Gaming, in brief

Silver Lake, an investment firm, and PIF, Saudi Arabia's state fund, have held talks to buy Unity, Reuters reports. [1]

They discussed a price of about $25 billion, unnamed people told Reuters. [1]

Unity makes a game engine, the software tools studios build games with. [1] Thousands of games use it. [1]

The talks are early, and no deal is assured. [1]

Unity's shares rose nearly 15% after the news. [1]

Scopely, maker of Monopoly Go!, and Niantic, maker of Pokemon Go, both use Unity's tools. [1] A group including Silver Lake and PIF owns both. [1]

So the buyers already own some of Unity's customers, and would become the supplier of those firms' rivals. [1]

PC Gamer's writer expects Unity's staff to dread it, after EA's mass layoffs followed its sale. [2]

Unity's tools also reach beyond games, into car design, film-making and architecture. [1]

Economists call this vertical integration: one owner holds a supplier and some of the firms that buy from it. [1]

If this deal happens, a studio competing with Monopoly Go! would be paying Monopoly Go!'s owners for its tools. [1]

In a town with one flour mill, a baker has a problem if the mill's owner opens a bakery too.

All this comes from unnamed people speaking to Reuters. [1] We read it through IGN and PC Gamer, not Reuters itself. [2]

Unity has reportedly been taking advice from an investment bank on its options. [1]

The purchase by Silver Lake and Saudi Arabia's PIF left EA with $18 billion of debt, and EA then closed BioWare. [3]

They are now in talks over Unity, the tool thousands of other studios build on. [1]

A closed studio gives fans something to fight for, with a petition and a documentary. [46] The $18 billion of debt behind that choice is a number nobody can picture. [3]

Talk of a buyer lifted the shares nearly 15%, with no deal signed. [1]

Whether Unity will sell, and what the buyers would pay.

The talks are early, and the $25 billion was discussed before Unity's results and before its shares rose nearly 15%. [1]

Disney's next round of job cuts looks set for early 2027, likely January, Deadline reports. [12]

Managers have been given targets, and some must find as much as 20% in yearly savings. [12]

Debra OConnell, chairman of Disney's TV arm, is also redrawing how that arm is run. [12]

Its TV networks look likely to be hit, as Disney moves away from shrinking channel TV. [12]

Disney recently sold its 50% share of A+E, a cable TV group, to Hearst for $1.2 billion. [12]

Staff at National Geographic and the 20th Television studio may also be cut, Deadline suggests. [12]

Employers call this a voluntary exit offer: some staff are paid to leave before anyone is pushed. [12]

More Disney executives took it than expected, Deadline hears, which softens the cuts. [12] Shari Rosenblum, its TV studio publicity head, left that way after more than 25 years. [19]

A crowded bus asks who will wait for the next one, before the driver has to choose.

Much of this is chatter from unnamed insiders, Deadline says, and OConnell has kept her plans to herself. [12]

Whoever is in the areas with the targets waits until about January to learn if they stay. [12]

How many Disney jobs go, and which ones.

Deadline reports targets and expected areas, and says its new chief has kept her plans to herself. [12]

Nintendo's president, Shuntaro Furukawa, says it is "not considering additional changes" to the Switch 2's price, Reuters reports. [10]

He also says Nintendo can "secure sufficient quantities" of memory, the chips in short supply. [10]

The Switch 2 went up $50 in the US this year, to $499. [10]

Microsoft took the Xbox Series S from $299 to $499 over several rises. [10] The PS5 now starts at $649. [10]

AI data centres are buying up memory, which is what has pushed these machines up. [10]

In Japan last week, Famitsu estimated 68,733 Switch 2s, 16,226 PS5s and 892 Xboxes sold. [20]

So Nintendo goes into Christmas with its price held and Zelda out, and January's report will show how that went. [21]

Economists call it cost pass-through: how much of a rise in a firm's costs reaches its buyers. [10]

A firm passes on less when buyers may walk away. [10] Switch 2 sales are already down 37.4% on last year, and Nintendo is holding at $499. [10]

A snack seller whose costs rise may keep the price if the queue has started to shrink.

Whether Nintendo can keep the Switch 2 at $499 next year.

Furukawa ruled out a rise only for now, and in May he said component prices could affect next year as well. [83]

Whether Macronix's exit from game chips touches Switch 2 cartridges.

The Verge calls Macronix a Switch 2 supplier. [10] GamesRadar says it makes parts for Switch 1 cartridges, not Switch 2. [83] Nintendo has not commented, Eurogamer says. [84]

Nintendo sold 18.8% more Switch 2 games in the 6 months to September, while Switch 2 consoles fell 37.4%. [22]

Tomodachi Life: Living the Dream was its biggest seller of those 6 months, at 8.81 million copies. [23]

Mario Kart 8 Deluxe, first released on an older console in 2014, has now reached 72 million. [21]

Downloads made up 60.7% of Nintendo's game sales, by money rather than copies. [24]

Over the 6 months, operating profit, what its business earned, rose 49.1%, helped by a refund of US tariffs. [22]

Tariffs are taxes on imports, and Nintendo says it mostly paid them itself rather than raising prices. [22]

In the last 3 of those months alone, operating profit fell 16% to 73.9 billion yen. [25]

With fewer consoles selling, Nintendo says it will lean on people who already own a Switch to sell more games. [22]

Accountants call a refund like this a one-off: it counts once and will not come again. [22]

The refund came in the first quarter. [22] So the 6 months rose 49.1% while the latest 3 months fell 16%. [25]

A birthday gift makes one month's pocket money look huge, and next month is back to normal.

Nintendo still expects 16.5 million Switch 2 sales in the year to March, down 16.9%. [26]

How much of Nintendo's 49.1% profit rise came from the tariff refund.

GamesIndustry.biz names the refund beside game sales and gives no split. [22]

Lionsgate, the US studio behind John Wick and The Hunger Games, says sales rose 41% to about $667 million. [6]

That beat analysts' forecast, and its loss shrank to $15.5 million from $113.5 million. [6]

Its library of about 20,000 old films and TV shows brought in $1.04 billion in 12 months. [7]

Boss Jon Feltheimer named Heartland, a Canadian show running nearly 20 years, among the drivers. [7] He also named Kill Bill: The Whole Bloody Affair. [7]

Lionsgate also licensed the first 4 Power series to Netflix, 10 years after the show began. [7]

Legendary Entertainment has reportedly offered to buy Lionsgate, and Feltheimer will not discuss it. [6]

Studios call old titles the library, and they keep selling them in new forms. [7]

Dirty Dancing is touring as a musical, and La La Land follows on stage in 2028. [6]

By the end of its 2028 financial year it expects at least 8 stage plays and 9 video games. [6]

A band's old hit keeps paying when a film or an advert uses it.

The next Hunger Games film, Sunrise on the Reaping, opens this month. [6]

The same week Lionsgate reported $1.04 billion in 12 months from old films and shows. [7]

The New York Times Company is in exclusive talks to buy Letterboxd for about $330 million. [5]

Letterboxd is a website and app where about 30 million film fans log and rate what they watch. [5]

The Times reported the talks itself, and said the deal is not final. [5] Its spokesman would not comment. [27]

Its 2 founders are expected to stay in charge, reporting to a Times executive. [5]

A24, a film company, dropped out when the price rose. [5] Netflix and Sony Pictures also showed interest. [5]

Canada's Tiny bought 60% in 2023, when the whole company was valued at $50 million to $60 million. [5]

The Times Company already owns Wordle, and The Athletic, which cost it $550 million. [27]

Investors call this a multiple: the price divided by a year's earnings. [5]

About $330 million against about $15 million of earnings expected for 2026 is more than 20 times. [5]

Paying many years' takings for a lemonade stand means you expect it to grow.

It holds 60% of a company it bought into at a far lower value in 2023. [5]

Whether The New York Times deal for Letterboxd closes.

It is the buyer's own report of talks, and it says the deal is not final. [5]

Strauss Zelnick, boss of Take-Two, which owns GTA 6's maker Rockstar, was asked if he has too few hits. [28]

The question came at a Wall Street Journal conference, with Take-Two's shares nearly 20% below last year's peak. [28]

Zelnick answered that 15 of his series have each sold at least 5 million copies in one release. [28]

Kotaku says Borderlands 4 and Civilization 7 were not runaway hits. [28]

Kotaku adds that a new BioShock has been stuck for a decade. [28]

Zelnick called GTA 6 "expensive" and its delay "expensive and inconvenient", and named no figure. [29]

He says a fixed schedule can be the wrong call, pointing to an unnamed game pulled after launch. [30] GameSpot thinks he means Cyberpunk 2077. [29]

The worry the question raised is that Take-Two leans on one big hit. [28]

Investors call this concentration risk: too much of a company's money rides on one thing. [28]

Take-Two has 15 big series, yet the question was about one game, because GTA 6 is so much bigger. [28]

A shop that makes most of its money at Christmas worries all year about one month.

GTA 6 comes out on 19 November. [29]

What GTA 6 cost to make.

Zelnick says only that it was expensive and took a long time. [29]

"Piracy is a fact of life," Take-Two's boss, Strauss Zelnick, said, two weeks before GTA 6. [31]

He said that when he worked in film, people figured on 10% to 20% being copied. [31]

He said music reached about 80% pirated by the mid 2000s, then came "way back down". [31]

Zelnick says huge file sizes make games harder to copy, but "it's not been a non-issue". [32]

He says Take-Two would answer with lawyers first, then with technical work. [32]

A court has already told Discord, the chat app, to hand over details about a person leaking GTA 6. [32]

GamesRadar calls GTA 6 the top target for illegal copying, because its sales should be huge. [31]

Economists call this excludability: how easily a seller can keep out people who have not paid. [32]

Take-Two's games need its servers for a good experience, he says. [32] So a pirate copy has no servers of its own and plays worse. [32]

A club with a door can keep out non-members, and a park with no fence cannot.

A video of the new Zelda: Ocarina of Time remake running on a PC appeared within hours of its launch. [33]

The player used an "experimental" emulator, software that makes one machine act like another. [33]

It hit 60 frames a second in film scenes, and 20 to 30 in play, a commenter said. [33]

The player says no piracy was involved, because the game was copied from their real copy. [33]

Nintendo made this game for the Switch 2 alone. [33] In August it destroyed 400 Switch emulator projects on GitHub, a code site. [33]

We have only one player's video and account, and GamesRadar says only that it "appears to be" the remake. [33]

Eiji Aonuma, who has 38 years at Nintendo and produces Zelda, says keeping staff for years brings "a real benefit". [34]

He told GameSpot that a core team stays from one game to the next, and new people learn from it. [34]

This year Microsoft planned to cut 3,200 jobs at Xbox, GamesRadar notes. [34]

So a studio that keeps its team can start the next game ahead, instead of hiring and teaching from nothing. [34]

Labour economists call this firm-specific skill: what a worker knows that is worth most inside one company. [34]

Aonuma says long-serving staff explain how and why things are done. [34] He calls that a base "we can build from". [34]

The cook who has worked at one cafe for years knows every regular's order.

GamesRadar's headline says Nintendo does not do layoffs. [34] The words it quotes from Aonuma are about the benefit of keeping staff. [34]

Nate Bihldorff, a senior Nintendo executive, told Polygon that new games and remakes are "of equal importance". [35]

The Ocarina of Time remake is Nintendo's second big remake this year, after Star Fox in June. [35]

Monolith Soft, the maker of Xenoblade, confirmed it worked on the game's design, code and graphics. [36]

People queued at midnight at Nintendo's New York shop, Best Buy and GameStop, Kotaku reports. [37]

Some lines began in the late afternoon, for a game they could have downloaded. [37]

A remake sells to two groups, Bihldorff says: those who loved it, and the many who never played it. [35]

Polygon reads remakes as the "safer bets" in Nintendo's plan, and that reading is Polygon's, not Nintendo's. [35]

Sony says 127 million accounts used PlayStation in September, a record for that month. [38]

Total playtime rose 4% in the quarter, its finance chief Lin Tao says. [38]

Sony has also raised its games sales forecast for the year by 6%, to 4.8 trillion yen. [39]

Those numbers came during a protest by players angry that Sony is ending game discs. [38]

All new PlayStation games will be download-only from January 2028. [40]

A boycott called PlayStation Blackout began after that news. [38]

A boycott aims for a fall big enough to force a rethink, and these figures show none. [38]

Economists call this revealed preference: trust what people do with their time and money over what they say. [38]

Here the chants are loud, and the count of hours played went up, so Sony reads the count. [38]

Friends who moan about a cafe's prices and still meet there every week have told the owner something.

Hours played cannot show who stopped buying, GamesRadar notes, and the count ended on 30 September. [38]

Sony says Marvel's Wolverine has sold 2.4 million copies in about 50 days. [41]

Sony names it as a reason its games business did better. [41]

Spider-Man 2, from the same studio, Insomniac, sold 2.5 million on its first day. [42]

The 2018 Spider-Man sold 3.3 million in 3 days, GamesRadar notes. [43]

Wolverine came out on 15 September. [39] Many big games launched around it, ahead of GTA 6 on 19 November. [42]

So Sony credits the game while GameSpot calls it a black mark on a solid quarter. [41][42]

Forecasters call this a reference class: you judge a result by which past cases you compare it with. [42]

Against a quarter's results, 2.4 million helps. [41] Against Insomniac's own Spider-Man launches, it falls well short. [42]

A runner's time can be great for the school and poor for the national team.

What Marvel's Wolverine cost to make.

Sony has not said, so nobody outside can tell what 2.4 million copies means for it. [42]

God of War Ragnarok, from 2022, has sold 1.1 million copies this year, Alinea Analytics estimates. [8]

That is nearly $60 million, says analyst Rhys Elliott. [8] He says it beat new 2026 games like Gears of War E-Day and Saros. [8]

Alinea puts its lifetime sales at 21.6 million copies and $1.4 billion. [8] That makes it Sony's own top-earning game of this console generation. [8]

It sold that way this year although 6.7 million people have played it through PlayStation Plus, the subscription. [8]

So a game with no new team behind it can beat this year's new releases. [8]

Elliott calls it an evergreen seller: one that keeps selling long after launch. [8]

He credits the pull of the God of War name, with an Amazon series on the way. [8]

A favourite book keeps selling in shops long after its author stopped writing.

These are one firm's estimates, not Sony's own figures. [8]

Why a film or game that has paid off its cost keeps earning for its owner

A studio pays most of a film's or game's cost before anyone buys it

Accountants spread that cost over the years it earns: this is amortisation

After some years the cost has all been counted, and none is left

Money the work still brings in then has almost no cost set against it

So owners keep finding new ways to sell old work

And buyers pay for a studio's library, not only for its next film