An indie developer posted a clip of her game idea. The AI clones beat her to the store.

The clone arrives before the game does

Earlier this year the developer Freya Holmér posted a 50-second clip of a prototype: Tetris, but the board rotates as you stack blocks. It went round social media. Within days, someone had built a version of it using AI coding tools, and more clones followed into app stores [11].

One of them, called Rotris, came from Charlie Greenman, who told 404 Media it took a few prompts and about a day of work. He was blunt about it: “I really can care less about the game” [11].

The mechanism here is worth being precise about, because it is not really about theft. Game mechanics — the rules of how a game works — have never been protected by copyright. Only the specific expression is: the art, the code someone actually wrote, the music. Rotating Tetris was legally free to copy on the day it was posted, and on every day before that.

What protected it was time. Turning a clever idea into a shipped, playable game used to take a single developer weeks or months. That gap was the window in which the original could finish and launch first. AI tools compress the gap to roughly a day, and the window closes.

The effect on the people making games is immediate. One developer told 404 Media she now feels “this anxiety anytime you post anything” [11] — which is a change in behaviour, not just a change in mood. Showing work early is how small studios build an audience before launch. If showing work is what gets you cloned, the cheapest marketing available to a one-person studio stops being safe to use.

This sits inside a broader shift. GDC’s 2025 State of the Game Industry survey found more than half of surveyed developers work at companies using AI tools [12]. In the same week, Netflix told shareholders it used generative AI in roughly 300 shows and films so far in 2026, mostly in post-production [19]. The tools deliver output “more quickly and at a lower cost than traditional methods,” the company said [19].

The biggest number in games this week is an estimate

Grand Theft Auto 6 opened pre-orders on 25 June. The analytics firm Newzoo puts the first week at roughly $260 million in global digital spending — the largest opening it has observed [13].

Read the construction of that figure carefully, because it is a model, not a receipt. Newzoo measured about $180 million across the US and the five biggest European markets. It then scaled that up, on the basis that roughly 69% of GTA 5’s lifetime console players sat in those six markets [14]. From there it projects $3.25 billion to $5.2 billion in launch-week revenue when the game ships in November. That is up to 51 million copies at an assumed $88 average price [14][17].

Newzoo’s Ronan Patrick was unusually direct about what the number is not. Social media claims that the game had done a billion dollars in pre-orders, he said, are “absurd” — nothing has ever done that 21 weeks out [17]. For scale, GTA 5 took three days to reach $1 billion in 2013 [14].

The projection matters to studios that have nothing to do with Rockstar, because a release that large bends other people’s schedules. The lead on Modern Warfare 4 was asked about launching near what PC Gamer called “the GTA 6 black hole.” He shrugged it off: “It’s a little head-to-head, that’s great” [74]. Not everyone can afford that posture.

An offline mode that needed the internet

On Saturday 11 July, Ubisoft Connect went down for about an hour. Players found they could not launch Assassin’s Creed Black Flag Resynced — including in its offline mode [25][56].

Ubisoft games require a one-time internet check to authenticate a copy, after which you should be able to play without a connection. The offline mode existed. It was advertised. It had simply never been tested against the one situation it is for. When that situation arrived, it turned out the offline mode needed the server’s permission to go offline [25].

The commercial picture around the game is otherwise strong. It sold 2 million copies on launch day and posted the best Steam launch of any Assassin’s Creed game. Alinea Analytics counted 701,000 copies on Steam as of 13 July [21]. The much-criticised day-one add-on content accounted for less than 3% of initial Steam sales — about $1 million [30]. Ubisoft laid off developers who worked on the game regardless, and staff at Ubisoft Barcelona went on strike this month [21].

The ownership question sits next to this one. Sony plans to retire PlayStation discs from the start of 2028. The UK’s Entertainment Retailers Association hit back. Its chief executive, Kim Bayley, called the move “a triumph of corporate convenience over consumer choice,” noting that millions still buy games physically each year [66].

Ubisoft stops betting on launches

Ubisoft’s 2025/26 annual report describes a pivot to a “more selective model” [27]. It will lean on its back catalogue and live-service games rather than depend on individual launches to carry a year. A live-service game keeps selling things to the same players for years, instead of once.

The report is candid about why. Releasing a game early, or into a crowded window against a major competitor, “can significantly limit its commercial impact” [27]. There is also a small piece of language worth noticing. Last year’s report listed “overpricing” as a business risk; this year it reads “a pricing strategy that may or may not devalue the content” [27].

Elsewhere in the technology stack, a report contradicted Microsoft’s statements that id Software has not been moved off its in-house id Tech engine onto Unreal [44]. One source suggested the engine is “most likely going to end up in the trash can” [44]. An id producer, speaking after the Xbox layoffs, was gloomier still about what the current industry can support: “you’ll never get another WoW or Morrowind in the current climate” [68].

Quietly, in the background

Three smaller things worth carrying. Scopely confirmed Looney Tunes: World of Mayhem goes offline in October, another mobile live-service game reaching the point where it no longer covers its own costs [32]. Riot is running League of Legends Classic from 29 July, rewinding the game to its season-three era — a publisher treating its own past as a product [51]. And GOG’s preservation programme shipped a small remaster of Thief, ahead of the full Nightdive version [26]. It is one of the few structured efforts keeping old PC games running at all.

The money is still moving, too. Games mergers and acquisitions hit $2.3 billion across 54 transactions in the second quarter — the highest since 2022, per Aream & Co [4]. Netflix said part of its games business is up 600%, while adding “we’re just getting started here,” which is the kind of percentage that usually means a small base [37]. And in Istanbul, the mobile studio Grand Games raised $30 million after its debut titles took more than $4 million in gross in-app revenue in under three months [9].