A data breach at Rockstar Games exposed GTA Online’s internal financials, showing $1.3 million in average daily revenue and approximately $500 million annually; Take-Two’s stock rose by over $1 billion in response.

New Xbox CEO Asha Sharma acknowledged in a leaked memo that Game Pass has “become too expensive for players,”

Amazon Luna ended all third-party game purchases and subscriptions, shifting to a subscription-only model.

Numbers

• Super Battle Golf surpasses 1 million sales, launches free Frozen Fairway update

• eFootball crosses 1 billion downloads as Konami launches Master League Sprint event

News

• Subnautica 2 quietly removes Krafton as publisher amid ongoing legal battle with Unknown Worlds

• Get Ready to Melt Your Mind: The Brainrot Takeover Hits Formula E: Electric Lap!

Industry Trends

• Marvel lays off 8% of staff as Disney restructuring impacts gaming division

• The Super Mario Galaxy Movie becomes the highest-grossing film of 2026 in the US

• Valve receives first bulk Steam Controller shipments as Steam Machine launch approaches

Rumors

• Fable reportedly delayed internally as Xbox weighs GTA 6 launch window; Playground Games reiterates Autumn 2026

• Nvidia rumored to be negotiating acquisition of major PC manufacturer; company denies report

We break down these stories on this week’s podcast. Listen on YouTube or Spotify

The Monthly Takeaway is available to paid subscribers.

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The Harder They Come!

What can you buy with billions in annual revenue and one of the most popular games in the world? Not 1,000 people’s jobs, I’ll tell you that. Epic Games, makers of the Unreal Engine, Jazz Jackrabbit, Fortnite: Save the World and its spin-off Fortnite: Battle Royale just cut 1,000 jobs, citing an overall decline in Fortnite engagement and the need to keep the lights on. This is the gaming industry, so we can’t get up to numbers quite as impressive as Oracle’s 30,000 layoffs, but even so this was a bloodbath.

From one angle, this looks like a classic modern story magnified to the scale of global phenomenon. A company stumbles into a hit and then expands quickly and ferociously, spending and expanding with the idea that interest will never decline, and they can keep making this amount of money forever. The winds change quicker than new projects come to fruition, and the whole thing comes crashing down. That definitely happened here, but it’s not the whole story.

Epic Games in no way intended to be this reliant on Fortnite: Battle Royale in 2026. Sweeney and co. used their windfall to make a series of bets commensurate with the size of said windfall. Other companies use their hit game to fund another game. Epic funded a PC gaming storefront intended to rival Steam, a massive lawsuit against some of the most valuable companies in the world, a spree of acquisitions and a broad-reaching attempt to transform their battle royale game into a UGC platform. It also managed to force the broader gaming industry’s hand on cross-platform play. I’m probably missing some things here.

What can you buy with something like $5 billion in annual revenue? Not a PC gaming storefront, I’ll tell you that, too.

Epic Games ran up against modern monopolies. It did so intentionally, forcefully, and with success that can only be called mixed. Steam was entrenched to the point where people were simply not going to change their buying patterns no matter how many free games they got. The company managed to defeat Apple and Google but spent ludicrous amounts of money in the process: Apple and Google seem more or less fine. On the UGC platform front, player counts remain a rounding error next to Roblox.

Sweeney always couched the company’s anti-monopolistic activity as a moral responsibility as much as a business strategy, and there is likely a significant degree of truth to that. There was always something remarkable about a billionaire willing to spend hundreds of millions of dollars while saying stuff like this:

“There’s really no price that isn’t worth paying for freedom, for all developers and the future of gaming… And if we spent a billion dollars so far, that’s a small price to pay for the future freedom of our company and of all of the others who want to participate in the market.”

In the end, however, monopoly is enforced through a range of different mechanisms, and all of those that Epic sought to challenge were able to weather the storm with minor inconvenience. And when we say Epic paid the price for that, what we really mean is that Epic’s employees paid the price for that, in 2023 and again last week. I wonder if those that got laid off would agree with the above quote.

Fortnite has got life left in it, that’s for sure. But like so many games in a similar position, this life will be lived as a successful, fun title, rather than an infinite ATM capable of funding untold miles of pipe dream. The harder they come, the harder they fall.

That’s the month. Below, we’ve got a pair of case studies from some of our consultants diving into how their specialties intersect with the headlines this month.  If you want to hire any of the brilliant minds at Mighty Diamonds, head to our Website.

The Great Decentralization - Tectonic Shifts of 2026

The old guard lie in ruin, and the people will rule.

The world of video games has been cracking open for years now, but here in 2026 the last walls of the gatekeepers are being torn down. Democracy has come for games. Tools, engines and middleware allow single-person studios to create the kind of million dollar games that previously would have required specialized tools years of development and serious investment.

Putting your game in front of a couple hundred million potential players on Steam requires $100 and a couple of hours of documentation reading. Getting them to pay any attention is another problem, but that’s just part and parcel with democracy.

Valve, so far, has owned an increasingly large slice of this shifting market, and it’s hard to imagine that will do anything but accelerate. The slow Valve rollout of hardware attracted a niche, but appears to now be becoming a genuine threat to the console markets. On paper, there’s little the average console can do against a platform that presents a high fidelity experience in the living room, with better access to new and experimental games at better prices with no monthly online fee to play.

The “Console Wars” are over, replaced by platforms less interested in walling their gardens. And yet even there, the rules never stop changing. Take for example the upcoming UGC platform S&Box (Release date: April 26, 2026), the successor to Garrys Mod (a 20 year old game), now allows developers to be able to export their games as standalone products to be published on Steam with no fee attached.

Let’s read that again, NO FEE ATTACHED!!!

There are so many layers to this, on the platform front, content and asset front and on the engine front. What already seemed like a frighteningly open platform chips away at its last few barriers to clear skies for millions of potential game makers.

It is, in many ways, terrifying. Particularly if you’re a professional that has built your skills and career inside a totally different ecosystem. And yet creativity has a way of bubbling from the bottom up, in games or elsewhere. People forget that both Counter-Strike and Dota, the top 2 games the past 10 years on Steam are both born out of the modding scene, coming out of early UGC platforms like Half Life and World of Warcraft. Allowing people to use the bones of something that came before to build something new is as old as games: a couple of college students made the precursor to Pong using an oscilloscope.

And we’ve been talking about Steam so far: A developer from 10 years ago would barely recognize the Steam of today, and they would sure as hell not recognize Roblox, a wide-open fever dream with CCU numbers that read like exorbitant punchlines to industry veterans. Forget $100: here you really just need an enthusiastic 10-year old.

(correction, is the Roblox enshittification just starting? Read:“New Publishing Requirements & Evaluation Process for Games”)

The decentralization of power in games is real, and it is moving fast. Investments and publishing deals are going to look very different from what is available today. As has been the case for the last couple of decades, we can look to the music industry for a glimpse of the future, where radical openness has reshaped the industry and stitched portions of it back together again ever since Napster. Where once record labels were the all powerful starmakers and arbiters of trend, now the biggest names are the artists themselves: who rake in massive paydays from tours, while companies like Spotify fill the “platform” role by making a huge amount of money and generally not doing anything.

Thank God for Valve!

What are Casey’s kids playing?

Arc Raiders: I guess they are burnt out at the moment and taking a break, it’s been an intense 4 months of fun shooting arcs. But we crave more content that can make us come back. However, my youngest is contemplating building the big project and starting over progression.

Balatro: Gambling is haram for a reason people. If anything, this is the game that will teach you why gambling should not be allowed in society. However, the kids are having fun doing math, unlocking jokers to min/max their strategies and I guess that is a bit less haram than gambling.

Slay the Spire II: This is the game that is played the most on our Steam Deck at the moment. Why you ask? Because the game is not available on PlayStation, and we have our Steam Deck hooked up to the tv in the living room. Prior to StSII releasing, we were playing the first game non-stop. With more content and options, we are enjoying the new game immensely.

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Take-Two Interactive laid off its head of AI and multiple team members, weeks after the company’s CEO publicly endorsed generative AI.

The Super Mario Galaxy Movie earned over $370 million globally in its first five days of release.

Hazelight Sales Data Shows How Much Money Can Be Made Without Being Anti-Player

🎧 We break down these stories on this week’s podcast. Listen on YouTube or Spotify

Numbers

• No numbers!

News

• Social gaming platform Rec Room, once valued at $3.5B, is shutting down

• 007 First Light is delayed on the Nintendo Switch 2

• PUBG: Battlegrounds‘ new PvE mode is all about fighting off an alien invasion, and/or hiding in a big man-made dirt hole

• Star Wars Eclipse development is ‘very slow going’, remains years from completion

Industry Trends

• Arc Raiders is a 'Trojan Horse' for demonstrating AI tool usage in game development, according to Nexon, after Embark built two hits at 'a fraction of the cost you’d expect'

• GTA 5 and Red Dead Redemption veteran says 20-year tenure is ‘no longer good enough’ to land a job

• The First Descendant has no staying power, admits Nexon

• "Any update is a bonus not a right": Peak co-developer Landfall reminds impatient fans it's not a live-service studio

Rumors

• Nintendo 2026 leak roundup: Zelda Ocarina of Time remake, new Star Fox, Metroid reportedly in the pipeline

• Assassin's Creed Black Flag Remake Announcement is Planned for Next Week - Insider Gaming

• Mass Effect Prime Video series reportedly rewritten at Amazon boss’s request to appeal to non-gamers

We break down these stories on this week’s podcast. Listen on YouTube or Spotify

The Monthly Takeaway is available to paid subscribers.

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Sony announced price increases of $100 to $150 across all PS5 hardware effective April 2, the second hike in under a year.
Eidos Montreal cancelled Wildlands, a 7+ year project that cost hundreds of millions, triggering 124 layoffs.
PUBG Blindspot will shut down forever after this weekend.

🎧 We break down these stories on this week’s podcast. Listen on YouTube or Spotify

🔢 Numbers

• As Crimson Desert nears 5 million sales, Pearl Abyss CEO says it’s looking into a Switch 2 port

• Death Stranding 2: On the Beach’s PC release takes sequel’s total sales past 2 million

🆕 News

• Bungie Rejects Rumours It Could Move on from Marathon After Unremarkable PS5 Sales

• France’s leading consumer association files lawsuit against Ubisoft over The Crew shutdown

• Resident Evil director’s new AAA studio joins forces with Shift Up to create a new game

📈 Industry Trends

• It turns out Fortnite isn’t the forever game after all

• ‘This is definitely crashier’: John and Brenda Romero reflect on the industry crisis

• A new breed of ‘outsider AAA‘ studios is taking over the games industry

• PlayStation Studios’ Mobile Push Seems Dead as Layoff Reports Continue

• Here’s how US tariffs have affected PC gaming hardware, from paused shipments to new investments

🤫 Rumors

• No rumors!

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Epic Games cut over 1,000 employees on March 24, attributing the decision to Fortnite’s declining engagement since 2025 and costs that now exceed revenue.

Saudi Arabia’s Savvy Games Group agreed to acquire Moonton, developer of Mobile Legends: Bang Bang, from ByteDance for $6 billion in one of the six largest gaming acquisitions on record.

Pearl Abyss apologized for including AI-generated assets in Crimson Desert’s launch version and issued a patch, pledging a full audit and replacement of affected content.

Numbers

• Pearl Abyss confirms Crimson Desert has sold 3 million copies since launch

News

• Nintendo to cut Switch 2 production by 30% this quarter after slower-than-expected holiday season sales | Nintendo Clarifies ‘The Cost of Physical Games Is Not Going Up’

• Metacritic's 2025 Rankings Show A Major Shift In Top Publishers

• PlayStation Shuts Down Dark Outlaw Games

• Fortnite creator update will change Star Wars video games forever

• Disney didn’t invest $1.5B into Epic to sell lightsaber skins

Industry Trends

• Behaviour Interactive acquires The Fun Pimps

• Why Kids Will Be the First True AI-Native Creators

• Ubisoft ‘ends game development’ at Tom Clancy studio, Red Storm, resulting in 105 job losses

• Ex-Blizzard president says gamers need to ‘man up’ over AI usage in games after Crimson Desert devs issue apology

Rumors

• New Nintendo Switch 2 Model in Production for Europe, Report Reveals

We break down these stories on this week’s podcast. Listen on YouTube or Spotify

The Monthly Takeaway is available to paid subscribers.

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🎧 We break down these stories on this week’s podcast. Listen on YouTube or Spotify

🎯 Highlights

• All games with loot boxes in them will be rated minimum PEGI 16, starting this summer

• Judge Orders Subnautica 2 Studio CEO Fired By Krafton To Be Reinstated And Gives Him Full Control Over Early Access Steam Launch

🆕 News

• Meta is shutting down Horizon Worlds VR, despite investing billions into the metaverse

• Pearl Abyss stock dives as Crimson Desert reviews miss expectations

• Monster Hunter Stories 3 Hits a Record Player Count on Steam for Capcom‘s Cozier Spin-Off RPG Series

• Nintendo Switch 2 Update Brings Handheld Mode Boost — Unlocks Higher Resolutions and TV-Mode Performance for Original Switch Games

• Minecraft meets Wind Waker – Hytale with airships, Everwind is Steam’s latest big early access release and it could be a winner with time

📈 Industry Trends

• PC will overtake console revenue by 2028, says Newzoo

• Hasbro CEO thinks the video game industry needs to think about things differently

• Saudi Investment Firm Acquires a 5% Stake in Capcom

• Why Free Games Still Matter to Epic, Hundreds of Giveaways Later

• ASUS Co-CEO Says MacBook Neo Is a Blow to the PC Market

🤫 Rumors

• No rumors!

🔢 Numbers

• As it passes 6 million sales, Capcom officially confirms Resident Evil Requiem is the series’ fastest selling game

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About Mighty Diamonds

Mighty Diamonds is a strategic video game consultancy specializing in Publishing, Design, Production, Marketing, and Business.

Our mission is to empower developers in creating exceptional games.

Learn more at mighty.diamonds.

🎧 We break down these stories on this week’s podcast. Listen on YouTube or Spotify

🎯 Highlights

• Valve fires back at New York lawsuit over loot boxes, says they’re like Magic cards or Labubu

• Epic raises price of Fortnite's V-Bucks to 'help pay the bills' | Fortnite's Save the World will be free from April 16

🆕 News

• Xbox Announces New 'Project Helix' Console, Says It Will Play PC Games

• Sales data indicates Sony's PS5 ports are increasingly losing audience share on PC, but only because of release timing

• Nintendo Suing U.S. Government Over Tariffs

• The Division 2 breaks its own concurrent Steam record, 7 years after it was first released

• After listening to your complaints, Bungie is making it just a tad less annoying to buy cosmetics in Marathon | Bungie asks sites to delay Marathon reviews, with release date Steam player count below 100K

📈 Industry Trends

• A Steam Machine update reignited release date fears, but Valve say the new hardware is still shipping this year

• Iran War Threatens Saudi Arabia’s $38 Billion Video Game Push

• Overwatch co-creator Jeff Kaplan on his exit from Activision Blizzard: 'It was the biggest f**k you moment I've had in my career'

• Sony is testing dynamic pricing: one game - different prices on the PlayStation Store

• EA Lays Off Staff Across All Battlefield Studios Following Record-Breaking Battlefield 6 Launch

🤫 Rumors

• No rumors!

🔢 Numbers

• Slay the Spire 2 hits nearly 575,000 concurrent players, almost beating Silksong's record

• Silent Hill 2 Remake Tops 5 Million Players

• Pokemon Pokopia Sales Top 2.2 Million Units in 4 Days

Emmanuel Rosier · Dave Thier · Casey Al-Kaisy

All links · YouTube · Spotify

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About Mighty Diamonds

Mighty Diamonds is a strategic video game consultancy specializing in Publishing, Design, Production, Marketing, and Business.

Our mission is to empower developers in creating exceptional games.

Learn more at mighty.diamonds.

Want a deep dive into the week's biggest stories? Check out our podcast onYouTube&Spotify

Highlights

• Sony No Longer Releasing Single-Player PlayStation Exclusives On PC

• Assassin's Creed: Black Flag Resynced Confirmed, Assassin's Creed Unity to Receive 60 FPS PS5 and Xbox Series Patch on March 5th

News

• Highguard Is Already Shutting Down After Only Lasting 31 Days Longer Than Concord

• Steam Deck OLED Getting Price Hike March 6 Across Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan

• 390TB video game archivebeing taken offline due to skyrocketing RAM, SSD, and hard drive prices

• Games media set for more layoffs, as IGN-owned Eurogamer cuts editorial staff

• Splash Damage acquires Scum dev Gamepires from Jagex

Industry Trends

• A Year-By-Year Breakdown Of Phil Spencer's Mixed Legacy As Xbox Boss - GameSpot

• 'We Don't Nickel-and-Dime People to Death' — Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 2 Isn't a Live Service Game, Tim Willits Says, It's Something Else

• Stellar Blade developer Shift Up is looking to strengthen its self-publishing capabilities

• Smartphone market poised for ‘sharpest decline on record’ in 2026

• Trump administration debates allowing Tencent to keep its gaming stakes, FT reports

Rumors

• Resident Evil Requiem DLC "Late in Development," Code Veronica Remake Coming in 2027, RE1 Remake Has Entered Production

Numbers

• Resident Evil Requiem Surpasses 5 MillionUnits!

• US Physical Video Game Sales Falls to Just $1.5 Billion in 2025

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About Mighty Diamonds

Mighty Diamonds is a strategic video game consultancy specializing in Publishing, Design, Production, Marketing, and Business.

Our mission is to empower developers in creating exceptional games.

Learn more at mighty.diamonds.

Will Xbox Survive the Xbox One?

The fact that Xbox is hurting is not exactly news. The house that Halo built has struggled to sell consoles, struggled to wrest any hits out of its power made studio acquisition spree, has struggled to earn new Game Pass subscribers, and just shed both CEO Phil Spencer and his heir apparent Sarah Bond in exchange for a new CEO straight from the world of AI: it’s bleak. It’s bleak all over, but it’s particularly bleak here.

It is all too easy to Monday morning quarterback this thing and say that Bethesda just couldn’t produce the hits it needed, that Call of Duty is past its prime, that they shouldn’t have shut down Tango Gameworks, or whatever myriad things that are all ultimately true but besides the point. Phil Spencer was the replacement for Don Mattrick, that was the guy we’re really talking about here. Mattrick launched the Xbox One, and Xbox was never going to survive the Xbox One.

The launch of the PS4 and Xbox One was an inflection point in the industry. Connectivity went from being a feature to an assumption: discs remained but digital storefronts began to exert their dominance, and eventually this allowed games like Warframe and Destiny to prove that live service was just as potent on console as it was on PC. But most importantly, over the course of this generation backwards compatibility became an expectation. Ironically, Xbox did a lot to make this happen, but it was going to happen anyways. And that was what ensured that Xbox was never going to live this one down.

If you, a dedicated Xbox 360 player, wanted to transition to PS4, it was a pretty simple process: you just started buying PlayStation games instead. None of your Xbox 360 games were going to work on your next console anyways, no matter what it was.

We don’t really need to go into why, exactly, Xbox One lost quite so badly to PS4, because there were a ton of reasons. Point being: it did. It put the company in the bind that saw Phil Spencer’s rise in the first place, and for a time there was some genuine excitement about this charming, inoffensive guy with an indie game T-shirt under his blazer: this was a gamer, there was no doubt about it. And he offered things up like Game Pass, which we were all into at the time. The ship was still leaking.

Mid-generation, Xbox began its push towards backwards compatibility, and by the end of the generation nobody really questioned whether or not Xbox One and PS4 games would work on the next machines. This meant that the opportunity cost for switching teams went through the roof. To get a PS4 player to switch to the Series X, Microsoft had to convince them to go with a machine that couldn’t access any of the games they had bought in the previous generation. For two x86 machines that played the same suite of AAA multiplatform titles, it was pretty easy to just stick with the one where you had games. Xbox’s exclusives didn’t just need to be good, they needed to be so much better than PlayStation’s that people would be willing to make that sacrifice. Even if they were a little bit better (they weren’t), it wouldn’t have been enough.

Clearly, a lot of things went sideways at Microsoft over the past 10 years or so that may or may not have made this whole thing a little bit easier. But it’s easy to forget what an uphill battle this whole thing was. If Xbox wasn’t so far on the back foot, if Spencer and co. had a little margin to make the massive plays that defined its post-Covid era, maybe this whole thing looks a little different. But it wasn’t, because Xbox One killed Xbox.

We’re going to be having this same conversation with different details with the PlayStation 6. But that’s next time.

That’s the month. Below, we’ve got a pair of case studies from some of our consultants diving into how their specialties intersect with the headlines this month.  If you want to hire any of the brilliant minds at Mighty Diamonds, head to our Website.

Brand Integration in Games: Visibility vs Value

The “Hot Bull” can in PUBG was never officially branded.

No logo. No partnership. Yet every player knew exactly what it was.
That detail exposes a blind spot in many gaming brand deals: visibility is not the same as value.

Yet most brand budgets in gaming are still allocated as if it were.

FMCG brands tend to live in the background of games. A soda on a shelf. A snack in a vending machine. Safe, low scrutiny — but also low impact.
And when developers control that space entirely, they often choose parody instead. GTA’s Sprunk, Burger Shot, Cluckin’ Bell. These aren’t placeholders. They are deliberate worldbuilding tools. In many cases, the fictional brand serves the experience better than a real one could.

Everything changes when a brand enters the gameplay loop.

In racing games, cars are not props. They are the interaction system. Players expect a Porsche to handle like a Porsche. They expect a Ferrari to behave like a Ferrari. When authenticity fails at that level, it is not perceived as weak licensing. It is perceived as weak gameplay.
Mil sim titles operate under the same constraint. Weapons, optics, and tactical gear are gameplay systems. These communities are highly knowledgeable. Small inaccuracies immediately break immersion and credibility.

The same pattern appears across categories. Fashion works in Fortnite when it reinforces player identity. Sports equipment works in EA Sports FC or NBA 2K because it strengthens broadcast realism. Hardware integrations work when they support performance fantasy.

Brand integration in games consistently operates across three layers:
→ Environmental: supports worldbuilding, low risk
→ Cultural: reinforces identity and tone
→ Mechanical: directly shapes gameplay

The commercial upside increases at each layer. So does the execution risk. Mechanical integration raises player expectations, increases development complexity, and constrains creative flexibility.

Most partnerships still optimize for layer one because it is safe. The brands building durable equity are increasingly experimenting in layer three, where integration shifts from visibility to player agency.

As games evolve into persistent worlds and identity-driven ecosystems, the real divide is emerging between brands that are simply seen inside games and brands that function inside gameplay systems.

That divide is where long-term brand equity in gaming will be built.

What’s Dave playing?

Ender Magnolias: A good solid Metroidvania. Loving the concept of having all your abilties represented as characters, but I have yet to see the sort of level design that really takes a Metroidvania from good to great. My favorite Metroidvania of the last however many years has still got to be Blasphemous 2. And yes, that includes Hollow Knight: Silksong.

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Want a deep dive into the week's biggest stories? Check out our podcast on YouTube&Spotify

Highlights

• Xbox fans react as Phil Spencer and Sarah Bond leave Microsoft

• Resident Evil Requiem is Almost Entirely Sold Out Online, With Physical Copies Only Available at Select Retailers

News

• Marvel's Wolverine Carves Out a Release Date at Last: Sept 15, 2026

• Overwatch Rush Preview - Blizzard’s First-Person Hero Shooter Goes Top-Down

• Meta"shifts focus" of Horizon Worlds platform from Quest VR to mobile

• Amazon abandons its open world driving game with Maverick Games

Industry Trends

• New York sues video game developer Valve, says its 'loot boxes' are gambling

• Nacon files for insolvency amid financial turmoil

• skate. Developer Full Circle Hit With Layoffs

• Weeks after Nioh 3's release, developer Team Ninja is being split into 3 as Koei Tecmo confirms major restructure

Rumors

• No rumors!

Numbers

• No numbers!

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About Mighty Diamonds

Mighty Diamonds is a strategic video game consultancy specializing in Publishing, Design, Production, Marketing, and Business.

Our mission is to empower developers in creating exceptional games.

Learn more at mighty.diamonds.

Want a deep dive into the week's biggest stories? Check out our podcast on YouTube&Spotify

Highlights

• Sony is 'Considering Pushing Back' the Debut of the PlayStation 6 to 2028 or Even 2029; Nintendo Switch 2 Price Could Increase in 2026

• Beneath the decline: how premium releases are reshaping Xbox revenue

News

• Mewgenics beats Hades 2 to become the most-played roguelite ever on Steam

• Yet another NetEase studio is going independent

• The Big Star Wars: Galactic Racer Interview — Why It's Not Open World, How Its Story Mode Works, and When It's Set

• Call Of Duty: Warzone Mobile Shutdown Date Announced, And It's Not Far Away

Industry Trends

• The cozy game boom is the clearest trend on Steam over five years of data

• Highguard layoffs hit developer Wildlight Entertainment two weeks after release

• Western Digital is already sold out of hard drives for all of 2026 — chief says some long-term agreements for 2027 and 2028 already in place

• Valve breaks its silence on Steam Deck OLED scarcity, and yes, it's because of the RAM and storage crisis| ASUS ROG Xbox Ally X price in Japan rises by 21%, Legion Go 2 price climbs in the US

• The “Hot Bull” can in PUBG was never officially branded.

Rumors

• ByteDance in talks to sell gaming unit Moonton for more than $6 billion, sources say

• Tencent’s TiMi Studio Group reportedly funded Highguard dev Wildlight Entertainment

Numbers

• 1 million concurrents, 14 million sales: Nexon shares figures behind Arc Raiders’ huge launch

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About Mighty Diamonds

Mighty Diamonds is a strategic video game consultancy specializing in Publishing, Design, Production, Marketing, and Business.

Our mission is to empower developers in creating exceptional games.

Learn more at mighty.diamonds.

Want a deep dive into the week's biggest stories? Check out our podcast on YouTube&Spotify

Highlights

• Mewgenics recouped its development costs three hours after release

• Riot Games Lays Off Dozens From 2XKO‘s Development Team Less Than a Month After Launch

News

• Nioh 3 shatters the record for the series' highest Steam concurrent player count through the power of actually launching on PC simultaneously for once

• Assassin's Creed Multiplayer Game Reportedly Canceled

• Nvidia’s RTX 50-series Super refresh is delayed, and the RTX 60-series might miss 2027

• Announcing Horizon Hunters Gathering, Guerrilla’s new co-op action game

Industry Trends

• Highguard layoffs hit developer Wildlight Entertainment two weeks after release

• Mattel takes full control of Mattel163 in a $159M buyout

• PS5 will hopefully avoid a price hike this year as Sony CFO says "we intend to minimize the impact" of ongoing RAM shortage, company positioned to secure memory through 2026

• Remedy appoints former EA executive as CEO

• Why traditional stability in games is gone, and how developers can adapt.

Rumors

• No Rumors!

Numbers

• Metal Gear Solid series soars past 62.5m copies sold following release of Metal Gear Delta: Snake Eater

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About Mighty Diamonds

Mighty Diamonds is a strategic video game consultancy specializing in Publishing, Design, Production, Marketing, and Business.

Our mission is to empower developers in creating exceptional games.

Learn more at mighty.diamonds.

Want a deep dive into the week's biggest stories? Check out our podcast on YouTube&Spotify

Highlights

• Numerous video game company share prices dropped following Google’s Project Genie AI rollout

• AMD say the Steam Machine is "on track" for an early 2026 release| Valve’s Steam Machine has been delayed, and the RAM crisis will impact pricing

News

• Overwatch 2 Is Ditching the '2' Amid Launch of 'New, Story-Driven Era' With 10 New Heroes

• Newzoo’s final 2025 rankings just dropped

• Fortnite “still remains the biggest game in the world on many fronts”, Epic says, but its playtime dropped noticeably in 2025

• Apex Legends For Switch Shutting Down This Year, But Switch 2 Edition Lives On

• Nintendo Silent on Metroid Prime 4: Beyond Sales, Prompting Fan Concern Over the Series’ Future

• AMD CEO Says Next Gen Xbox On Track To Launch In 2027

• Obsidian's The Outer Worlds 2 Underperformed, and There Won't Be a Third

Industry Trends

• Microsoft reports 9% decrease in gaming revenue for Q2

• Paradox operating profit dropped 162% year-on-year as it writes down Vampire: The Masquerade Bloodlines 2

• Investors Worried about Switch 2 Sales, Nintendo Shares Fall 11 Percent

• One-Third of Video Game Workers Laid Off in Past 2 Years

• Report: UK retailer GAME is going into administration again

Rumors

• No Rumors!

Numbers

• Nintendo Switch 2 Sales Reach 17.37 Million Worldwide

• Tainted Grail: The Fall of Avalon- 1 million copies sold

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About Mighty Diamonds

Mighty Diamonds is a strategic video game consultancy specializing in Publishing, Design, Production, Marketing, and Business.

Our mission is to empower developers in creating exceptional games.

Learn more at mighty.diamonds.

High(Guard) Expectations

The basic contours are familiar. A new hero shooter, possessed by a certain level of visual polish but lacking much in the way of a visual identity. A splashy introduction followed by cratering player counts. Some idiots waving the word woke around. Maybe its Concord, maybe its Hyenas, Suicide Squad, even all the way back to Anthem. It’s a list nobody wants to be on. Is Highguard the next name on this list?

Highguard became an internet punching bag in many ways because of its prominence. The Game Awards reveal thrust it into the crosshairs — people saw that sort of slick presentation that stops just sort of a true art style and they lumped it in with those other gigantic projects. Gamers, especially of the more online variety, are cynical. They like it when big things fail. Highguard smacked of the institution and thus the sentiment turned sour.

But this is not the big new project from Sega or Sony, EA or WB. This is a new self-publishing studio —albeit an obviously well-funded one—with only itself and its investors to answer to: maybe it could be different. Or, at the very least, we can always hope that it can be different. I am not familiar with Wildlight’s P&L, runway, projected revenue, investor expectations or any of those things that ultimately determine whether a thing succeeds or not. Instead I’m just going to take a quotation from Lead Designer Mohammad Alavi in a recent PC Gamer article at face value:

“Honestly, we don’t need [player counts] to be super huge in order to be successful,” he explained. “We’re a small team. A six-player match [Highguard’s max player count at launch] is not hard to find. What we’re really hoping for is a core group of fans that love us. That will allow us to grow. Being the ire of the internet hate machine sucks, but at the same time, I try to just focus on making the best game I can and getting that game into people’s hands. At the end of the day, that’s all that really matters.”

All the other names on that list were major products from big operations that obviously required player counts to succeed. They failed because they didn’t sell, sure, but more to the point they failed because sales didn’t get to where they needed to be. They failed because they were developed with unrealistic expectations in mind.

If Wildlight understands this – and public statements indicate that they do – there is no reason to assume there’s really anything wrong here.

The industry, now and over the past few years, is primarily struggling with managing expectations. There used to be certain assumptions you could make about how certain things would perform, and these assumptions are now gone. Every project that isn’t GTA or The Elder Scrolls or The Legend of Zelda needs to find a way to be comfortable with less sales and smaller player counts to be considered successful. Every project needs to know how to start small and grow, or to stay small and be happy. Publishers and investors need to understand this as well as investors.

This is pretty clear when you look at the sort of indie hits we’re always talking about at GIES, Peak and Schedule One or whatever. These are games designed to be succesful at a small scale that hey, wound up with a whole lot more than they needed.

We all know about No Man’s Sky — another game that got smashed in the face by its position at the end of a major press conference. One launch happens, good or bad, the dust settles into something. Is that thing enough to press on into the future? If so, that’s all you can really ask.

That’s the month. Below, we’ve got a pair of case studies from some of our consultants diving into how their specialties intersect with the headlines this month.  If you want to hire any of the brilliant minds at Mighty Diamonds, head to our Website.

Don’t look up: why climbing keeps coming back in games

Don’t look up. The phrase comes from the movie, but it also describes a quiet default in modern game design. As games scale, they increasingly push players forward, outward, and sideways: bigger maps, more icons, more parallel objectives. Horizontal sprawl becomes the standard answer to engagement.

And yet, some of the most resonant experiences of recent years do the opposite. They ask players to slow down, commit, and look up.

With the release of Cairn, climbing is once again positioned not as a traversal layer, but as the experience itself. Not a genre, but a design response. One that cuts through abundance with a single, visible promise: there is something above you.

What changes from game to game is not the direction. It is what climbing is used to achieve.

When climbing is about spectacle

In franchises such as Tomb Raider, Uncharted, and Assassin’s Creed, climbing primarily exists to preserve the flow.

It paces the experience between action beats, frames danger and scale, and guides players through carefully authored spaces. These systems are intentionally forgiving. Handholds are readable, animations absorb mistakes, and failure is rare or scripted. The player is meant to feel exposed, not tested.

Here, climbing functions as cinematic language. Verticality supports fantasy and momentum rather than mastery.

When climbing is the objective, and failure is the feedback

Some games strip that framing away almost entirely. What remains is a simple contract: go up, and don’t fall.

This is the core of Getting Over It with Bennett Foddy, Only Up!, Chained Together, and a large number of Fortnite Creative maps built around vertical parkour or no-checkpoint climbs.

In these experiences, the goal is visible from the start. Progress is purely spatial. Failure is legible, public, and often costly. There is no story required to justify the ascent and no tutorial needed to explain success. Looking up explains the objective. Falling explains the mistake.

Here, climbing is not traversal. It is the game. And failure is not a punishment layered on top; it is the feedback loop.

When climbing becomes the main protagonist

Other games use climbing not just as a challenge, but as the lens through which tone, pacing, and meaning emerge.

In Jusant, ascent is rhythmic and contemplative, with friction deliberately softened to preserve flow. PEAK adds a social layer, where success and failure are shared, and trust becomes part of the climb. Baby Steps goes further still, making even basic movement awkward and intentional, so that progress feels fragile rather than triumphant.

In these games, failure still exists, but it is not always the spectacle. The mountain or tower is no longer a backdrop or an obstacle course. It is the narrative device itself.

Why this keeps working (and why it matters now)

Climbing keeps coming back because it solves a problem the industry keeps recreating. As games scale, they tend to add breadth, featuring larger maps, more systems, and more parallel objectives. Progress becomes diffuse. Direction becomes abstract. Players spend more time navigating choices than committing to action.

Climbing does the opposite. It collapses complexity into direction. There is one axis of progress, the goal is visible, and commitment is explicit. Whether it appears as a cinematic spectacle, a failure-driven challenge, or a narrative ascent, climbing removes ambiguity without adding scope. In a medium increasingly defined by content abundance and attention scarcity, that distinction matters.

You don’t progress because the game tells you to. You progress because you can see where you are going. That is why climbing keeps coming back in games.

What’s Dave playing?

Mio: A little bit of this thing so far, not too much. A nice, perfectly serviceable Metroidvania that isn’t as challenging as certain silk-themed Metroidvanias I’ve played recently.

Sifu: I keep playing this thing because I’ve been super busy with work, and because it is relatively satisfying in 3-5 minute chunks. Find yourself a game that works like this, is my advice to you.

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About Mighty Diamonds

Mighty Diamonds is a strategic video game consultancy specializing in Publishing, Design, Production, Marketing, and Business.

Our mission is to empower developers in creating exceptional games.

Learn more at mighty.diamonds.

Want a deep dive into the week's biggest stories? Check out our podcast on YouTube&Spotify

Highlights

• Ubisoft details ‘major company reset’: 6 games canned, 7 delayed, and 2 studios closed

• The Highguard Devs Explain That Terrible Game Awards Reveal

News

• Divinity Announcement Sparks 'Incredible' Baldur's Gate 3 and Divinity: Original Sin 2 Sales, Larian Boss Says

• Game Devs Skipping GDC 2026 Over ICE Concerns, US Safety Fears

• Video game giant Valve facing UK lawsuit over pricing, commissions

• SSD prices may follow RAM pricing after Samsung and SK Hynix reportedly cut NAND production

Industry Trends

• Did the Nintendo Switch 2 Really Have a Bad Holiday? We Asked Analysts

• Gamers protesting ‘AI slop’ are forcing studios to cancel titles

• "We respect their time, and in turn they stick around" 25 years later, here's why Jagex believes so many people still play RuneScape

• AI hype meets reality as majority of CEOs report no financial returns

• Director Gore Verbinski says Unreal Engine is 'the greatest slip backwards' for movie CGI

Rumors

• Grand Theft Auto 6 may not have a physical version on day one to avoid leaks, report claims

Numbers

• RuneScape surpasses $3bn in lifetime revenue as Jagex marks 25th anniversary

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About Mighty Diamonds

Mighty Diamonds is a strategic video game consultancy specializing in Publishing, Design, Production, Marketing, and Business.

Our mission is to empower developers in creating exceptional games.

Learn more at mighty.diamonds.

Want a deep dive into the week's biggest stories? Check out our podcast on YouTube & Spotify

Highlights

• Sony wiped over 1,000 shovelware games off the PlayStation store without warning, all from a single developer

• Arc Raiders: Men Spent Their Holiday Obsessed With a Peanut

News

• Ubisoft Cancels 6 Projects Including Prince of Persia: Sands of Time Remake, Closes 2 Studios and Confirms Further Layoffs in Major Company Restructure

• Marathon Releases March 5, 2026

• As Hitman 3 turns five years old, we surely have enough hindsight to declare: this is one of the greatest of all time, right?

• Highguard Developers Remain Silent One Week Before Release Day

• Resident Evil Requiem is launching with $2,000 real-life watches because "time is a main character" in the game

Industry Trends

• Epic Game Store’s free giveaways just cause a huge spike in Steam sales, reveals New Blood CEO

• Direct-to-consumer transactions have become a "core, scalable revenue system," says Appcharge

• Would you give up your PC or console for the cloud?

• Poppy Playtime: How Mob Entertainment builds a transmedia franchise

Rumors

• No Rumors!

Numbers

• Dragon Ball Z: Kakarot sells 10m units

• Ubisoft Reveals Sales Numbers for Multiple Series - Assassin's Creed Series Tops 230 Million Units

• Tainted Grail: The Fall of Avalon - 1 million copies sold

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About Mighty Diamonds

Mighty Diamonds is a strategic video game consultancy specializing in Publishing, Design, Production, Marketing, and Business.

Our mission is to empower developers in creating exceptional games.

Learn more at mighty.diamonds.

Want a deep dive into the week's biggest stories? Check out our podcast on YouTube & Spotify

Highlights

• Hytale surges to the most-watched game on Twitch, attracting over 420,000 viewers with its long-awaited launch

• Epic Games rolls out in-island transactions for Fortnite Creative

News

• Rockstar launches official marketplace for mods

• Monument Valley maker Ustwo is now a "PC first" studio

• Samsung execs warn of upcoming phone price hikes over memory shortages

• New Chinese slasher Phantom Blade Zero is already on the wishlist of a million players

Industry Trends

• How gaming is fixing broken loyalty programmes

• Don’t look up: why climbing keeps coming back in games

• Split Fiction’s Josef Fares: “I would not be able to live without AAA titles”

• Why is Arc Raiders cheaper than most triple-A games? Thanks to Helldivers 2, mostly

• Meta is closing down three VR studios as part of its metaverse cuts

• The Truth About What Happened on Anthem - Complete (2011-2026)

Rumors

• No Rumors!

Numbers

• Arc Raiders has surpassed 12 million players worldwide: 'a milestone we owe entirely to the players', and to celebrate, Embark is handing out a free golden pickaxe

• Detroit: Become Human surpasses 15 million units sold worldwide

• Forza Horizon 5 PS5 port tops 5 million sales, securing $300m in additional sales for Xbox

• Steam sets a new all-time concurrent player record after surpassing 42 million users online

Gies is a free-for-all newsletter | Press F to support us!

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About Mighty Diamonds

Mighty Diamonds is a strategic video game consultancy specializing in Publishing, Design, Production, Marketing, and Business.

Our mission is to empower developers in creating exceptional games.

Learn more at mighty.diamonds.

Want a deep dive into the week's biggest stories? Check out our podcast on YouTube & Spotify

Highlights

• Arc Raiders Now Matches You Based On Whether You Prefer PvE Or PvP

• Asus announces product price hikes starting January 5, and AI is to blame — RAM and storage cost pressure cited as main trigger for pricing increase

News

• Why is Arc Raiders cheaper than most triple-A games? Thanks to Helldivers 2, mostly

• Gamers desert Intel in droves, as Steam share plummets from 81% to 55.6% in just five years

• Xbox suffers "worst year on record" for console sales in the UK

• AAA John Wick Game Is Officially In Development And Will Be Announced Soon, Confirms Lionsgate Executive

• GOG is getting acquired by its original co-founder

Industry Trends

• Fallout Season 2 has doubled the number of people playing the Fallout games on Steam

• Boosting Steam reviews post-release leads to increased conversion rates

• CEO Of Lies Of P Publisher, Neowiz, Talks 2025, Overture Expansion, Release Strategy, Gen AI, And More

  Reddit overtakes TikTok in UK thanks to search algorithms and gen Z

• IDC warns PC market could shrink up to 9% in 2026 due to skyrocketing RAM pricing — even moderate forecast hits 5% drop as AI-driven shortages slam into PC market

Rumors

• Report: Discord confidentially files for IPO

• Microsoft Is Rumored to Be Planning Thousands of Job Cuts as AI Spending Accelerates

Numbers

• Hollow Knight: Silksong sells over 7m copies in three months

• Buckshot Roulette - BUCKSHOT ROULETTE Reached 8 Million High Rollers

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About Mighty Diamonds

Mighty Diamonds is a strategic video game consultancy specializing in Publishing, Design, Production, Marketing, and Business.

Our mission is to empower developers in creating exceptional games.

Learn more at mighty.diamonds.

🎧 Want a deep dive into the week's biggest stories? Check out our podcast on YouTube & Spotify

🎯 Highlights

• The Game Awards 2025: All the game announcements and trailers

• FIFA’s Gaming Comeback Is A New Netflix-Exclusive Game

🆕 News

• Battlefield 6 “Extremely Likely” To Outsell Black Ops 7 In The US This Year, Expert Says

• Nvidia plans heavy cuts to GPU supply in early 2026

• Bungie finally confirms a Marathon release date and $40 price point | VGC

• Terminator Survivors is delayed indefinitely and will now be a single-player only survival game with no early access launch

• Deus Ex Remastered delayed to unannounced date

📈 Industry Trends

• Epic fails to compete with Steam because “EGS is a shop, Steam is a community”, says Witchfire lead, as Epic has “nothing to do but to buy”

• Ubisoft acquires Amazon Games Montreal team, marking the return of Rainbow Six Siege’s director

• Tencent sells Battalion maker Bulkhead to newly-formed consortium backed by Team 17 owner

• Science Says There’s More To Cozy Games Than A Comfy Escape

• Steam Replay 2025 shows that only 14% of all user playtime was spent playing new PC games

🤫 Rumors

• Assassin’s Creed Black Flag Resynced Is the Name of Ubisoft’s Long-Awaited Pirate Remake

🔢 Numbers

• Hogwarts Legacy Has Sold 40 Million Units

• Steam data shows over 19,000 games released in 2025

Gies is a free-for-all newsletter | Press F to support us!

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About Mighty Diamonds

Mighty Diamonds is a strategic video game consultancy specializing in Publishing, Design, Production, Marketing, and Business.

Our mission is to empower developers in creating exceptional games.

Learn more at mighty.diamonds.

🎧 Want a deep dive into the week's biggest stories? Check out our podcast on YouTube & Spotify

🎯 Highlights

• Netflix Officially Buying Warner Bros. Discovery In $82.7B Deal | Netflix Considers Warner Bros. Games To Be Worthless | Paramount Launches Hostile Bid for Warner Bros.

• The AI Tech Crunch: Are We Looking At A “Dark Age” For Gaming Hardware?

🆕 News

• Call of Duty Will No Longer Do Back-to-back Releases of Modern Warfare or Black Ops Games

• PS5, EA Sports FC 26 and Hogwarts Legacy come out top during Europe’s Black Friday

• The end of an era: Tekken boss Katsuhiro Harada is out at Bandai Namco, after 30 years of working on the esteemed fighting series

• Postal game developer shuts down after its project was cancelled due to allegations of generative AI use

📈 Industry Trends

• SIE Partners with Bad Robot Games to Produce and Publish the Studio’s First Internally Developed Game

• Amazon’s King of Meat Developer Glowmade Faces Layoffs Following Disastrous Game Launch

• Wreckreation maker Three Fields Entertainment puts whole studio on redundancy notice

• Roblox banned in Russia, accused of distributing LGBTQ+ propaganda as criticism of child safety measures continues

🤫 Rumors

• Assassin’s Creed Black Flag Resynced Is the Name of Ubisoft’s Long-Awaited Pirate Remake

🔢 Numbers

• No numbers!

Gies is a free-for-all newsletter | Press F to support us!

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About Mighty Diamonds

Mighty Diamonds is a strategic video game consultancy specializing in Publishing, Design, Production, Marketing, and Business.

Our mission is to empower developers in creating exceptional games.

Learn more at mighty.diamonds.