Gaming · Friday, 28 August 2026

01 Briefing what happened

The Helldivers 2 studio says every sales assumption in games should lose a zero

Gaming 1 min 32 sources

At Gamescom the people who run studios spent the week explaining what went wrong. Almost all the evidence they have comes from the games that lasted.

$6m

what SnowRunner cost to make

Saber says it has since brought in hundreds of millions [2]

5.1%

forecast console revenue growth

flat without one game that is not out yet [3]

32m

people who played World War Z

made by a team of about 50 [2]

$213.9bn

forecast global games spending

up 6.1%, with mobile taking 57% of it [4]

The lead story — what happened

Arrowhead boss Shams Jorjani told Gamescom the playbooks used from 2010 to 2020 no longer work. [1]
Studios used to assume a game would sell at least a certain amount. Jorjani's version of that number: take a zero away. [1]
He said the bottom has fallen out of every business case studios had. [1]
Fallout co-creator Tim Cain named the habit underneath it. Publishers only study the games that sold well, so failure teaches them nothing. [5]
Cain called it survivorship bias, and said the search should also cover what the games that flopped had in common. [5]
Saber's Tim Willits argued the reckoning is North American, not global. Saber has 3,500 staff across 15 studios and no development in North America. [2]
Willits said Saber's driving game SnowRunner cost around $6 million and has brought in hundreds of millions. [2]
He said World War Z was made by about 50 people and has been played by 32 million. [2]
Newzoo forecasts console revenue up 5.1% this year, to $46.9 billion. [3][4]
Take out Grand Theft Auto 6 and that growth is zero. Newzoo's Emmanuel Rosier said console revenue would be flat against 2025. [3]
Rosier said the game will be cannibalistic to other releases. GamesIndustry.biz gives that as the likely reason so many studios moved their dates. [3]
CD Projekt Red now runs The Witcher 4 on PC, PS5 and Xbox every day, because Cyberpunk 2077 was built PC-first and shipped broken. [6]

What is pushing on this

Cost of building in North America High↑

Saber runs 15 studios and puts none of its development there [2]

Faith in the old sales numbers Easing↓

Arrowhead says every business case has lost its floor [1]

Asian studios at the front Building↑

Chinese and Korean games opened and filled Gamescom's Opening Night Live [10]

Money still arriving Steady↑

Newzoo forecasts $213.9bn spent on games this year [4]

Who is involved

Shams Jorjani, Arrowhead — told Gamescom the industry's planning numbers are gone Tim Willits, Saber — argues the crisis is North American cost, not global demand Tim Cain, Fallout co-creator — named the industry's habit as survivorship bias Emmanuel Rosier, Newzoo — says one unreleased game is the console market's whole growth Michal Nowakowski, CD Projekt Red — rebuilt the studio's process after Cyberpunk 2077

How it unfolded

2020 Cyberpunk 2077 ships broken and is pulled from the PlayStation Store [6]
2020 Saber releases SnowRunner, made for around $6 million [2]
Last week Tim Cain publishes the video calling the industry's blind spot survivorship bias [5]
Thursday Arrowhead and Saber both tell Gamescom the old assumptions are finished [1][2]
3 September 1047 Games switches off dedicated servers for two of its shooters [8]
December Riot ends active development on its fighting game 2XKO [7][9]

Where this points

Newzoo publishes its full report on 10 September; the figure to watch is console revenue with Grand Theft Auto 6 taken out. [3][4]

The rest of the day

17 more stories on this beat.

Each with its own sources. None of these is a link to the story above.

02
Tariffs may return to consoles

Politico reported the White House is weighing tariffs on chips and on the goods that use them, including consoles. [11]

Why it matters — Nintendo raised Switch prices weeks after the 2025 round, which the Supreme Court later ruled unconstitutional. [11]
03
Xbox says it has to get cheap

Xbox boss Asha Sharma told the BBC the whole industry must innovate on affordability and efficiency. That, she said, is something it has not had to do. [12][13]

Why it matters — She named the cause as the crisis in hardware and components, and said Xbox has not had to think this way before. [12]
04
The anniversary Xbox costs $899

Microsoft priced its translucent green 25th-anniversary Xbox at $899, with preorders from 27 August and a 13 November launch. [15]

Why it matters — Under the shell it is an Xbox Series X, which itself now lists at $799.99 after an earlier rise. [16]
05
Netflix stopped making games

Netflix dropped its plans for big games. Instead it hosted the Grand Theft Auto 6 extended look, six hours before YouTube got it. [17]

Why it matters — Grand Theft Auto V has sold more than 230 million copies, so the audience was never the problem. [19]
06
Creators argued over the rules

Rockstar told creators they could share reaction content after the Netflix debut, without saying whether they could show footage. [18]

Why it matters — Co-streaming a showcase is normal, and a copyright strike is not a small thing for a channel. [18]
07
Europe grew by adding countries

Video Games Europe put 2025 revenue at 30bn euros, after expanding its report from five countries to sixteen. [20]

Why it matters — The original five fell 4%, to 25.7bn euros. [20]
08
Newzoo disowned its own analyst

Newzoo said Rosier's remarks that the Epic Games Store cannot recover were not supported by its data and should not be treated as its assessment. [31]

Why it matters — Epic answered with numbers: third-party spending up 57% to a record $400 million in 2025. [31]
09
Saudi state media starts a studio

MBC Group, 54% owned by Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund since 2025, is building a games studio around 1001 Threads of Mizan. [21]

Why it matters — The studio's head calls the region fast-growing, and says it has ruled out using generative AI. [21]
10
Gamescom sold its whole floor

Gamescom filled all 233,000 square metres in Cologne, with more than 1,600 exhibitors from 67 countries. Its indie area grew 16%. [22][23]

Why it matters — ChinaJoy drew over 438,000 attendees this year, so the largest games show in the world is in China. [22]
11
Chinese and Korean games opened Gamescom

Hoyoverse opened Opening Night Live with Nodusfall, followed by games from Krafton, NetEase, NCSoft and Chengdu's Eclipse Glow Games. [10]

Why it matters — Arrowhead's boss says Asian studios have reached a tipping point in quality. [1]
12
A Chinese action game's pre-orders

Alinea Analytics estimates Phantom Blade Zero has taken over 300,000 Steam pre-orders worth $14.5 million, with 1.6 million wishlists. [24]

Why it matters — That is an outside firm's estimate, not a figure from the studio. [24]
13
Google will police memory-hungry games

Google told Android developers that apps over its new memory limits will be slowed down and may be shut off, blaming the memory shortage. [25]

Why it matters — Mobile is 57% of what the world spends on games. [4]
14
Switch 2 goes up $50 on Tuesday

Nintendo raises the 256GB Switch 2 from $449.99 to $499.99 on 1 September, in the US, Canada, the UK and Europe. [26][27]

Why it matters — Bundles including a game arrive from late September, priced above $500. [27]
15
Movie tie-in games have stopped

More than 30 licensed movie games came out in 2007. In 2025 the nearest thing was an event server in Minecraft and Fortnite skins. [28]

Why it matters — Half-Life 2 cost $40 million in 2004; Marvel's Spider-Man 2 cost about $300 million. [28]
16
Xbox is testing ads in streaming

Xbox is trialling a game streaming tier paid for by ads. An eMarketer survey found 52% of players would quit over repeated disruptive ads. [29]

Why it matters — One in five said good ads would make them play a game more often. [29]
17
Britain opens a mentoring scheme

Creative UK launched Fast Forward, sponsored by Barclays and backed by lottery money, matching games, film and TV firms with industry mentors. [30]

Why it matters — It is help running a company, not money to make a game. [30]
18
Europe's studios re-elect their lobby

The European Games Developer Federation named its 2026-28 board and re-elected Hendrik Lesser as president, with funding and skills access on its agenda. [32]

Why it matters — Its stated agenda is better access to funding, talent and skills, while Europe's longest-counted markets shrank 4%. [32][20]

02 Lesson why it matters

The rule you learned came only from the ones that lasted

Failures disappear faster than successes, so the evidence you can reach has already been sorted by the thing you want to explain.

The twist

The evidence you can still reach has already been sorted by the very thing you are trying to explain.

How it works

Many teams try the same thing; most of them fail
The failures stop being visible - cancelled, shut off, forgotten
What is left to study is the ones that lasted
You find what those share and call it the reason
The failures shared it too, and are not there to say so

Where you've seen this

Business books

the habits of ten founders who made it, and no chapter on the thousand who had the same habits

Old buildings

we think past craftsmanship was better, because the badly built ones fell down

Medicine

a treatment judged on the patients who came back to the clinic

Career advice

drop out and build it in a garage, told only by the people it worked for

The catch

Sometimes the shared trait really is the cause. You just cannot tell that from the winners alone, and almost nobody keeps the losers.

And the whole of it

Everyone here is looking where the light is, and that includes us. This briefing is built from studios that still exist to be interviewed. The cancelled ones left no interview, and their absence is the exact shape of what we cannot tell you.

03 Lab your turn

What the winners have in common

Pick the trait the survivors share, then see how many games started with it and never finished.

04 Truth what's really going on

What is really going on

An industry is diagnosing its own collapse using only the survivors. Everyone it interviews runs a company that is still here to be asked.

Why it works on us — A number with a name attached feels checkable. So take a zero off travels far, and the sentence saying nobody measured the original does not.

Who gains

Studios outside North America — Saber's argument turns a cost gap into a strategy, and it is the argument its 15 non-American studios are already built on. [2]
Rockstar and Take-Two — Studios moved their release dates away from its launch, which Newzoo links to the game being cannibalistic. [3]
Google — The memory shortage lets the Play Store write a rule every Android game must meet, enforced by slowing down or shutting off apps that miss it. [25]
Netflix — It walked back its own games and still got the exclusive first showing of the Grand Theft Auto 6 look, six hours before YouTube. [17]

Who pays

People who worked on the games nobody studies — Publishers only look at the games that sold, so whatever a failed project could have taught is never read. [5]
Players of Empulse and Splitgate: Arena Reloaded — 1047 Games stops paying for dedicated servers on 3 September and hands hosting back to players. [8]
Switch 2 buyers after Tuesday — The 256GB model goes from $449.99 to $499.99 on 1 September in the US, Canada, the UK and Europe. [26]
European studios — The five European markets with the longest run of comparable data shrank 4% year-on-year, to 25.7bn euros. [20][32]

What nobody knows yet

Open questions from across today’s stories — ours included.

01

Whether Newzoo's console figures hold once Grand Theft Auto 6 is out.

Rosier said the 2027 forecast assumes a PC version nobody has announced, and that on the transition of GTA Online they have no information of any kind. [3]
02

Which number describes Europe.

Video Games Europe reported 30bn euros for 2025 across sixteen countries, while the five countries it counted last year fell 4% to 25.7bn euros. Both are in the same report. [20]
03

Whether the Epic Games Store is recovering or finished.

Newzoo's own analyst said it cannot recover; Newzoo then said the remark was not supported by its data; Epic said third-party spending rose 57% to $400 million. [31]
04

Whether the console tariffs happen at all.

The report is of proposals under consideration, and Politico's sources said the framework could change drastically in coming weeks. Nothing has been published. [11]
05

Whether the next Xbox has a disc drive.

Sharma declined to confirm or deny it, and answered a question about physical media by describing a feature that converts discs to downloads. [12][14]
06

How many Steam pre-orders Phantom Blade Zero really has.

The 300,000 units and $14.5 million come from Alinea Analytics, an outside firm. S-Game has published nothing. [24]
07

What SnowRunner actually earned.

Hundreds of millions is Willits' own figure, given in an interview at Gamescom. No audited number appears anywhere in the reporting. [2]
08

How many games were cancelled this year.

Nobody publishes a count. Tim Cain's point is that these games are simply forgotten, and a project killed before it is announced leaves no record at all. [5]

05 Hope carry this

The most useful thing anyone said this week was that we should study the games that failed. That is an ordinary, unglamorous idea, and industries do eventually adopt ordinary ideas once enough people say them out loud.