Gaming, in brief

Steam, the biggest shop for computer games, has taken about $15 billion so far in 2026, according to Rhys Elliott of Alinea Analytics, a firm that estimates game sales from outside. [1]

The hundred highest-earning games released this year account for 15.9% of that, around $2.4 billion. [1]

Forza Horizon 6 was the biggest of them at $210.5 million, then Crimson Desert at $203.3 million and Resident Evil Requiem at $200.9 million. [1]

Those three, plus Slay the Spire 2, Subnautica 2 and Meccha Chameleon, come to 6.6% of Steam's whole year. [1]

Inside that top hundred, 63 games had no earlier version behind them. They took 47.5% of the money; older names took the rest. [1]

Crimson Desert alone is about 18% of what those brand-new games earned. Take it out and the other 62 fall to roughly 39%. [1]

Where the other $12.6 billion comes from is not broken out. Valve takes a cut of everything sold on Steam, including the extras sold inside games. [1]

About 12,000 games launched on Steam in the first six months of 2026, 19% more than the same months of 2025. [3]

In the last week of August, 720 launched in seven days, a record. 530 of them have fewer than ten player reviews and ten have more than a thousand. [2]

Amir Satvat, who tracks industry jobs, says the release count overstates the crowding: of roughly 20,000 games released in 2025, about 600 ever had a hundred people playing at once. [3]

Valve is privately owned and publishes no sales figures, so every number above is an estimate made from outside. [1]

Why it matters. Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4, Gears of War: E-Day and Phantom Blade Zero all arrive before December, so watch whether new games end the year above a sixth of Steam's take. [1]

A US federal judge, Leonie Brinkema, refused the US Justice Department's request to make Google sell parts of its advertising business on Wednesday. [4][6] She had already ruled that Google illegally tied together the tool websites use to sell advertising space and the auction where that space is sold, making it very hard for customers to leave. [4][19] Instead of a sale she will impose rules on how Google behaves. Those rules are not public yet, because the two sides must first agree what to black out. [4][5][18] Publishers pay Google a 20% fee to sell their space through that auction. [19]

Why it matters. This is the third US case in a year where a court found a Big Tech violation and stopped short of breaking anything up, after the Google search case and the Meta case. [6][7] Game companies have fought the same kind of case over the cut a storefront takes, including Epic Games against Apple, and this is what winning one has looked like. [11]

Buyers sued both companies over 2025 console price rises they say were caused by US import taxes that the US Supreme Court later ruled illegal. [8] Sony asked a judge in northern California to dismiss, calling the claim speculative and illogical, and listing inflation, currency, component costs, logistics and demand as the reasons prices move. [8] It said it raised PlayStation 5 prices again after the taxes were struck down, which it argues proves the taxes were never the cause. [8] Microsoft filed a similar request in Washington state. [8]

Why it matters. Sony told investors in July it expected $508 million back in refunded import taxes, and that money lifted its quarterly operating profit by 37%. [8] If the dismissals work, Sony keeps the refund and the higher price, and nobody outside the company ever sees what a console costs to land.

Rockstar Games, the studio behind Grand Theft Auto, put a 30-minute preview of Grand Theft Auto 6 on Netflix at the end of August. The game itself is not out until November. [9] The trade newsletter The Games Business reported Nielsen IQ figures showing UK PlayStation 5 sales up 33% and Xbox sales up 34% in the week that followed. [9] PS5 Pro consoles sold out at the retailers Argos and Smyths Toys, and other sellers raised their prices. [9][10] UK console sales are still down 14.4% for the year, mostly on a 32% fall in PlayStation 5. [9]

Why it matters. Ronan Patrick of the research firm Newzoo expects more consoles in homes but nothing large. [9] He points out that a PlayStation 5 now costs 67% more than at launch once inflation is counted, and an Xbox twice as much. [9] Sony and Microsoft sold those consoles off a game they did not make and do not own.

Phil Schiller has stepped down from running Apple's App Store and its product events, Bloomberg reported; Apple has not announced it. [11] Schiller helped Steve Jobs create the store, ran it from 2015, set the share Apple takes from developers, and handled the company's long legal fight with Epic Games, which makes Fortnite. [11] The store goes back under Eddy Cue, who ran it before 2015, with Schiller's deputy Carson Oliver in day-to-day charge. [11] Schiller stays at Apple as a fellow. [11]

Why it matters. The App Store is where most mobile games are sold, and its rules on payments and on Apple's cut decide what a mobile studio keeps from every sale. [11] Those rules were one man's brief for a decade and are now somebody else's.

Yong-yi Zhu, who runs operations and strategy at Tencent Games, told GamesIndustry.biz that live service is the company's holy grail. [12] A live-service game keeps selling things to the same players for years instead of charging once. [12] Zhu named Honor of Kings, League of Legends and Valorant, all years old, as the company's DNA, saying such games provide stability to the studio. [12] Tencent, the Chinese internet company behind them, has parted with the British studios Splash Damage and Bulkhead in the past year. [12]

Why it matters. Zhu gave no reason beyond saying that for some studios Tencent cannot help them amplify their game. [12] One of the largest owners of game studios in the world is telling them the safe product is the one that never finishes.

The mayor's office in Miami-Dade County, Florida sent Rockstar Games a pitch deck on 29 June, proposing to dress parts of the county as Grand Theft Auto 6, which is set in a version of Miami. [13] It offered branded planes and signs at Miami International Airport, game livery on the Metromover trains, custom manhole covers and a Vice City Motor Fest. [13] The county sheriff, Rosie Cordero-Stutz, and commissioner Juan Carlos Bermudez objected in public. [13] A spokesperson for the mayor confirmed there had been some conversations with Rockstar. [13]

Why it matters. The sheriff and the commissioner said the county should promote the Miami-Dade it has worked to build, not a fictional version defined by crime and violence. [13] A local government is bidding for a share of a game's marketing budget, and its own police force is the obstacle.

GamesIndustry.biz ran a column on Friday pushing back on the talk of a second industry crash that has followed developers since Gamescom last month. [17] In the 1983 crash the American games business fell from over $3 billion in revenue to about $100 million by 1985, and analysts asked out loud whether video games had been a passing fad. [17] The column argues nothing like that is happening now: headline revenue is fine and games are an established medium with a huge audience. [17] It grants that this is no comfort to anyone who has lost a job. [17]

Why it matters. Tim Sweeney, head of Epic Games, called the present moment the worst crash since the 1980s. [17] Amir Satvat's Gamescom keynote put this year's announced job cuts at 14,666. [3] The money is growing and the jobs are going at the same time, and that is the argument the industry is now having with itself.

Thomas Mahler, lead developer on the Ori games and on the unfinished No Rest for the Wicked, launched VideoGamesCritic, a site that averages review scores. [14] It takes critic scores from the existing aggregator OpenCritic and combines them with player scores worked out from Steam reviews, weighting players at two-thirds. [14] It then rates each publication by how far its scores sit from the players'. [14] Mahler wrote that existing aggregators tell you how the press felt about a game, not how players did. [14]

Why it matters. Mahler said last year that being marked down by Steam reviewers could bankrupt his studio, and his new site now rests on those same reviewers. [14] An averaged score is how a lot of buyers decide whether to try a game they have never heard of, so who gets counted in one matters to every small studio.

Crystal Dynamics, the Californian studio that has made Tomb Raider games since the 1990s, has handed day-to-day development of Tomb Raider: Legacy of Atlantis to Flying Wild Hog in Poland. [16] The game is a remake of the 1996 original and launches on 12 February. [16] Game director Raul Siqueira said the two teams work as one, called Team Atlantis internally. [16] Flying Wild Hog has changed how it plays: first-aid kits are gone, replaced by potions and meals Lara Croft makes from ingredients she collects, and there is a skill tree. [16]

Why it matters. Crystal Dynamics has held the Tomb Raider name for thirty years and is now paying another company to build the game that carries it. [16] For a buyer deciding what to try in February, the name is the part doing the work.

2K released NBA 2K27, made by its Visual Concepts studio, on PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X and S, Nintendo Switch 2 and Steam on Friday. [15] It is the twenty-seventh yearly edition of the same basketball series. [15] Visual Concepts president Greg Thomas said this year adds a MyCAREER Eras mode, the series' first mixed-gender City, a 100-year franchise mode and experience points on every MyTEAM card. [15]

Why it matters. Every addition Thomas named is aimed at somebody who already owns last year's edition and is deciding whether to buy this one. [15] A yearly sports game is one of the few products that never has to explain what it is.