should absolutely try to build more democratic game societies,” he said. “Gamers like to be independent; gamers don’t like to be told what to do. They absolutely should use that independence to fight back and say games should be spaces for fun, for play, and also more importantly for building free, tolerant, incredibly resilient spaces.”

Following a bad example: Russia’s weaponisation of video game spaces has a specific strategic goal of undermining Ukraine as part of its increasingly desperate attempts to win a war it has fought at extreme costs. But while Russia’s aims may be targeted, its strategy relies on insidiously polluting all of our digital worlds to exhaust, confuse, and reduce resistance from its enemies everywhere. And the more it succeeds in spreading its narratives in the video game third places we inhabit and along the social highways that connect them to the rest of our digital world (and reality), the more likely it is that others will follow suit.

Defending our communities: We must push back against the Kremlin’s efforts to make video games a front of its hybrid war to help the people of Ukraine continue to defend themselves against unjustifiable, ruinous aggression. But we must also roll back the use of games as a frontline for malign digital influence more generally, or risk hostile states, groups, and individuals using our players, our communities, and our mediums to achieve disturbing ends in the future.

News in brief

Xboxing up their desks: Phil Spencer and Sarah Bond’s departure from Xbox has dominated the industry discourse this past week. Despite Spencer playing a big role in turning around Microsoft’s video game fortunes following the Xbox One disaster, the business has suffered in the past few years under the weight of the Activision acquisition, the waning fortunes of Game Pass, and the latest Xbox’s failure to establish itself as a meaningful force in the console market. The departure of both executives and the arrival of the AI-focused Asha Sharma as EVP and CEO for Microsoft Gaming shows that the company knows it needs to change course. The question is whether its new leadership really knows where it needs to go next.

LA Not So Confidential: LA County has joined the states of Texas and Louisiana in suing Roblox over allegations that the platform is failing to protect children from online predators. In a statement released to the press, Hilda L. Solis, LA County Board Chair and First District Supervisor, said that the company has “allowed its platform to become a place where children can be exposed to grooming and exploitation.” Roblox has responded, saying that it “strongly disputes” the allegations.

Guillemot speaks out: Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot sat down with Variety last week to discuss the business’s decision to split into five creative houses. In the interview, Guilemot argues that the creative house structure will allow the business to grow its established IP by ensuring that similar properties are grown by teams with the right expertise to push them forward. He also argued that investment from Tencent is key for accessing the Chinese market, gave a flim-flammy answer about lay-offs and suggested that Ubisoft’s perspective as a family company “helps us take a long-term view.” That’s one way to justify hiring your son as a co-CEO of your swankiest new Creative House.

Taxing times: Labour MP Tracy Gilbert has described Rockstar’s claiming of nearly half a billion pounds in tax relief as an example of “Grand Theft Tax.” Her comments came in response to a piece in The Scotsman, which reported that the company claimed £70m in Video Games Tax Relief (VGTR) in 2024/2025. The IWGB union claimed that “when one company is taking that much of the pot, smaller studios suffer” and that it fails to adhere to ‘British values’. The problem? Those statements aren’t accurate (the pot isn’t limited, it’s not solely aimed at small companies, and that’s really not how the cultural test works). It also ignores the fact that VGTR has long supported thousands of jobs in the games industry that wouldn’t otherwise exist without it — suggesting that IWGB should take more care with its commentary in the future.

Mm. 165 Slides of Games Industry Analysis, Please: Finally, Matthew Ball’s long-awaited state-of-the-industry mega deck landed last week. Come for 165 slides of hot graphs and charts about the video games sector. Stay for analysis on how China is eating the industry, why external development is becoming one of the big winners of the sector’s restructure, and why video game companies have found themselves in an attention war with several terrifying horsemen of the digital apocalypse: OnlyFans, gambling, and AI chatbots.

Moving on

Christie Golden has popped up at IO Interactive as its new Principal Writer…Kangwook Lee has been promoted to the role of Chief AI Officer at Krafton…Patrick Söderlund has been appointed Executive Chairman at Nexon following the success of Arc Raiders…Robin Lau is in at Hoyoverse as Senior Global Brand Partnerships Manager…And William Goodwin has left King to become Chief of Staff at Supercell…

Jobs ahoy

There’s a really big General Manager gig open at Sony Interactive Entertainment in London…EA Sports is hiring a Senior Game Product Manager in Southam…Sports Interactive has a post open for a new Head of Social and Content…Wizards of the Coast needs a Game Editor - D&D in the States…And Discord is hunting for a Public Policy Advisor, U.S. States, to settle into its offices in San Francisco…

Events and conferences

• Game Developer Conference, San Francisco - 9th-13th March

• 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

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Games of the week

• Resident Evil Requiem - Latest entry in the storied survival horror series offers a Requiem for a nightmare from tomorrow.

• Pokémon FireRed and LeafGreen - Ports of Game Boy Advance classic land on Nintendo Switch in time for the latest Pokémon Day.

• Reigns: The Witcher - Another officially licensed entry in the ‘Tinder for decision makers’ lands on PC and iOS.

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Before you go…

Mortal Kombat is making your kids take up ice-skating. Or at least, that’s what we learned from the final days of the Winter Olympics.

Georgian ice-skating duo Anastasiia Metelkina and Luka Berulava performed a routine inspired by the fighting game in Milano-Cortina, with each skater performing a ‘Friendship’ and a distinctly family-friendly ‘Fatality’ during their four-minute-long show.

When will someone ban this sick, sick filth?

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

• We summarise the major industry financial results for your reading ease

• ByteDance preps sale of Moonton to Saudi Arabia’s Savvy Games for $6bn

• Styx: Blades of Greed sneaks its way to the top of a quiet week of releases

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Hello VGIM-ers,

Before we go into this week’s newsletter, I have big news about the ol’ book.

Power Play has been picked by Waterstones to feature in a special pre-order sale, and you can bag it for a nice discount right this second.

You can pick up a copy of the book for just £16.50, a 25% saving, by heading to the Waterstones website and using the code FEB26 at checkout.

And best of all, Waterstones has international delivery options. That means anyone in the world can make the most of this lovely little deal.

But you’re going to have to be quick. The offer ends tomorrow evening UK time, so you’ll need to move fast to get your discounted copy.

Want to grab your copy of the book and save yourself some all-important cash?

Hit this link and get pre-ordering now.

The big read - Games Industry Finance Cheat Sheet: Winter 2026

Cheat sheet readers always prosper: It’s that time of year again. As per VGIM tradition, I’m rolling out the latest edition of our legendary quarterly games industry finance cheat sheets to give you the lowdown on the biznezz of digital play.

Outlining the rules: For those of you who’ve not seen one of these before, the cheat sheet is simple enough to explain. I dig through the financial results of publicly traded game companies. I write up a quick commentary on the performance of some notable picks, highlighting ups and downs. I then round the sheet off with a pithy/glib summary of the state of play, which you can steal to regurgitate in business meetings at your leisure.

Getting on with it: So without further ado, let’s get into the latest financial results shaping the game business.

PlayStation: Hardware times

Ghost at the sales party: Sony’s latest financial results showed that first-party hits like Ghost of Yōtei have not given PlayStation enough uplift to overcome struggles within its hardware division.

Tricky times: The company reported that sales in its Game and Network services segment decreased from $10.9bn (¥1.68tn) in Q3 2024 to $10.5bn (¥1.61tn) in Q3 2025 due to a drop in hardware sales. And while its overall operating income increased because of a bump in sales of network services like PlayStation Plus and first-party game software titles, hardware losses acted as a drag on that growth too.

Long-term problems?: PlayStation has almost certainly suffered as a result of Grand Theft Auto VI being delayed into late 2026, removing a major reason for players to upgrade to a new device last year. But with rapidly rising RAM costs likely to lead to cost increases of all consoles (see the news in brief section), expect to see harder times for Sony’s hardware business in the years to come.

Xbox: The struggles continue

Problem child: Microsoft’s revenue grew 17% year-on-year to $81.3bn in Q2 of its 2026 financial year, with operating income also up by 21% to $38.3bn in the same reporting period. But the company’s strong performance masked Xbox’s ongoing struggles, raising genuine questions about the future of its games business.

Downward spiral: Xbox content and services revenue declined by 5% year-on-year due to the underperformance of first-party releases (almost certainly Call of Duty: Black Ops 7). Hardware revenues, meanwhile, declined by an alarming 32%, with the launch of the Xbox-branded ROG Ally in October 2024 doing little to arrest the slide.

Deck chairs on the Titanic: The ongoing poor performance of the Xbox brand since Microsoft forked out $69bn to acquire Activision Blizzard will likely be a source of concern for the company’s leadership. And while rumours abound that the next Xbox console will bring PC rivals like Steam and Epic onto the device to strengthen its offer to players, don’t expect strategic shifts like this to address serious structural problems within the company’s business.

Nintendo: Great expectations, decent performance

Make it add up: Nintendo saw its share price slip by 11% following its latest financial results, after it posted merely very good results instead of outstanding ones for the nine months ending December 2025.

Cha-ching: The company reported net sales hit $12.4bn (¥1.9 trillion) over the period, an increase of 99.3% year-on-year. Operating profit grew by 21.3% and ordinary profit leapt by 39.4% compared to the last comparable period. Turns out that launching a brand new console following a very quiet year is very good for business.

A steady Switch 2 a new console: However, markets were less impressed with the bumper growth. Despite the Switch 2 outselling forecasts to ship 17.37m units in the first nine months of the year, the lack of first-party big hitters outside of the 14m unit-selling Mario Kart World has spooked investors.

No first party: With Donkey Kong: Bananza selling a respectable 4.25m units and Metroid Prime 4 selling poorly enough to be omitted from the quarterly highlights, Nintendo needs to show that its forthcoming release line-up has a dazzling hit on the horizon. Otherwise, investors will remain sceptical about the Switch 2 maintaining its momentum - especially with those dreaded RAM price increases hitting the company too.

Electronic Arts: Dominating with Battlefield

It’s in the game: Soon-to-be-PIFed Electronic Arts had a memorable third fiscal quarter. Net bookings increased 38% year-on-year to $3bn, and net revenue reached $1.9bn as the company’s portfolio of releases performed strongly.

Shooting down its rivals: The jewel in the company’s crown was Battlefield 6. The game shot down rivals such as Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 to become the best-selling shooter of 2025. It also set new records for engagement with the franchise, according to EA’s corporate birt-speak.

Tasty loot boxy goodness: But the company also saw strong performance in some of its evergreen service games. EA Sports FC recorded high single-digit year-on-year growth, as Ultimate Team continued to prove devilishly moreish. Apex Legends, meanwhile, saw net bookings up by double digits compared to this time last year.

Nearing the end: The company remains on course for its acquisition by the PIF to be completed by 2027. So we’ll have to enjoy its final round of financial results while we still have the chance.

Ubisoft: Creative Houses Accounting

Overextended metaphor: Despite wobbling harder than a jelly in an earthquake last year, Ubisoft emerged from Q3 2025-2026 with a set of financial results that’ll please hard-hearted market watchers.

Better than expected: The company’s Q3 net bookings grew to $399.5m (€338m), an increase of 12% year-on-year, overperforming Ubisoft’s expectations. The company reported that the result was driven by partnerships and the Assassin’s Creed franchise overperforming. It also said that back-catalogue sales were up 11% compared to this quarter last year, with Avatar and The Division doing numbers.

Road to recovery: The results are good news for the company. The company’s market cap dropped below the billion-dollar mark to $680bn (€575m), following the announcement that it was reorganising into five creative houses. But with the company sucking up some seriously unpopular headcount reductions and demonstrating that it has plenty of potential to make bank, it should be well-placed to recover in the years ahead.

Roblox: On the path, or stuck on the treadmill, to profitability?

Growing pains: Roblox’s results for Q4 2025 once again showed a company chasing scale, while trying to keep its losses in check.

Mixed picture: The company reported 144m daily active users, an increase of 69% year-on-year, and 35bn hours of engagement, up 88% from Q4 2024. But while revenue grew by 43% to $1.4bn and bookings increased by 63% to $2.2bn year-on-year, the company recorded a $318m loss for the quarter - an increase from this time last year.

Strategic priorities: However, the company described 2025 as a “banner year” for the company after revenue grew 36% year-over-year to $4.9bn. And as long as it continues to demonstrate a hefty user count and revenue growth, it will be well placed to continue its steady swallowing up of the traditional games industry in the years ahead.

Best of the rest

• Who needs Grand Theft Auto VI? Not Take-Two, apparently. The company’s net bookings grew 28% year-on-year to $1.76bn in the third quarter of its 2026 fiscal year, with titles such as Toon Blast, Empires and Puzzles, NBA 2K26, and a little-known game called *checks notes* Grand Theft Auto Online continuing to keep the company performing above its guidance to the market.

• Unity acted as a handy reminder that telling the right corporate story is essential to long-term commercial success. The game engine maker reported increased revenue in its create solutions ($165m vs $152m last year) and grow solutions ($338m vs $305m in 2024). But misaligned market expectations and the spectre of Google’s Project Genie generative AI engine saw the company’s stock value slump, with few investors taking comfort in Chief Exec Matthew Bromberg’s efforts to spin AI disruption in Unity’s favour.

• Embracer Group reported that profitability and sales were comfortably down year-on-year in its latest results, but described the results as a ‘clear improvement’ on the year before. The reason for the confusion is likely that i) it divested a hefty chunk of mobile revenue by selling off Easybrain to MiniClip and ii) Kingdom Come: Deliverance II did numbers.

• Tencent’s results aren’t due for a while. But rival NetEase has reported that revenue has grown 6.9% in 2025 to hit $16.1bn (RMB 112.6bn). A full 97% of the company’s revenue came from online games, with Fantasy Westward Journey Online and Marvel Rivals two of the company’s standout stars.

• And Capcom continues to be the star performing business in the video game world. Net sales jumped 29.8% year-on-year to hit $749m (¥115.3bn), and operating income leapt by 75.1% to $353m (¥54.3bn), despite the company’s long-term run of financial hits. The announcement of Resident Evil Requiem, steady sales of Street Fighter 6, and the ongoing strength of both Devil May Cry and Monster Hunter franchises kept the good vibes going for the Japanese giant.

  ---

The Bluffer’s Guide to the Winter 2026 financial results

Do say: The games industry is being buffeted by headwinds from over-investment into the AI economy, leaving companies with strong software portfolios and less direct exposure to rising hardware costs better placed to weather the storm.

Don’t say: “…ladies and gentlemen, we’ll start the bidding for this stick of RAM at one million dollars. Can I see a million dollars in the room, please?”

News in brief

A Moonton of money: ByteDance is reportedly close to reaching a deal with Savvy Games to sell Moonton, the business known for Mobile Legends: Bang Bang, for $6bn. Bloomberg reports that terms have been broadly agreed and that the deal could be announced this quarter. The deal will further strengthen Savvy’s position in mobile games, while bringing an increasingly large esports-friendly title into its competitive gaming portfolio.

RAM raided: Video games hardware manufacturers are beginning to creak under the pressure of RAM shortages caused by the more-than-a-bit-stupid AI hype bubble. Valve has confirmed that its Steam Deck OLED “may be out-of-stock intermittently” due to shortages, Nintendo is reportedly considering a price increase of its Switch 2 to deal with rising costs, and Sony is apparently considering delaying the release of its next console by a year to try to wait out the challenges. Re-read Eurogamer’s Bertie Purchese’s piece about the causes of the shortage here to understand exactly what’s going on and why this could result in serious pain for the consumer games business.

North of the border: Ukie spin-off Interactive Entertainment Scotland has released its manifesto ahead of this year’s Scottish Parliament elections. The 16-page document calls for a review of existing policy support for the country’s games business, developing new sources of funding akin to schemes seen in Wales and Northern Ireland, and enhanced support for schemes supporting talent across the country. The manifesto launch follows the recent unveiling of Scotland’s Games Action Plan, a point which was raised directly with Ukie in response to the announcement.

Steam’s moderation problems: The Guardian’s Geoffrey Bunting has written a piece about Steam’s lackadaisical moderation policies and the impact it has on creators and players alike. His article outlines how Steam’s failure to effectively moderate its social media-like functions has turned it into a breeding ground for hate and harassment, particularly affecting LGBTQ+ content creators whose concerns go unheard by the company. It’s a prime target for online safety regulators, I’d say.

Discord in the ranks: Finally, and speaking of online safety rules, BBC News has spoken to content creators and academics who have expressed concerns over Discord’s decision to roll out age verification for its global user base. What the piece does mention are the reasonable concerns amongst individuals about handing over sensitive identification data to technology companies. What it doesn’t mention is that Discord’s move is a direct result of online safety rules that legally mandate and culturally normalise the use of the technology.

Don’t forget: you can order Power Play with a 25% discount from Waterstones this week. Key in the code FEB26 at checkout to pre-order your copy of the book for just £16.50.

Grab the deal at the Waterstones website before the end of Friday 20th February by clicking here.

Moving on

The big move that took place while I was on jury duty was David Helgason stepping down from Unity’s board alongside Tomer Bar-Zee. Bernard Kim is in as a replacement…Jay Sullivan was recently appointed as CEO at Fandom…Emily Pestell has a new title of Senior Brand Communications Manager at King…Annabelle Shoel has been promoted to Campaign Manager at YRS TRULY…And Rebekah Nicodemus has been announced as the head honcho of Bastion America…

Jobs ahoy

Sega Europe is recruiting a Head of Social and Content…Make-A-Wish UK is hiring a Gaming and Creator Partnerships Manager…Rockstar Games is rather ominously looking for a Principal Investigations Analyst…2K Games is hunting down a Senior Director of Community and Digital Content Strategy, Core Games in Los Angeles…And Nvidia is seeking a Hackathon Program Manager - APAC to help it out in Singapore…

Events and conferences

• Guildford Games Festival, Guildford - 20th February

• devcom leadership summit, Lisbon - 24th-26th February

• Game Developer Conference, San Francisco - 9th-13th March

• PAX East, Boston - 26th-29th March

• Games for Change Summit, London - 15th April

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Games of the week

• Styx: Blades of Greed - Latest entry in the fantasy-based stealth series promises greater freedom than ever to sneak and heist however you like.

• Avowed - Obsidian’s perfectly reasonable role-playing game with a perfectly reasonable price tag rocks up on PlayStation 5.

• Star Trek: Voyager - Across the Unknown - Play a story-driven strategy game set in the Star Trek universe that gives off vibes of building your main base in XCOM.

  ---

Before you go…

Roses are red. Violets are blue. Video game romances rely too much on lore dumps. Do you agree too?

Then you'd better read Josh Broadwell’s piece for Polygon, which ponders why so many interactive romances are less Casablanca and more listening to someone bore on forever on a first date without bothering to ask you a question.

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

Hello VGIM Insiders,

Welcome back to Playing Politics. Due to ongoing jury duty, this month’s edition will be a little bit different from usual.

Instead of the usual big read, politics in brief, and ones to watch, I’m running the rule over three stories from the past few weeks that give a flavour of where video games interact with the political world.

If you’d like to read this month’s Playing Politics and are not currently a VGIM Insider, you can grab a paid subscription to the newsletter here.

Roblox’s rumble down under

Showdown: Roblox has found itself in hot water down under after Annika Wells, the country’s communications minister, demanded a meeting due to ongoing concerns surrounding content on the platform.

Read more

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• Nintendo’s intergenerational genius is crucial to its success, says Kez

• Clair Obscur 33 devs knighted by the French Government for services to J’ai-RPGS

• Mario Tennis Fever serves up chaotic sporting fun in the week’s releases

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Hello VGIM-ers,

I’m landing in your inboxes with a shorter newsletter than usual because jury duty has swallowed up a big chunk of my time this week. But I’ve got a few quick things to let you know about before I head back to my civic duty.

We’ll be unveiling the first speakers for Games for Change London in a couple of weeks. If you’d like a chance to appear on stage at the inaugural summit, submit your idea for a talk, panel, or roundtable here.

Next, we’ve got an edition of Playing Politics landing for VGIM Insiders tomorrow. If you’d like to read the newsletter, sign up as a paid supporter of the newsletter here.

And finally, I’m going to be speaking at London’s Good Game Dev Club at Loading Bar on Thursday 5th March. Make sure you follow their LinkedIn page so you can grab a ticket when they go live.

The big read - Why Nintendo is Super

Sounds like someone’s a Nintendo nerd: There is no Video Games Industry Memo without Nintendo. The company is arguably the biggest reason I am in this industry, doing the work I do, and writing the piece you’re reading now. Super Mario World on the SNES was the first game I played. Mario Kart 64 was the game that brought my siblings together. The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild reinvigorated my lifelong fascination with the series when the Switch launched. And watching my nieces fall head over heels for Super Mario Odyssey felt like passing a personal passion on to the next generation.

A bit mysterious: But Nintendo itself remains something of a mystery. The 137 year-old company’s games, hardware, and creative creations are among the most recognisable in the entertainment world. Yet at the same time, the company has often been a secretive beast. It might have given the world Mario, Link, and Samus, but the method behind its creative madness has consistently been obscured.

Super scope: Fortunately, a wonderful new book has lifted the curtain on my favourite company in the video game world. Super Nintendo by Keza MacDonald tells the story of how Nintendo helped the world to have fun through the games that defined it. By drawing on her interviews with Nintendo’s senior execs, two decades of industry experience, and more desk research than a fastidious Dad updating his home office, Keza’s book reveals how Nintendo’s unique approach to making games has given it such longevity (and plenty for the rest of the industry to mull over).

A cultural history through games

Diglett for victory: Keza wrote this book for a simple reason: a lifelong obsession with the Big N. “I was 35 when I wrote the proposal for this book, and I had been writing about video games for nearly 20 years,” she said. “I had spent a lot of time thinking about why I was still interested in video games. As part of that thinking, I thought a lot about what started my interest in video games, and that was Nintendo. And I started thinking about how Nintendo has not just been present in my life, but a constant presence for 130 years plus now. I felt like if I could dig into Nintendo, I could maybe dig into why I liked games at all in the first place. And if I dug into that, I could then dig into why we all like video games.”

Dry-Dry Deserted: She decided not to write a linear history of the company. Instead, she opted to write a cultural history exploring the company’s history through the games that defined it. “I didn’t want it [the book] to feel dry,” she said. “A lot of video game history books that I’d read were very focused on technology. Obviously, that’s in our industry and the driving force for the first 30 to 40 years of our medium’s history. But technological change and creative change went hand-in-hand. So I wanted to think about what these games meant to people. I didn’t want to be like, ‘okay, so here’s a chronology of Nintendo games.’ I started thinking about how to structure the book in a way that would tell the whole story, but also avoid feeling too formulaic. So I decided to structure it around Nintendo’s games instead.”

Talking points: The result is that each chapter grounds you within the creation of each franchise through the people, philosophy, and quirks that make up Nintendo’s creative method. “Structuring it around particular games gave me an excuse to dive into stuff I really want to say about Nintendo because I find a game that’s a way in. So, Metroid became a way in to talking about how Nintendo’s games portray women in games. Pokémon ended up being not just the story of the game, but the story of how video games became more social and started to connect people together. And Nintendo Labo, if you were to name Nintendo’s top 50 best-selling games, wouldn’t be anywhere in there. But Labo was a really fantastic way to talk about Nintendo’s philosophy of making innovative things with old-fashioned technology.” It was, according to Keza, the perfect encapsulation of Gunpei Yokoi’s (the creator of the Game Boy) product development philosophy of ‘lateral thinking with withered technology.’

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A lineage of success

Secret to success: Over the course of the book, we see Nintendo rise from a humble Hanufada card manufacturer into a multi-billion-dollar digital behemoth that somehow retains a uniquely playful creative spirit. But how did it do it? For Keza, Nintendo’s magic is found in a distinct blend of inventive innovation where the limits of games and hardware can be playfully pushed by multi-disciplinary teams in a secure environment.

Two-player game: “It’s the unique marriage of technical and other kinds of creative intelligence,” Keza explained. “That was really exemplified by the wonderful lifelong friendly rivalry between Shigeru Miyamoto and Satoru Iwata. You’ve got Shigeru Miyamoto [the creator of Mario], who wanted to be a comic book artist and he’s a product designer. He’s not a particularly technical guy, but he has enough of an understanding of the technical stuff to push boundaries. And then you have Satoru Iwata [Nintendo’s former CEO until he died in 2015], who was a programming genius from a young age and whose technical, programming, and business intelligence are just this perfect foil and complement to Miyamoto’s creative approach.” This combination of personalities that Keza describes in the book as ‘two different flavours of game development cleverness’ would prove so delicious that the duo would grab lunch together every Monday to talk shop.

Institutional knowledge: Dynamics like this have been strengthened because Nintendo has been able to keep its most senior staff in the business for decades, allowing up-and-coming talent to learn from it. “If you are a new Nintendo employee, you’re working on the next Zelda about four seats away from Eiji Aonuma, who worked on Ocarina of Time and Majora’s Mask,” Keza said. “And Aonuma learned from Miyamoto, who made the first game, so you have this lineage. There’s no company at which this is the case anywhere, even at Pixar or Disney, where you get that sort of level of institutional knowledge.” The benefits of this extend to Nintendo’s hardware too, with developers working on games at its Japanese HQ practically able to turn around to talk to an engineer about the device they’re creating content for if they need to.

Do be Alarmo-ed: You may reasonably think that Nintendo’s retention of senior staff is just a by-product of Japanese business culture, where it is undoubtedly harder to fire staff and much easier to be a one-company person. Keza argues that it misses an important difference between Nintendo and other businesses in the country. “You have lots of people with lots of different types of intelligences who work very collaboratively and non-hierarchically,” she said. “Everyone on a Mario team will be prototyping, having ideas, having ideas shot down, or having ideas make it into the game. It’s not necessarily that the older people at the company are in charge and that everybody does what they say. Everyone has a very collaborative way of working which crosses not just age but also disciplines.” This creates plenty of room for creativity, whether it is recognising that squids are the perfect animal for a game about splattering liquid all over the floor or making a $100 alarm clock that makes coin noises when you move your arms just because you can.

Opening the treasure chest: But the creativity is underpinned by a conservative business model that means its staff have more room than most to take risks. “Nintendo operates in a very cash-first way,” Keza told me. “Nintendo has this war chest so that if something like the Wii U happens [where the Wii’s successor simply failed to sell] or they have a few unprofitable quarters, they don’t have to fire the CEO, fire half the staff, or everybody commits ritual suicide for the shareholders to be appeased. You can just stay the course and try again.” The company’s financial security gives the business the confidence to experiment, allowing it to launch industry-defining consoles like the motion-control powered Wii that none of its rivals (and a lot of Nintendo’s own shareholders) wouldn’t back.

A Switch 2 conservatism?

Wa-hoo: Keza’s book ends up being an exhaustively entertaining romp through Nintendo history, which perfectly blends the stories of the people, the properties, and the philosophy that makes the business come to life. A chapter on Kirby transforms, somewhat ironically perhaps, into a vehicle for discussing the character’s importance as a space for safe creativity in Nintendo’s portfolio and how it kick-started Satoru Iwata’s rise in the business. Mario’s chapter talks about the character’s global popularity, but grounds it in the decades of work to make the buttery-smooth experience of controlling him central to the endlessly inventive, iterative games that have delighted millions.

Two-by-two: But due to the vagaries of the publishing world, Keza’s book had to mostly miss the latest console upon which Nintendo has cast its magic: the Switch 2. I asked her where she thought it fitted into the company’s story now that the book is out. “Nintendo tends to oscillate between releasing something completely new or releasing a follow-up,” she said. “So you get the Game Boy with the Game Boy Colour, the NES with the SNES, the Wii and the Wii U. They [its consoles] tend to come in little pairs that follow on directly from any other thing they’ve done.”

Steady as it goes: Keza believes that the decision to release a direct successor to the Switch is a sign that the company’s appetite for risk has lowered over the past decade. “I think we’re in a conservative era of Nintendo,” she said. “Satoru Iwata passing away was probably not in anyone’s business plan. And so in the years after, right after the Switch was released, I think Nintendo probably had to do a lot of behind-the-scenes reorienting.” Keza believes the company’s appointment of Shuntaro Furukawa, a mostly mysterious accountant who started his career in the company’s European office, as its sixth President in 2018 is one factor behind this. The Covid-19 pandemic, the global cost-of-living crisis, and the maturation of the games industry have also understandably shaped its attitude towards risk.

A Bananza for all: So far, the safety-first strategy has worked pretty well. The conservative decision to upgrade the Switch with a few meaningful new features and to launch it with Mario Kart World has powered it to 17.4m sales so far. Nevertheless, Keza is hopeful that we will be able to see a “bit more weird Nintendo” in the console’s line-up of games, as we did in Donkey Kong: Bananza. “Although I didn’t personally love Bananza that much, I respect it enormously. It says ‘what if we took the 3D Mario template and then made just one transformative change?’ Miyamoto loves these kinds of ideas that solve several problems at once. Bananza’s big idea is that you can smash everything, and that one idea completely transforms the whole concept of a platforming game.”

Swimming against the tide: But despite a little fear that Nintendo’s creative edge may be dulled a little, Keza’s message is clear. Although the company may at times be so opaque that we barely know who its President is, the source of its magic is pretty clear. Nintendo allows creative people from multiple disciplines and a range of experience to work together for years on games that have a defined creative philosophy. By giving those people access to deep institutional knowledge, encouraging them to push creative and technical boundaries, but anchoring their work within a secure cash-backed business model, Nintendo’s games can soar. Its approach feels antithetical to much of the modern games industry. Maybe, just maybe, it shouldn’t.

Super Nintendo is available to buy in hardback and audiobook form. You can choose from a list of retailers here.

Games of the week

• Mario Tennis Fever - Latest entry in long-running Mario-themed sports series leans much harder into Smash Bros/Mario Kart style chaos.

• Mewgenics - Edmund McMullan backed turn-based strategy game about breeding a cat army lands on Steam (with great reviews behind it)

• High on Life 2 - Less-funny-than-it-thinks-it-is first-person shooter series returns for its second shot at breaking the big time.

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Before you go…

The success of Clair Obscur 33 has landed 28 members of Sandfall Interactive with knighthoods from the French government.

The majority of the team behind the award-winning RPG were inducted into the country’s Order of Arts and Letters (Ordre des Arts et des Lettres) because it represents “a major moment in the history of games.”

A hearty très bien to all those clever little sausages.

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• VGIM teams up with Games for Change and London Games Festival for a brand new event

• Video game stocks take a beating after Google lets Project Genie out of the bottle

• Dragon Quest VII Reimagined heads the week’s releases

  ---

Hello VGIM-ers,

I’ve got exciting news to share with you in the Big Read, which we’ll get to in just a second. But before we get there, I do need to let you know that the next few VGIMs will be a little shorter than usual.

I’ve been called up for jury service. And after successfully dodging it last year (without resorting to Homer Simpson’s preferred tactic for beating it), I must now serve on behalf of our King, country, and its crumbling criminal justice system.

VGIM’s will drop at the usual time for free subscribers and paid Insiders over the next couple of weeks. But they are likely to only contain the big read due to time constraints.

The big announcement - Games for Change is coming to London

Drum roll, please: Last week, I teased that I have been working on something exciting that’s due to take place in April. This week, I’m very happy to be able to tell you all about it.

Summit special: VGIM has teamed up with the London Games Festival and Games for Change, the not-for-profit dedicated to driving the use of games for social impact, to launch a special event. On Wednesday 15th April, 150 people from across the games business, civil society, and the political world will come together for a one-day summit to talk about how games can meaningfully change our world for the better.

Tracks and fields: The event, which is the first Games for Change event to land in the UK, will be split into two content tracks. The first track will be dedicated to talks and panels about how to use games to empower individuals, cultivate healthy communities, build a better world, and create a movement for positive change that has staying power. The second, meanwhile, will consist of focused roundtable discussions and workshops that’ll allow us to dive deeper into specific topics - such as the use of video games within public health, sustainability, diversity and inclusion, for creating safe spaces online, and education - to drive the conversation further. And never fear: there will be some opportunities to do some networking. We know you all like that.

All on board: I’m lucky enough to be in charge of curating the event. But I’m not running it alone. Jude Ower MBE (Planet Play), Deborah Mensah-Bonsu (Supercell), James Delaney (Blockworks), Sarah Ticho (XR Health Alliance), and Phil Stuart (PRELOADED) are all contributing their expertise to the event as members of the advisory board, ensuring the event’s content shines and keeping me to task. I’m also being supported by a crack team of event organisers, including reps from both our partner orgs.

Rationale thinking: There are loads of ways that I would love for you, the VGIM community, to get involved. But before I tell you about all that, I think it’s worth saying why I’ve got involved in all of this (and what I hope we can achieve by coming together on this).

The call to action

Sad times: At the end of the last year, I was feeling a touch glum. I’d wrapped up writing Power Play, but I left that process worried about the future. What had started as a cheery project scribbling about how influential video games are turned pretty dark in ways I didn’t expect. Bad actors were using video games, video game culture, and video game communities to achieve some worrying ends. And I felt like I needed to do something about it.

Seriously good: Around that time, I caught up with Elizabeth Newbury. Liz is one of the leading lights of the games for change movement in the US. She had headed up the Wilson Center’s Serious Games Initiative. After chatting with her and several other people within America’s serious games movement, such as Maria Burns Ortiz and Paul Fischer, it was clear that games across the world are supporting social good. Want to encourage people to make sustainable food choices? Create a game with a compelling story to convince them, of course. Want to inform people about vaccines during the Covid crisis? Tap up the Plague Inc team to help you spread the word. Worried about people not understanding how misinformation works online? Run a game jam that uses the industry’s mastery of mechanics to create explainers that truly engage.

Challenges aplenty: But there’s a problem. Support for games that seek to have a meaningful positive impact on society is patchy. Games that shape the way we think about the world are supported by the commercial games industry (hello, Civ), but the need to return investment naturally limits the kind of projects the sector backs. Public funding could theoretically fill the gap, but support for games in most territories is light, inconsistent, and rarely targeted for cultural or societal purposes (it also, occasionally, gets DOGE’ed). And while change-making developers are spread out across the world, there are few opportunities for them to come together to talk shop, share ideas, and spark the next generation of game-changing experiences.

Get on with it: So, an idea formed. Instead of simply whingeing about the problem, what would happen if I rolled up my sleeves and did something about it? At the end of 2025, with a little help from Liz, I pitched Susanna Pollack’s team at Games for Change and Michael French of London Games Festival fame the idea of pulling together a summit in London. With the help of a proposal drafted in a remarkably chilly Belfast Airport in mid-November, we hammered out an agreement to bring Games for Change to London. And as a result, I believe we’ve got a great opportunity to use the event to tell a much more positive story about the power of play in the UK, Europe, and beyond.

Get involved

Teasing times: What can you expect from the event then? Right now, I can’t say too much while we’re lining up our first speaker and partner announcement for later this month. However, there are some things we can say following lots of chats with our event partners, the advisory board, and our first speakers.

Mission statement: We are looking to capture the spirit of the Games for Change Festival and movement at the event. We want to focus on sharing genuine impact from across a range of fields. We want to inspire game makers to positively impact the world around them, while showing the world around us the true power of games. And we really want the event to be a first step towards something much bigger, turning lots of great work in the UK and Europe into a defined movement.

Three routes to glory: But we can only achieve this with your help. And fortunately, you - yes, you, reading this email - can help us to deliver this glorious game-changing event in London by doing one of the three following actions.

Speak up: First, you can submit a talk, panel, or roundtable idea for the summit. Submissions for talks open today and close on Thursday 26th February (that’s three weeks away). If you want to submit a session, you can use our speaker submission form here. You can also read Games for Change’s guidance on great submissions here, all of which will be relevant for our considerations.

Become a partner: Next, you can help out by partnering with us to ensure the event runs successfully. We have a series of packages available for companies that wish to shape the agenda, support activities on-site, and believe that it is important we share the industry’s positive narrative with the world. If you’d like to talk sponsorship, get in touch with me at george@half-space.consulting.

Tickets, please: And finally, you can help out by buying a pass to the event. The London Games Festival ticketing site has industry tickets to the event selling at £99+VAT per person and a limited concession rate of £69+VAT for people working in not-for-profits, academic institutions, and other relevant settings. You can buy a pass here.

Cheery conclusion: So if you believe that games can build a better world, get involved with Games for Change London. You never know what difference we could make together in April.

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State of the Age report 2026: 2026 is the Year of Implementation.

2026 represents a turning point: the year compliance moves beyond static controls designed for an earlier era and becomes embedded directly into product architecture. From the FTC’s recent workshop to mass enforcement actions globally, age assurance is now a competitive advantage.

Join the exclusive launch of our State of the Age 2026 report to learn how platforms are operationalising compliance at scale and growing user trust.

Register for the Exclusive SotA Webinar and get a copy of the report

News in brief

Genie out of the bottle?: Video game stocks slid last week after Google unveiled Project Genie, a generative AI tool for creating playable worlds. Unity was hit hardest with a 22% drop in price, but shares of Roblox, CD Projekt Red, and Take-Two also took a pounding. But is Genie really a viable tool for game development? Or is it currently only useful for creating piss-poor recreations of carefully authored game worlds, which require curation to make and actually meet player expectations for fun and quality? Watch footage of the worlds that The Verge has generated with Genie and buy stocks in companies affected by an idiotic dip.

SIC news: In massively dry, but genuinely important, news, the UK Standard Industrial Classification (SIC) framework is introducing dedicated codes to mark businesses working within video games publishing, development, and sectors like esports. The new SIC codes, which are used to classify the type of work a business does for the country’s national company register Companies House, will make it much easier to measure the precise economic impact of video game businesses in the future.

Epstein files latest: Jeffrey Epstein was permanently suspended from Xbox Live “due to harassment, threats, and/or abuse of other players,” according to emails released last week. In an email dated 19th December 2013, Microsoft informed the disgraced billionaire that the ban applied to both its Xbox 360 and Xbox One consoles. Former Activision Blizzard CEO Bobby Kotick has also appeared in the Epstein files in a discussion about microtransactions. You can view the correspondence here.

It’s not in the gambling game: Austria’s Supreme Court ruled that loot boxes in EA’s FIFA Ultimate Team (Now known as FC Ultimate Team) do not constitute gambling. The court found that the random allocation of content via Ultimate Team packs did not stop a player from using “their own skills to control the course of the game with a probability for success.” The ruling follows a similar judgment in the Netherlands in 2022, which also ruled that the skill-based nature of the wider game meant that the presence of loot boxes did not turn the game into gambling.

Switched on: The Nintendo Switch has become Nintendo’s best-selling console of all time. In its latest financial results, Video Games Chronicle spotted that the original Switch’s 155.4m unit sales have exceeded the record previously set by the Nintendo DS. The company also revealed that it has sold 1.5 billion Nintendo Switch games to date.

Moving on

Paula Angela Esuadra has been appointed Director, Research and Insights at 2K…Jacek Pudlik and Nic van ‘t Schip have founded a new publisher called Pixel Doors…Mike Wallen has been appointed President of Testronic…Richard Cole has recently been appointed a Senior Lecturer in Digital Futures at the University of Bristol…And Christoph Hartmann has left Amazon Game Studios, which he helmed until late last week…

Jobs ahoy

Sports Interactive has a post open for a Senior Community Manager…Frontier Developments is hiring a Senior Game Writer…Kinetic Games is hunting for a Development Director…Netflix has reopened applications for a Senior Researcher - Consumer Insights, Party Games role in New York…And Sony Interactive Entertainment is hiring a Senior Content Acquisition Manager in San Mateo…

Events and conferences

• DICE Summit, Las Vegas - 11th-13th February 2026

• Guildford Games Festival, Guildford - 20th February 2026

• devcom leadership summit, Lisbon - 24th-26th February 2026

• Game Developer Conference, San Francisco - 9th-13th March 2026

• PAX East, Boston - 26th-29th March 2026

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Games of the week

• Dragon Quest VII Reimagined - Remaster of Square Enix’s legendary RPG that has more than a passing resemblance to the Link’s Awakening reboot lands this week.

• Nioh 3 - Another entry in the needlessly hard action series, where you blend samurai and ninja skills to kill big monsters.

• PUBG: Blindspot - 5v5 tactical shooter set within the PUBG universe entered early access earlier this week.

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Before you go…

Some cities would be offended if they found out that their streets had inspired a horror game. But some cities are not like Gero City in Japan’s Gifu Prefecture.

It has appointed Takeshi Masago and Tamami Hiraoka, two voice actors who feature in the Gero City-inspired Silent Hill f, as tourism ambassadors.

Let’s toast the news, which was shared by IGN, with some of Gero City’s Silent Hill sake (which rapidly sold out when it first went on sale).

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

• Ubisoft splits into five creative houses, news goes down badly

• Steam’s surprise success stories from 2025 revealed

• Critics leap on board 2026 breakout hit Big Hops

Hello VGIM-ers,

Welcome to the first Debrief of 2026.

We’ll dive into our usual monthly summary of the top video game industry news stories, business deals, data dives, cultural conversations, and VGIM Insider gossip in just a second.

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• Six video games industry predictions for 2026, 08/01/2026

• Why Tim Sweeney is wrong about X, 15/01/2026

• A UK Video Games Council-ing session, 22/01/2026

• Thou can steal (gold pieces), 29/01/2026

Read more

• We examine an influential UK Court of Appeal ruling about pinching in-game currency

• Steam set for a half-billion-pound class action lawsuit in the UK following Competition Appeal Tribunal ruling

• Highguard barely enthuses in the week’s releases

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Hello VGIM-ers,

Somehow, it’s the end of January already. But rather than dwell on time speeding past alarmingly quickly, I wanted to let you know about a few things coming up in the next three months at Osborn Towers.

In February, copies of Power Play will be unleashed in digital format to unsuspecting journalists, commentators, and bigwigs for endorsement purposes. If you’d like to have an early look at the book, get in touch.

Then in March, I’ll be doing something a little different to most years. I’m skipping GDC to have a couple of weeks off before the madness of launching a book kicks in. Expect to see some beloved freelance favourites in your inboxes then.

And in April…well, I can’t tell you what I’m doing then just yet. But stick with VGIM over the next couple of weeks, and you’ll find out what I’ve been cooking up soon enough.

The big read - Thou can steal (gold pieces)

Love thy neighbour: I get on well with my next-door neighbour, but she usually only texts me about a few things. Have I read anything good recently? Did I pick up a package for her? And how is her cat doing when I’m on cat-sitting duties? But last week, I received a message from her that unexpectedly brought our professional interests together.

Professional courtesy: As a very capable barrister, my neighbour likes to keep abreast of legal developments that might affect her day job. Last week, she spotted a write-up from law firm Norton Rose Fulbright of a video game-related ruling that she knew would catch my eye.

Property: In the catchily titled R v Lakeman case, the UK’s Court of Appeal ruled that Old School Runescape’s in-game currency, which is called ‘gold pieces’, counts as property and can be stolen under the country’s Theft Act. In doing so, it’s opened up the possibility of some intriguing - and genuinely impactful - changes to the law around in-game currencies in the UK and beyond.

You gotta heist, for your rights, to properrrr-tay

Alleged antics: The head-scratching about whether gold pieces count as property started with some allegedly seriously naughty behaviour from a former Jagex staff member. The ex-employee, who worked at the company as a content developer, allegedly accessed and emptied 68 player accounts holding a whopping 705bn pieces of in-game gold. He is then alleged to have sold the gold to ‘off-line’ buyers via a mixture of bitcoin and fiat currency (i.e. cash), putting him on course for potential ill-gotten gains valued at the better part of £550,000.

Theft defined: The alleged Danny Ocean of Old School Runescape was charged with several crimes, including a range of money-laundering offences and the wonderfully twee sounding misuse of computers. But at the heart of all these crimes was a charge of theft, which is defined in the UK by a 1965 act as when someone “dishonestly appropriates property belonging to another with the intention of permanently depriving the other of it.”

Missing the threshold: However, the defendant’s lawyers said that the theft charge should be dismissed on the basis that gold pieces don’t count as property. And a Crown Court judge agreed with them. While the judge did say that gold pieces met some key criteria to be counted as property (more on that in just a second), they suggested that the in-game currency lacked two key characteristics of other forms of property.

Heated rivalrousness: Gold pieces, they argued, were a form of digital ‘pure information’ because they could be infinitely created by the publisher and shared with players in a manner legally akin to someone sharing knowledge out loud. This meant that the asset lacked ‘rivalrousness’ – an economic term which means that the consumption of a good stops someone else from consuming it at the same time. This meant that gold pieces didn’t count as a nickable form of property, meaning that the theft charges should have been dropped.

Appealing outcome

Second opinion: Unsurprisingly, the prosecution appealed against the verdict. And after what reads like a lot of tedious legal to-ing and fro-ing, the case wended its way to the appeal court. There, the judges prodded the original judgment with a series of questions to work out whether they should be charged with theft. To save your sanity and reading a very long document, I’ve chunked them up into three lines of inquiry.

Outlining the arguments: The first was whether Runescape’s gold pieces meet four conditions of property known as the Ainsworth criteria, which means that they must be definable, identifiable by third parties, “capable in its nature of assumption by third parties” (i.e. tradeable) and have a degree of permanence. The second was to examine whether the original judgement was right to define gold pieces as ‘pure information’ that lacked that all-important rivalrous context. And finally, the appeal court judges had to answer whether emptying someone else’s account of gold pieces met the narrow criminal conditions of the Theft Act, which - as a reminder - is all about dishonestly depriving someone of their property.

Objects permanence: On the Ainsworth criteria, which were defined by a 1965 case and not by the current Gillingham manager, the appeal court agreed with the original judgement that they meet every criterion. The ruling asserts that gold pieces are “clearly definable and identifiable” by third parties. It states that gold pieces could be swapped by players in-game, making them capable of assumption. And while Jagex does have the right to yank gold pieces from players’ accounts or take the currency out of circulation, the judges stated that gold pieces have at least a degree of permanence for anyone who owns some. “A melting ice lolly or a burning match will qualify as property,” the ruling stated, inadvertently channelling the spirit of an Instagram influencer posting captions over pictures of tropical sunsets.

Clip it good: However, the Court of Appeal disagreed with the Crown Court judgment that gold pieces lacked the quality of rivalrousness. Although they did recognise that the production of gold pieces in a digital context is near infinite, they diverged from the original judgment by comparing the in-game currency to the production of paper clips. There is an essentially infinite supply of paper clips in the world. But if you own one and use it to hold together a stack of documents on a table, that “precludes its use or consumption by another.” The gold pieces in your Runescape account may be the thin end of an infinitesimally large currency edge, but they’re still your gold pieces to use as you see fit. And if that’s the case, they must be rivalrous because you holding onto them stops someone else from using them.

Function over form: Even more importantly than the stationery comparison, the judges drew a comparison with developing law around cryptocurrency to show that the important thing is not whether an asset is produced digitally; it’s how it functions in the world. Instead of fussing over how gold pieces are produced, the judges asked whether they had a visual and functional value in the world and whether that value is recognised in-game or through third-party markets. Drawing on guidance from the Law Commission regarding digital assets in general, they argued that gold pieces were recognised as having useful value and cash value due to the existence of those offline markets where players can flog currency. This, in their opinion, knocked away the ‘pure information’ argument.

Dishonest dealings: Therefore, the judges were able to head to the final question about whether pinching gold pieces from someone else’s account could amount to theft. Using the arguments they’d developed and drawing on other examples from across the world - including a legal case in the Netherlands which ruled that stealing in-game items was a form of theft - they said that it would be unsatisfactory if stealing Runescape gold “did not amount to the offence of theft.” The intention behind emptying someone’s account of gold pieces and flogging the proceeds online could therefore reasonably be seen as an attempt to dishonestly deprive someone of their property. This led to the conclusion that the defendant could be tried for theft, reversing the Crown Court judgment in the process.

All that glistens might be gold?

Caveats galore: For now, the ruling has a deliberately narrow application because the judges who presided over the case took great care to draw boundaries around it. While it did find that Old School Runescape’s gold pieces could be considered property in the context of a criminal charge of theft, they stated that this did not necessarily apply to wider civil law. They made it clear that the judgment only applies to the status of gold pieces in Runescape in this trial, not wider in-game purchases. The entire case was also understandably UK-centric, meaning it theoretically has little international applicability.

But, but, but: VGIM sources believe that the ruling has the potential to be influential both in the UK and the rest of the video game world. For starters, it puts into writing a lot of things that video game companies won’t necessarily like to see. It opens the door to suggestions that all in-game currencies are property. It suggests that their trade in offline grey markets for cash might give them real-world value, irrespective of what a game’s terms and conditions might say. And if both of these things are true, it could strengthen arguments around all kinds of consumer protection issues that game companies don’t want to talk about. This includes discussions over thorny issues such as whether loot boxes are gambling (because the contents of them may now be seen to have real-world value) or publishers finding fairer ways of “killing” their live service games (because users may try to argue that they have property rights over currency they’ve accrued in games).

On the cases: And though the ruling doesn’t currently apply beyond a narrow context, it establishes a legal building block for others to build upon. Even though the ruling notionally applies to narrow criminal law, Aaron Trebble of Lewis Silkin writes that the case’s “reasoning may apply equally to civil cases” – something that’ll encourage people to test its cash value conclusions in other contexts. Anna Poulter-Jones of Sheridans, meanwhile, says that companies should expect it to have broader implications because the Court of Appeal consistently draws on civil law examples to make its argument, reducing the likelihood that it can be seen as only relevant to criminal law. Whether or not this ruling is wielded successfully in a court of law to change the legal basis of in-game currencies or items, policymakers and campaigners will undoubtedly have taken notice of its conclusions. This means it may inspire wider political change, irrespective of the outcome of any future court-based ding-dongs.

Tightening net: For now, the main implication of the ruling is that an alleged wrong ‘un will go on trial for theft for pinching Runescape gold. But the Court of Appeal’s judgment could inadvertently lead to an even tighter legal environment around in-game currencies and purchases. Video game publishers would do well to brace themselves for the impact of this in the years to come.

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News in brief

The heat is on: In further UK video game legal shenanigan news, Valve is set to face a class action lawsuit that claims its overly high revenue share has negatively impacted consumers across the country. The claim, which was filed back in 2024 by Vicki Shotbolt and is supported by David Zendle and Andy Burrows, argues that Steam’s 30% revenue share and market dominance have locked consumers into the platform - depriving the UK’s 14m PC gamers of up to £656m in the process. The CAT’s decision to allow the case to proceed (which is not the same as a ‘mini-trial’ in its own words) can be read in full here.

Ooh la-na: French publisher Ubisoft has announced it is restructuring into five creative divisions as it continues a hefty internal restructure. Each division will focus on a different vertical, with Tencent-backed Vantage Studios supporting its flagship franchises. The reorganisation has coincided with cutbacks and cancellations, including the canning of a Prince of Persia remake and the closure of Ubisoft Stockholm.

Not Stopping Stop Killing Games: Stop Killing Games is heading back to the European Commission for examination after it received 1.29 million statements of support from EU citizens. The campaign, which somewhat shakily claims it is just about preventing publishers from remotely disabling video games, will receive a reply from the Commission before 27th July 2026.

Plugging leaks: Take-Two is allegedly considering delaying the physical release of Grand Theft Auto VI in an attempt to prevent leaks, according to VGC. Its report is based on information from a Polish video game site with a track record of breaking industry stories, which suggests the publisher is planning to hold back physical copies of the game to ensure its contents remain secret until launch day.

Blast off for Mars: Finally, nearly 13m popped along to a Bruno Mars concert inside Roblox’s Steal a Brainrot experience. The event, which also achieved 10m livestream views across 14 countries, allowed attendees to grab their own limited-edition Brunito Marsito brainrot collectable. For the record, my brain rotted while writing that final sub-clause.

Moving on

Tom Stone has been promoted to Team Lead at Bastion…Karl Stricker is Chief Revenue Officer at Virtuous…Lee Guinchard has expanded his responsibilities at Embracer Group to become Chief Operating Officer…Monty Hernandez has been appointed as Strategic Operations Lead at Netflix, after spending over a decade working at Microsoft…And Michael Blank and Nicole Quinn have co-founded Connect Ventures…

Jobs ahoy

Electronic Arts is hiring an SVP, Publishing - EA Entertainment in Redwood City…Hangar 13 has a Narrative Director role going in Brighton…Quantic Dream has a rare Cinematic Director role available in Paris…Climax Studios needs a Technical Artist on a 12-month contract…And ACMI has the dream role of Melbourne International Games Week Coordinator going down under…

Events and conferences

• Taipei Game Show, Taiwan - 29th January-1st February 2026

• DICE Summit, Las Vegas - 11th-13th February 2026

• Guildford Games Festival, Guildford - 14th February 2026

• devcom leadership summit, Lisbon - 24th-26th February 2026

• Game Developer Conference, San Francisco - 9th-13th March 2026

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Games of the week

• Highguard - Play the PvP shooter that received a surprising amount of hate at last year’s Game Awards is out now.

• Earth Must Die - Point and click adventure featuring the cream of the British comedy crop (Tamsin Greig! Alex Horne! Other people!) lands on Steam.

• Steel Century Groove - Elite Beat Agents meets Pacific Rim in this dancing mech extravaganza.

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Before you go…

What happens when a beloved cultural institution asks you to pitch a game for their forthcoming exhibition? You make an in-person game about answering video game consumer hotlines, of course.

Hotline ‘93 is an interactive experience designed to recreate the thrill of answering phone calls from punters stuck on their favourite titles.

Yarn Spinner has the story of how it came to life and why Melbourne’s outstanding ACMI museum said hell yes to the idea.

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

• The UK Video Games Council kicks off at Pocket Gamer Connects

• Scotland’s Games Network unveils new plan to grow the local games biz

• Inkle’s TR-49 offers up eerie puzzling in the week’s releases

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Hello VGIM-ers,

It’s been another busy week here. Last Friday, I sat down for my comms planning meeting for Power Play. On Monday, I joined an Out Making Games roundtable about the censorship of LGBTQ+ content on video game platforms. And on Tuesday, I hosted a private roundtable for leaders in the external development biz on behalf of Moore Kingston Smith.

But the good news is that I still found plenty of time to write this week’s VGIM. A relief for you all, I’m sure.

Note: The original newsletter contained a misspelling of Donna Orlowski’s surname, due in no small part to my terrible handwriting. Apologies to Donna and holders of surnames of Polish descent everywhere.

The big read - A UK Video Games Council-ing session

The whale trail: Pocket Gamer Connects, the video game conference with more whale chat than Captain Ahab, came ashore in London this week. The event, which kick-started Pocket Gamer’s 20th birthday celebration, once again saw thousands of industry professionals descend on The Brewery and the Barbican to talk shop.

Following the story: As the industry’s premier place for talking politics, VGIM was naturally drawn to the policy chatter spread throughout the schedule. And while your humble writer had to duck out of panel duties due to a scheduling snafu (sorry, Celia), he did find time to check in on a panel all about the still-relatively-recently-established UK Video Games Council to see how the heck it is doing.

Terms of endearment

Time for a callback: Eager VGIM readers will remember this isn’t the first time the council has graced these virtual pages. Last July, we ran a story about its formation to find out how it plans to advance the interests of the UK Industrial Strategy-approved video game sector.

Teething issues: Six months on from its formation, it’s fair to say the council hasn’t had the smoothest start. Shortly after it launched, co-convener Ukie was forced to respond to a social media spat about one of the Council’s founding members, which raised questions about its governance structures. There were also plenty of private concerns that the Council’s membership did not represent the regional diversity of the UK games sector, leading to a rumbling of grumbling.

Rules and regulations: However, the Council has recovered its gait after stumbling out of the blocks. It is now chaired solely by Nick Button-Brown, who emerged as the council’s true knight in shining armour following a formal election process amongst its members. The body also now has terms of reference around its membership, including term limits, a process for booting bad eggs off the board, and a method for selecting new members to address the regional disparity within its board membership. Expect to hear more details on this soon.

Disappointingly limited: The reboot has also given the UK Video Games Council a chance to clarify its true purpose to the games business. It is not Team UK Video Game Industry: World Police or the Unofficial Games Industry Governing Body, as one source told me. Instead, it really is just a way for the UK games biz to talk to the Government about economic growth on a regular basis. That’s why Chucklefish’s Donna Orlowski is off on a government trade mission to China later this month that Prime Minister Keir Starmer is reportedly set to join. Will she push the case for a boosted version of the country’s Video Game Expenditure Credit for indie developers on the flight over? Or will she convince him to romance someone more interesting than Penny in Stardew Valley? Only time will tell.

Council culture

Heckling the audience: But if Orlowski is planning to collar Keir to discuss ways to grow the UK games biz, what kind of tone would she strike? Judging from the panel, it’d be punchy stuff. To the likely non-delight of onlooking government officials, members of the UK games council responded to Ukie CEO Nick Poole’s gentle questions about the government’s support for the biz by *checks notes* relentlessly punching it in the stomach.

Heavyweight criticism: Miniclip’s Saad Choudri was the council’s pugilist-in-chief. As chief exec of one of the few British-born games businesses capable of dropping a casual billion dollars on an acquisition, Choudri was withering about how little help his business received from our government. “We’ve [the UK games industry] all the talent and none of the support.” In contrast to markets like Canada, Vietnam, or Turkey, where developers can benefit from cash to support everything from prototyping to funding mobile ad buying, Choudri argued that the UK industry has comparatively little financial or structural support to lean on. “If I was setting up a 100-person studio today, I wouldn’t do it in the UK,” he added scathingly.

Brexit from the main menu: It wasn’t just the current Government that received jabs from the council, though. I asked the panel whether the Brexit vote in 2016 had helped or hindered the UK games industry in the decade since. After reeling off its negative impact on the sector in terms of hiring talent, accessing funding from across the continent, and receiving support from our friends in Europe, Nick Button-Brown channelled his inner Gennaro Gattuso to describe its impact as “not great” and “really shit.” A ringing endorsement, then.

Laundry list of complaints: And sandwiched between Choudri’s rant and Button-Brown’s Brexit despair (a great name for a flavour of ice cream, you’ll agree), the Council reeled off a load of other concerns that presumably caused the coterie of civil servants to fidget in their seats. Orlowski unloaded about her concerns regarding the UK’s education system and the extent to which it prepares youngsters for the business world they’re stepping into. Choudri opened fire on the “anti-immigration” sentiment sweeping the country, describing international hiring as almost impossible due to the UK’s lack of a visa comparable to the effectiveness of the US’s H1-B temporary skilled worker visa. And to land one extra punch, Emily Bailey, co-founder of service provider Jeco and the “baby” of the council, added to Choudri’s earlier remarks by saying she wouldn’t set up a two-person games business in the UK either. Better make sure that you hire between three and ninety-nine people for your next games business, then.

Chipping in(to our shoulders)

Playing diplomacy: So, it was a total bloodbath then? Well, not entirely. Nick Poole once again demonstrated his mastery of the diplomatic arts by spinning the Brexit question into an opportunity to discuss UK games companies trading with countries across the world. Bailey may not be keen on founding another game studio, but she did agree that support from the UK PLC had helped Jeco to get off the ground (including through the support of the British Business Bank). And while the panel did spend most of the conversation laying into the Government, it did share some practical tips on how we could schmooze our overlords more effectively. This included getting games businesses to talk to their Members of Parliament more effectively and remembering to invite political dignitaries to jazzy video game launch events to give them the glitzy photo ops that they’re all desperate for.

Overly self-sufficient: Overall, though, I left the panel feeling a little bit concerned that the UK Video Games Council was at risk of leaning too hard into negativity about the industry’s historic lack of Government support.

Lacking a plan: Yes, we still don’t have a UK-wide national strategy for growing our domestic games sector. The impact of Brexit and our hostile immigration environment has dramatically weakened our ability to hire the brightest talent from across the world. Public funding for games in the UK appears increasingly sparse compared to direct rivals like Germany and madly funded petro-states like Saudi Arabia. And as any regular reader of VGIM knows, it definitely is important to be unafraid to noisily state when something isn’t working on the policy front.

A little less chippy?: But while the Council clearly enjoyed having a lovely little vent on stage, Poole’s steer towards a more diplomatic approach is necessary. Things certainly aren’t perfect in the UK games industry, but they’re much better now than they were when I worked for Ukie four years ago. Extra support for the industry in the form of a boosted game fund, the explicit backing of the games business in the Industrial Strategy and even by the presence of Sir Chris Bryant MP, Minister of State for Trade Policy, at Pocket Gamer Connects itself demonstrates that the Government really is paying attention for once.

Chips off the menu: So while I can understand that the UK games biz (and much of the industry around the world) still has a chip on its shoulder about being ignored by policy makers for years, I left the session on Monday feeling like it’s time to remove it. Otherwise, we risk being seen as whingers stuck in the past rather than pragmatic problem-solvers pushing towards a brighter future.

News in brief

Scotland’s game plan: In further UK video games policy news, the Scottish Games Network has unveiled a “national action plan” to push forward its video game industry. The plan, which has been put together by the Scottish Games Network in conjunction with the devolved government, aims to support 5,000 video game jobs and £1bn of economic value by 2030. VGIM likes the overall plan. And we specifically like suggestions such as creating a “chief games officer” and creating a National Games Innovation Centre to grow the local sector effectively. Nicely done, everyone.

VGIM’s Steam prediction update: Simon Carless of GameDiscoverCo spotted that Steam has rewritten its AI disclosure rules for its storefront. Game developers who use ‘AI-powered tools’ for ‘efficiency gains’ no longer need to disclose usage. But the company still requires game companies to declare if they use generative tools to create content or if their game allows users to generate their own AI-powered content on the fly. It’s not quite what VGIM forecasted at the top of the year, but it’s close enough to count as a win.

More Grok backlash: Min-Liang Tan, Razer’s CEO, had an interview to forget on The Verge’s Decoder podcast. Tan was forced on the defensive about his company’s decision to use Grok to power its physical AI companion product Ava, unsuccessfully arguing that Razer’s commitment to trust and safety countered the very public problems with the model. He also ended up in an unconvincing chat about consumers loving to pay ongoing subscription costs to access services, which is well worth cringing your way through if you get a chance.

Good game, good game: You’ll be forgiven if you’ve missed this Davos development due to the current state of geopolitics. But a new podcast launched at the event, which aims to promote the positives of play across the world. The Good Game Club, hosted by Jude Ower MBE and Mathias Gredal Nørvig, CEO of Subway Surfers creators SYBO, will interview a series of guests about the importance of video games, video game companies, and charities to doing good across the world.

Listing the cost of job cuts: Finally, Stephen Totilo has found an itemised way to show the at times dizzying impact of video game job cuts. In a piece for Game File, Totilo has run the rule over letters sent to Washington State’s Employment Security Department by video game businesses informing them of headcount reductions. And while letters from businesses like Microsoft do not name who has been affected by job losses, the line-by-line breakdown of job roles affected does provide a brutal insight into the far-ranging impacts of cuts.

Moving on

Jonathan Hales is the new CEO of Megabit Publishing…Mattias Wiking has also landed a new CEO role at strategy game funsters Winterkeep Interactive…Max Downton has been appointed as Senior Account Manager at DDA…Izzy Jagan has popped up at the heavily capitalised YRS TRULY as a Campaign Manager…And Ukie has made two new hires, with Cinzia Musio joining as Programme Manager with responsibility for the Raise the Game inclusion campaign and Stacey Jubb signing up as a Senior Programme Manager leading on the org’s Skills Network work…

Jobs ahoy

Epic Games is recruiting a Senior Counsel (Game Production)...Sony Interactive Entertainment wants a Digital Games Monetisation Development - Manager…Arrowhead Game Studios is hiring a Craft Manager in Sweden…Rockstar Games needs an Associate Director of Creator Strategy…And Riot Games is hunting for the delightfully named Director of Music Affairs…

Events and conferences

• Taipei Game Show, Taiwan - 29th January-1st February

• DICE Summit, Las Vegas - 11th-13th February

• Guildford Games Festival, Guildford - 14th February

• devcom leadership summit, Lisbon - 24th-26th February

• Game Developer Conference, San Francisco - 9th-13th March

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Games of the week

• TR-49 - New Inkle game set in a World War II codebreaking facility channels The Room and spooky detective game vibes for your amusement.

• Final Fantasy VII Remake Intergrade - The latest part of the FFVII remake arrives on Nintendo Switch 2 and Xbox.

• Cult of the Lamb: Woolhaven - DLC to the incredibly popular sacrificial lamb simulator arrives today, to the delight of all you utter sickos out there.

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Before you go…

What’s the story behind the making of Nate, the “pathetic character” whom you steer in the remarkably hard Baby Steps?

Keza MacDonald has the story in The Guardian.

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

• The WHO hosts an intriguing webinar about video games and social health

• Roblox rolls out face-check age verification across the world

• The Digital Fairness Act is the law to watch in 2026

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Hello VGIM-ers,

Welcome to the first Playing Politics of 2026, your monthly look at the political news shaping the video games industry across the world.

This month, we’re taking a look at the World Health Organisation’s thinking about video games and public health, picking through some of the political news shaping the biz, and offering up five trends for you to keep an eye on in 2026.

If you want to read Playing Politics, get other exclusive VGIM content, receive first dibs on event tickets, and get discounts on all purchases (including sponsorships), sign up as a VGIM Insider for £6 per month or £50 per year below.

Inside the World Health Organization’s video games webinar

Health (side)bar: There’s nothing like the start of a New Year to make you think about your health. Whether you’re saying no to the booze for a Dry January, fighting the hordes to get onto the cross-trainer at the gym, or reminding everyone that Blue Monday was invented as a marketing campaign, the first month of any year is a good time for a health check.

A conversation, not a conclusion: The World Health Organization (WHO) agrees. On Wednesday 14th January, the WHO held a webinar all about video games and health. Catchily titled Social Health and Digital Play: A Conversation, Not a Conclusion, the session brought together 245 people to hear talks from the WHO, academics, and industry about the potential harms and benefits of games on our ‘social’ health.

Social medium: The purpose of the webinar was supposedly two-fold. The first reason it was held was to air the possible impact of video games on social health issues like isolation or loneliness, moving the discourse away from the traditional chats about physical health (e.g. obesity) or mental health (e.g. gaming disorder). The second was to spark an open conversation between academics, industry, policy makers and health professionals to explore an underresearched topic.

Leopards, spots: However, there was a problem. Despite framing the event as an open-minded chat, and despite the best efforts of the majority of academic speakers to keep it that way, the WHO seemed reluctant to engage in an open conversation about games and social health. Instead, it veered back towards its well-trodden concerns around mental and physical health, undercutting the intention of the event in the process.

Read more

• We pull apart Tim Sweeney’s censorship argument about Grok

• Fired Rockstar employees lose first round of union-busting case

• Animal Crossing: New Horizons gets a Switch 2 update in the week’s releases

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Hello VGIM-ers,

A hearty hello for this second newsletter of the year. I’ve got a few quick things for you before we dive into an opinionated big read.

I’m heading to Pocket Gamer Connects London on Monday next week, where I’ll be taking the temperature of the games biz. If you want to talk shop, get in touch via the email address linked at the bottom of the newsletter.

Next, the North American launch of Power Play has been delayed slightly due to the exciting world of print logistics. The book will now be available in bookstores across America on Tuesday 21st July.

And finally, the first paid newsletter of the year lands tomorrow. If you want to read Playing Politics, which is like VGIM but entirely about the wonderful world of video games policy, sign up as a paid subscriber below.

Update: Thursday 15th January, 08:10am - The following piece was written and uploaded to Substack’s backend prior to an announcement by X in the early hours of Thursday morning, which said that it will stop allowing users to generate images of people in “revealing clothes.” The story can be found here.

The big opinion - Why Tim Sweeney is wrong about X

Knock, knock: I was wondering when the controversy surrounding the sustained use of Grok to generate non-consensual sexualised content of women and children would knock on the video games industry’s door. I wasn’t expecting the thudding to come from inside the industry’s house.

Going off on one: Last Sunday, Tim Sweeney, CEO of Epic Games, Leroy Jenkins-ed his way into the middle of the Grok-powered political scandal that’s made its way around the world. In response to a post on Mac Rumours about three US Senators writing to Apple and Google to ask them to remove X - and by extension Grok - from its stores, Sweeney argued against the app’s removal. He suggested that it was important for platforms to remain open “to shut down every politician’s incessant demands…to censor all of their political opponents.” He went on to argue that “all Major AIs have documented instances of going off the rails,” suggesting that the senators’ request to remove X amounted to “demanding gatekeepers selectively crush the one [AI model] that’s their political opponent’s company.”

Media pick up: Unsurprisingly, Sweeney’s remarks were quickly picked up by the games press. Vikki Blake at Eurogamer was first out of the gate with the story. Blake reported Sweeney’s headline comments and follow-up comments to users, where he stated that “the bad stuff people do with AI, I do not defend, but I staunchly oppose the wrongdoing of a few from being used as a pretence to undermine the freedoms of all.” Shortly after, Sweeney would go on to accuse PC Gamer - who followed up on Blake’s story - of spreading a “vile lie” about his support for Grok and X in general, arguing that it misrepresented his efforts to criticise a “government official for pressuring Apple and Google to block a speech app.”

Kicking the tyres: In the glorious post-truth age we live in, it is tempting to pass over the farrago around Sweeney’s remarks as little more than social media chit-chat. That would be a mistake. Sweeney is one of the few figures in the games industry who has genuine cut-through into the world around us. His perspective matters. His comments deserve investigation. And after giving the evidence base a thorough kicking, I believe that Sweeney’s opinion doesn’t stand up to scrutiny and deserves to be critiqued.

Evidence-based arguments

A quick precis: Sweeney’s argument to keep X on the app stores rests on three pillars. He suggests that all major AI tools can go off the rails and enable the creation of CSAM content by determined users. He argues that “all major AI companies make their best efforts to combat this.” Therefore, he concludes that Grok’s selective targeting by senators must be a move to crush an opponent as part of “basic crony capitalism” - rather than authentic concern over the content being generated by its users.

On paper argument: If you don’t look too closely at Sweeney’s argument, it makes sense. Generative AI service providers such as OpenAI and Anthropic have reported the creation of child sexual abuse material (CSAM) through their tools to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) in the United States. All of these companies, including X, have content policies which expressly prohibit the creation of CSAM and allow for enforcement action against people who do. The focus on Grok’s use in the creation of CSAM by the three Democrats is therefore factually “selective”, meaning it is theoretically possible to suggest their letter calling for X’s shutdown is a pretext for political action.

A problem of scale: However, the pillars of his argument crumble when you prod them with evidence. Yes, all image generation tools can, and are, used by people to create sexually problematic content. But Grok enables the creation of such content on a scale that dwarves other platforms in the space. Open source researcher Genevieve Oh estimated that Grok was being used to generate 6,700 sexually suggestive images per hour at the start of 2026, a run rate of up to 160,000 images per day or tens of millions of images per year if it continues. By contrast, OpenAI filed roughly 150,000 reports to NCMEC about its users generating CSAM in the first six months of 2025. And Anthropic, which admittedly does not have an image generation functionality within its model Claude, reported that its users generated 613 pieces of CSAM content in the same time frame as OpenAI’s reporting. While the comparison points are not perfect - for example, Oh’s research includes wider harmful sexual content such as adult ‘nudification’ which would not constitute CSAM - Grok is clearly being used to generate much more problematic content than its rivals. This justifies the attention by policymakers toward it.

Different priorities: This leads, in turn, to the demolition of Sweeney’s second point: that every company is doing their best to combat it. In response to concerns about CSAM on its platform, OpenAI released an extensive post in September 2025 outlining its efforts to tackle its creation through reporting to NCMEC, by using ‘hash’ technology to identify offensive images as they’re uploaded into a model, and advocating for public/private partnerships to address the problem at a regulatory level. Anthropic has committed to similar, arguably deeper, work in its own business. X’s leadership, by contrast, fanned the flames of the crisis. Elon Musk responded to the ‘put her in a bikini’ trend that sparked the crisis by asking Grok to dress him up in one. The platform responded to concerns about users generating CSAM via Grok by putting the image generation tool behind an easily navigable paywall, rather than amending the model or tightening the guardrails around it. Musk then claimed that mooted action by UK internet regulator Ofcom against the platform amounted to “an excuse for censorship.” If Grok is being selectively targeted because it is being used to generate a vast amount of illegal and harmful content, X is being targeted because its response to concerns merits further investigation.

Reading homework: So that leaves Sweeney’s characterisation of the letter from senators Ron Wyden, Ben Ray Lujan, and Edward J. Mackey to Apple and Google as selective political interference to undermine their rivals. The extent to which Sweeney read the letter is questionable, given that his response to PC Gamer suggested it was the work of a singular “government official” rather than three elected senators.

Targeted action: However, a read-through shows that the letter is not a brute-force attempt to censor a rival. Instead, it’s a proportionate and even-handed request for platforms to act against a business not complying with their own illegal and harmful sexual content policies. The senators open the letter by identifying how Grok’s use in the “mass generation of nonconsensual sexualised images of women and children” has shown “complete disregard for your stores’ distribution terms.” It cites specific policies from both stores that would justify the app’s removal, while alluding to public statements each business has made about creating safe environments for their users. And while the senators do call for X’s removal, they suggest that the removal should be “until X’s policy violations are addressed.” It is not a permanent attempt to remove a free-speech platform; it’s an exhortation for Apple and Google to remove a service until it follows the rules they’ve set. In fact, the only reference to censorship within the senators’ letter regarded the removal of two apps from the App Store and Google Play that allowed members of the public to track enforcement actions by the Department of Homeland Security. Neither app explicitly breached the rules of either app store. Both were pulled from download last year for “safety reasons”, following pressure from the US Government.

Considering the implications

Myopic, not malicious: So on all counts, I believe that Sweeney is wrong. Grok does generate significantly more sexually compromising content than its rivals. X does considerably less to stop users from going ‘off-the-rails’, with its leadership actively encouraging its users to do so. The “selective” targeting of Grok by the senators is precisely because the service clearly contravenes app store policy, rather than a political pretext akin to the Trump Administration threatening charges against the Chair of the Federal Reserve due to a disagreement over monetary policy. And while Sweeney’s comments don’t have malicious intent, and he clearly opposes the misuse of generative AI image generators for inappropriate sexual purposes, his opinion is misleading: pulling us away from the truth of what is happening in the process.

Epic fail: Therefore, it’s important to take Sweeney’s argument apart like this for three big reasons. For starters, his comments risk undermining the work that his own business does to protect young players. The Epic Games store has banned content featuring sexual themes that it deems inappropriate for children. The company has worked extraordinarily hard to roll out a range of features designed to protect young players after receiving a record-breaking fine in the US in December 2022 for a range of child safety breaches. And its investors include the parent company of LEGO and Disney, two businesses that take the protection of young people exceptionally seriously. Sweeney’s defence of Grok is therefore likely to cause headaches for his content, legal, communications, and public policy teams, who may need to negotiate the issue with much greater diplomacy than he has.

Recall the ambassador: Sweeney’s comments also have to be challenged because he is an ambassador for our industry. He has undoubtedly done enormous good for the sector through the creation of Unreal Engine, the growth of Fortnite, and the impact his campaigning has had on loosening competition rules across the world. But because he is a recognisable figurehead for the industry, there’s a risk that his careless comments are seen as reflective of our overall culture. Given the decades of work that video game businesses have done to assure the public that the medium is safe for children, creating some distance between his remarks and the sector as a whole is important so that we don’t muddy the water.

Punchy conclusion: But most importantly of all, we need to challenge arguments like this because facts, in the end, still matter. As we wade deeper into the confusing morass of the modern information age, we must have the confidence to challenge assertive political opinions where the evidence base doesn’t support them. Otherwise, we risk losing touch with the truth altogether.

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News in brief

Wasted (for now): A judge has denied a request from Rockstar Games staffers, who were fired by the company for allegedly leaking confidential materials, to receive pay while challenging their dismissal. Judge Frances Eccles said that staff supported by the Independent Workers’ Union of Great Britain had not demonstrated a “pretty good chance of success” in winning their case against the GTA maker via an employment tribunal. However, Bloomberg reports that the bar for achieving a favourable interim ruling is higher than receiving a favourable ruling in the final case - suggesting the battle has a long way to run.

Massive acquisitions: Video game industry M&A hit a record $161bn, according to M&A corporate advisory firm Drake Star. The Public Investment Fund’s acquisition of Electronic Arts for $55bn, Netflix’s likely acquisition of Warner Bros, and Niantic’s acquisition by Scopely pushed the market to new heights. Drakestar predicts that 2026 is likely to be buoyant again, boosted by private equity investment in the industry and some possible high-profile IPOs (hello, Discord).

Loot boxed in: Fortnite is allowing user-generated content developers to sell their own in-game purchases within their titles, including loot boxes. Developers who activate creative mode transactions will receive 100% of the V-Bucks value of purchases until January 2027, dropping to 50% thereafter. But who will receive 100% of the stick for bringing loot boxes back into a game that famously dropped them to great applause years ago? We’ll find out soon enough…

Job losses latest: Ubisoft has announced that it is cutting 55 jobs at Massive Entertainment and Ubisoft Stockholm. Jon Hicks reports in GI Biz that the job losses “were not related to performance issues”. The layoffs follow a round of voluntary redundancies in the business in October 2025 and come just a week after the company announced it was shutting down its recently unionised studio in Halifax.

Awesome outcome: And finally, Awesome Games Done Quick (AGDQ) has raised $2.44m for charity in this year’s live-streaming extravaganza. The event, which ran between 6th January and 10th January, saw streamers tackle Majora’s Mask with a blindfold on and beat a Resident Evil game using a Guitar Hero controller. All funds this year were donated to the Prevent Cancer Foundation.

Moving on

Tom Dore has been appointed Managing Director of National Student Esports…Becky Mullen has been promoted to Client Services & Campaigns Director at Bastion…Richard Burnham is Principal Legal Counsel at Everplay Group… Valentine Piedelievre-Eman will become Chief Communications Officer at Ubisoft from February 2026…And Adam Phillips is the new Head of Gaming at Make-A-Wish UK…

Jobs ahoy

This Week in Video Games is hiring a News Editor, with a preference for someone UK-based…Pantaloon wants a Brand Manager to support its mission to help creative misfits thrive…Hasbro is hunting for a Senior Manager Digital - YouTube in its City of London office…Gameloft is bringing in a new Creative Lead in Brisbane…And Board is hiring a Senior Game Designer to support its forthcoming tabletop games console in New York…

Events and conferences

• Pocket Gamer Connects, London - 19th-20th January 2026

• DICE Summit, Las Vegas - 11th-13th February 2026

• Guildford Games Festival, Guildford - 14th February 2026

• devcom leadership summit, Lisbon - 24th-26th February 2026

• Game Developer Conference, San Francisco - 9th-13th March 2026

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Games of the week

• Animal Crossing: New Horizons - Ignore the fact that you’ve not visited your island in approximately half a decade by upgrading to the Nintendo Switch 2 edition of this Covid classic.

• Quarantine Zone - Prevent a different kind of plague from being unleashed in Brigada’s zombie-tinged twist on Papers, Please.

• Big Hops - Do you like Spiderman-style swinging? Do you enjoy 3D platformers? And do you have a sense of whimsy? Then this, my friend, is the game for you.

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Before you go…

Unless you’re lucky enough to live in the Southern hemisphere, January is pretty darn dark and chilly.

So why not curl up with one of nine cosy games tipped by The New York Times’s Haley Perry, whose expertise is listed by the publication as video games and booze.

Cheers to that!

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

• We make six mostly bulletproof-ish predictions about the global video games industry

• Rainbow Six under Siege from hackers tops our out-of-office news round-up

• 007 First Light tops our picks of the releases for 2026

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Hello VGIM-ers,

Welcome back, everybody.

The first week back at work each year is always disorienting. So I’m here to help with a special ‘welcome to 2026’ edition of the newsletter.

I’ll kick things off by rattling through a series of increasingly unhinged predictions about where the industry will go in 2026. I’ll wrap up the news you might have missed over the festive season. And I’m going to handpick a few of the big releases that aren’t Grand Theft Auto VI for you to keep an eye on this year.

But before you dive in, make it your New Year’s Resolution to support Video Games Industry Memo by either i) signing up as a VGIM Insider for just £50 a year or ii) contacting me to discuss sponsorship opportunities for our newsletters and events this year.

I’ve got some fun plans up my sleeve. I’d love it if you could help me bring them to life.

The big read - Six video games industry predictions for 2026

Survivors: In 2024, the video games industry “survived until 2025”. In 2025, the video games industry survived 2025. In 2026…we’re going to have to do something that isn’t about surviving 2025, that’s for sure.

Self-promote early and often: Glibness aside, we find ourselves at the start of a fascinating year for the sector. The release of Grand Theft Auto VI is going to dominate the cultural chatter. Video game software revenue will likely cross the $200bn mark globally for the first time. And some guy is releasing a fascinating book about video games and geopolitics in the middle of the year. Exciting eh?

Shake your Caracas: But even with lots to look forward to, 2026 is steeped in uncertainty. The industry’s hard reset after COVID looks to be complete, but it has changed the rules of the game. The culture war around the use of artificial intelligence within development is raging. And the global political environment we operate in is a little spicy at the moment.

Seamless introduction: So, what exactly will happen in the forthcoming year in video games? Here are six predictions about the games business, ranging from most likely to happen to least.

Prediction 1: Grand Theft Auto VI is an awe-inspiring but era-ending success story

Dichotomy central: Grand Theft Auto VI will almost certainly release in November 2026. When it does, it will simultaneously be the biggest Triple A release in video game history and mark the end of a period of video game history as we know it.

Multi-billion-dollar baby: It’s hard to know exactly how much cash Take-Two and Rockstar will make from the crime caper. But the reasonable guest is “loads”. Boffins suggest that it’ll swipe the best part of $3bn from excited players in opening week sales alone, generating enough income to single-handedly push the $197bn global games business past the aforementioned $200bn barrier. It’ll also provide a long-term bump to the wider market, increasing the console install base in a way that hardware makers and other game publishers will be grateful for.

End of an era: Its success, however, will be akin to Paris St Germain’s £200m+ purchase of the footballer Neymar in 2017: a financial aberration that won’t be repeated for decades. The game’s billion-dollar budget is a product of GTA’s unique position in the industry, not a target for any business to aim for. Its decade-long development cycle is an indulgence few can follow. Questions linger about whether the new release will convert or cannibalise the user base of the long-lived GTA Online: the real money-maker that has given Rockstar room to manoeuvre.

Luxury items: There’s no doubt in my mind that GTA VI will be a massive hit when it releases, dominating playtime, spend, and attention. But will it also be the game that confirms the ‘traditional’ console model is now more of a luxury targeted at older players in a handful of long-established markets? I bet that it will.

Prediction 2: China becomes the centre of the video game world

China rises: GTA VI’s era-ending success matters because it’s taking place at the same time as America’s position as the world’s video game power is supplanted by its main rival: China.

Big numbers: You could argue that it is already on top of the video game world. China is the biggest market in the world in terms of revenue ($53.2bn) and player count (723m), according to Newzoo. Tencent has been the biggest (or one of the biggest) game publishers in the world since 2017. Releases like Honor of Kings, Genshin Impact, and Black Myth: Wukong have shown the depth of talent and range of business models that the market can support (whether at home or abroad). There’s still enormous room for revenue growth in the territory, both as the population gets richer and through sneaky grey market growth on PC via Steam Global (where traditional Chinese is now its largest language).

Avoiding the slowdown: But there are two reasons why China is likely to turn its lead over America into dominance. Despite a better-than-expected 2025, the global games industry is still only forecast to grow roughly in line with inflation until 2030. The Chinese games market, as well as Chinese-speaking markets across South East Asia, offers the most obvious pathway to growing game revenue. The region is also well placed to become a main hub for game development, providing developers with highly-skilled and comparatively low-cost talent with greater alignment to China.

Protectionism for the win?: Additionally, China’s protectionist, and just occasionally authoritarian, policies towards its games industry give it strategic control over the sector. The challenges of accessing the country’s regulated market - which requires following all kinds of rules around company ownership, data headquartering, and in-game creative content - ensure that approved gatekeepers like Tencent will grow their position in the market further. And while the country’s willingness to turn a blind eye to grey markets allows plenty of other games into China, especially on PC, the always-present possibility of a crackdown on game content keeps everyone on their toes.

Caveats aplenty: This doesn’t mean the country will emerge as the world’s video game superpower without its fair share of challenges, of course. The Chinese Communist Party’s tight grip on power in China means it will trade off economic growth for political discipline if it deems it necessary, as seen in the numerous video game crackdowns between 2017-2022. China’s protectionist policies have given domestic developers control over the market, but clamped down on their creative freedom through content restrictions in a way that risks limiting their international reach. Growth isn’t a guarantee either, with Reuters reporting that the country is on track to miss its 5% annual growth target by a couple of percentage points.

Centre of our universe: However, these are brakes on China’s games market growth rather than hard barriers to it. And if it does become the superpower of the video games industry world, expect the industry to draw ever closer to its orbit in the years to come.

Prediction 3: “Thesis” led publishing to win big in 2026

Theorise to monetise: The maturation of the video game consumer market, the consolidation of video game publishing through acquisitions, and intense competition due to a glut of video game releases have made the industry even harder to operate in. But one group will benefit from this new reality: thesis-led publishers and developers.

Massively reductive explainer: For much of the past decade, digital game publishing has felt generic. Of course, individual publishers have often had differing vibes, specialised in certain platforms, or supported distribution in certain territories. But when the market was growing like the clappers, publishing functions were generally pretty generic: developers pitched game ideas, publishers shoved cash towards them depending on the functions they’d fulfil, and everyone broadly fished for the same kind of content.

Inspiration elsewhere: Maturation, however, makes that model incredibly challenging for all but the biggest players. In other creative industries, saturated competitive markets forced companies that fulfilled ‘publishing’ roles to specialise. Music industry labels like Trojan Records found markets for reggae. Beloved (and long rebranded) TV production company Endemol specialised in formatted programming like Deal or No Deal that could work across the world. Wildfire, the imprint of Headline that my book is being published in, publishes work from subject-matter experts that they think can catch fire (insert your own joke about me being a subject matter expert here).

Multiplying success: Therefore, I think similarly “thesis-led” video game publishers will likely reap rewards in a mature market in the year ahead. Publishers like Hooded Horse (deep strategic and tactical games), Fellow Traveller Games (narrative titles), and Raw Fury (which emphasise an ‘unpublishing’, art-centred approach) have the strategic advantage of clarity. Developers know who they’re going into business with. The publisher’s staff has a clearer idea of what they need to do to succeed. Players are more likely to be drawn to other games within a portfolio, creating a multiplier effect for the publisher’s business in the process.

Disciplined storytelling: In short, a more competitive market means businesses need more discipline. And thesis-led publishers with a tighter argument of what they’re publishing, the niche they’re selling to, and why they think that’ll deliver repeatable success will be primed to win big in the years to come.

Prediction 4: Steam will drop its ‘Made with AI’ label from its storefront

Declaration on AI-rrival: Since January 2024, Steam has required game developers who list on its storefront to declare how they use generative AI within the development of their games. By the end of the year, I’m guessing that the public declaration will be significantly amended or completely shelved by Valve.

Love and hate: The reason for the prediction is simple: it’s becoming a growing commercial risk for the platform. On the one hand, vocal players online hate generative AI on the basis that they believe (often correctly) that it’s deployed cheaply to undermine creative talent in the games industry. But on the other hand, game companies are definitely experimenting with their usage across their production pipelines: from mundane day-to-day usage of large-language models for generic backroom tasks to much more controversial content production.

Unvirtuous cycle: This presents a clear problem. Game companies that use generative AI must declare that they’ve done so on Steam. This feeds outrage amongst players, likely impacting sales at least slightly. This then hits more businesses as its adoption increases. And this puts Valve in the unhelpful position that a content disclosure designed to enhance player choice actively risks damaging its own business. We know from previous content squabbles with payment providers over sexual content that Valve hates that.

Label maker: I would predict that Steam’s AI content disclosure may not be long for the world. The question is what replaces it if it does go. The smart solution would be to build granularity into the disclosure process to create a ‘sliding scale’ of generative AI usage (e.g. generating a few lines of text versus generating entire words) to guide payer choice. But given possible complexities around building such a system, I wouldn’t be surprised if Steam dropped the disclosure altogether: riding out short-term public fury in return for a more comfortable time in the long-term.

Prediction 5: A major games publisher will acquire a Roblox studio

Building ‘blox: Roblox is in a strong place heading into 2026. Despite suffering the kind of headlines that might sink another business, it continues to grow. It recorded over 150 million daily active users in its last quarter results. Leading experiences like Grow A Garden have become big enough to smash industry records for most players online. And it has started to generate enough revenue to justify its market cap of approximately $56bn, making it nigh on impossible for another games company to acquire it.

Buy, buy, buy: So rather than buy the platform, I predict that one of the top publicly listed video game companies in the world will do something else: they’ll buy a studio with a track record of creating world-leading Roblox experiences instead.

Experience with Experiences: Strategically, it makes sense for the same reason that Activision Blizzard bought King in November 2015. Buying a studio responsible for major Roblox experiences would bring a mixture of expertise in the market, access to the audience, and knowledge of the space that few traditional games businesses currently have. And while such businesses could invest time, effort, and money into building their own presence, anyone with cash floating around would likely be better off bringing experts in directly.

Bang for Robux: Handily, I also think that the right acquisition would likely be cost-effective too. Roblox may be huge in its own right, but the scale of it compared to, say, King’s presence within the global market is low. And even though there have been some acquisitions of Roblox titles on the strength of their reputation and audience reach (e.g. Voldex buying up Brookhaven in February 2025), the average Roblox studio will be relatively cash poor compared to, say, a social mobile gaming giant, making an acquisition attractive to the right buyer.

Prediction 6: There will be another ‘political’ acquisition or investment into a games business

Power Play: Finally, and keeping well within the interests of this newsletter, I think we will see another example of a games business receiving investment or being acquired for political purposes.

Political purchases: Over the past five years, we’ve seen growing interest from autocracies in being invested - literally or politically - into games businesses. Vladimir Putin ordered his government to fund the development of video games via the Institute for the Development of the Internet in September 2023. One month later, the Chinese government took up its option of a ‘golden share’ in Tencent to give it a seat on its board. And Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund’s purchase of Electronic Arts with the help of Jared Kushner landed itself on a recent New York Times explainer linking financial deals to the political priorities of the Trump regime.

Art of the deal: And while I have no reason to believe that any party is currently planning to invest in a games business, this would be a good year to make another one. The Trump administration is likely to remain unconstrained until midterms, opening up a window for deals to be done. Regulators are unlikely to scrutinise the acquisition of games companies for foreign influence concerns in the current political environment, especially regarding American businesses. And despite all the challenges of the past few years, the biggest game companies make bank and reach vast audiences: an attractive proposition to the more, ahem, “self-interested” political elite popping up around the world.

Plenty of players: So, whether it’s the PIF deciding to jump on Discord’s rumoured IPO, the Ellisons finding themselves in control of Warner Bros’ game studios, or Elon Musk deciding it’s too hard to build a games company from scratch, someone will make a ‘political’ investment into the industry. And if they do, I’ll do the media round to end all media rounds to celebrate my sagacious judgment.

VGIM’s 2025 Predictions - Rated for your amusement

Last year, I offered up my predictions in the form of five answers to questions shaping the video games industry.

Here’s how I fared over the course of 2025.

• Grand Theft Auto VI will release at the end of 2025 - Wrong, and spectacularly so.

• The Nintendo Switch 2 will sell well, but not as strongly as its predecessor in year one - Wrong, but generally within the ballpark.

• Video games businesses will get into legal/regulatory hot water - Correct, thanks to US state attorney generals hating Roblox and the Online Safety Act.

• The Esports Olympics will be used for video game washing - Wrong, the Esports Olympics were cancelled (although the Saudi purchase of EA attracted the same criticism).

• The video games media will be in better shape at the end of 2025 than at the start - Correct, largely due to the emergence of a new form of paid consumer and trade media.

Score: 2 out of 5? See you after class, Osborn.

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News in brief - Out of Office Edition

Under siege: Ubisoft pulled Rainbow Six Siege offline during the festive period following a hack attack. A currently unknown group allegedly banned and unbanned thousands of accounts, gave every player two billion in-game credits to spend, and posted defamatory messages via in-game interstitials. The game has since been hacked again this week, spamming players with multiple references to the Six Seven ‘brainrot’ that we’ve all learned to hate over the past six months.

Houston, we have a problem: A federal judge in Texas has blocked a law that would impose age verification requirements on the app store. Passage of the law, which would have forced app stores and developers to age-verify users and receive parental consent for purchases, was blocked due to concerns that it affected First Amendment rights to free speech. Expect this to make its way to the Supreme Court in the future.

In direct competition: Two countries took big steps to force app stores to allow third-party rivals to operate under competition rules. Brazil’s regulator CADE has established an agreement with Apple to open its store to third parties or risk a fine of 150m BRL (roughly $27m). Japan, meanwhile, has rolled out its new competition law, forcing both Apple and Google to allow users to access third-party stores in a manner akin to the EU’s Digital Markets Act.

Dubai on life: Dubai has established a new Gaming Committee as part of its effort to turn the United Arab Emirates into a new global games hub. The committee, which has been established by Dubai’s Multi Commodities Centre, plans to make the region more attractive to international talent and create new opportunities for investors and creators within the territory.

Sad news: Finally, VGIM wants to pay its respects to several video games industry professionals who lost their lives in the past month and a half. Vince Zampella, CEO at Respawn and co-creator of the Call of Duty series, David Rosen, the co-founder of Sega, Albert Penello, Xbox’s former Head of Marketing, Nick Thorpe, Retro Gamer’s Features Editor, and Patrick Dane, News Editor at This Week in Video Games, will all be sorely missed by their families, friends, and colleagues.

Moving on

Michael French of London Games Festival fame has been made an MBE in the New Year Honours List...Jo Cooke has been promoted to CEO of Frontier Developments…Ed Nightingale has hung up his journalism hat to join the games team at Premier…Trent Cotter has been promoted to the role of Ratings Manager at The Games Rating Authority…Adam Snook has joined Green Man Gaming as SVP for Content Acquisition, Publishing, & DMS…Yingfeng Ding has retired from his role as Executive Vice President and head of the Interactive Entertainment Group at NetEase after 23 years…And Toshiuki Itahana has left Square Enix after 25 years of hard work in the character and art design team…

Jobs ahoy

Epic Games needs a new Senior Product Manager, Moderation Automation…The Pokémon Company is hiring a Product Marketing Manager - Mobile and Apps in its London office…Logitech is on the hunt for an Esports & Partnership Marketing Manager…Wizards of the Coast has a post open for a Senior Producer in Austin, Texas…And Electronic Arts is hiring a Social Media Manager - Apex Legends in Vancouver…

Events and conferences

• Pocket Gamer Connects, London - 19th-20th January 2026

• DICE Summit, Las Vegas - 11th-13th February 2026

• Guildford Games Festival, Guildford - 14th February 2026

• devcom leadership summit, Lisbon - 24th-26th February 2026

• Game Developer Conference, San Francisco - 9th-13th March 2026

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Games of the year (that aren’t GTA VI)

• 007 First Light - Remember that the name’s Bond, James Bond when the game releases in May 2026 (yes, it got delayed by a few months over Christmas).

• The Duskbloods - New multiplayer title from the sickos that brought you Elden Ring and Dark Souls due at some point on Switch 2 in 2026.

• Slay the Spire 2 - The sequel to one of my favourite video games of all time is…releasing in March, my birthday month? You spoil me, Mega Crit.

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Before you go…

During the festive period, The Economist posed the question that we’ve all been waiting for the answer to: what if the best way to learn history is by playing with it?

Come for an interesting piece about the extent to which strategic video games like Europa Universalis can develop a nuanced understanding of history.

Stay to understand exactly why I ended up doing a history degree after years of playing Rome: Total War.

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

It’s the end of 2025. I’m out of office. I hope you are too. But just in case you’re checking your emails, I’m sending you this little plain text message summarising some of my favourite cultural bits and bobs from the past 12 months.

We’ll be back with a proper VGIM service in early January. But for now, here’s a rundown of my actual…

Read more