Gamified

EA promises "creative freedom" under its new Saudi sovereign-fund owners

Is DLSS 5 / neural rendering a genuine "GPT moment" for gaming, or NVIDIA hype?

Atari turning its arcade catalog into a movie?

Capcom wants to release a Resident Evil every year, and it sees remakes as the way to make that cadence work

Someone rebuilt World of Warcraft as a single-player experience populated with roughly 1,700 AI-driven companions and NPCs, and r...

Unity is building its next-gen engine around AI agents.

MindsEye's Meltdown - A GTA legend's comeback studio flops, lays off 400+, blames corporate sabotage, and throws an all-expenses fan party the same day workers protest outside

Palworld borrowed Pokemon's whole playbook, got sued by Nintendo, and made ~$700M anyway

Gamescom Sells Out for the First Time Ever - is this genuinely bullish for the gaming industy?

Watch instead of listen...

EA put paid progression into College Football 27's single-player modes, then pulls it days later in launch week?

What Would It Actually Take for Sony to Walk Back the Disc Shutdown?

84% of Game Attention Goes to Games Older Than Two Years - is this a crisis for new games?

Tim Sweeney Says Steam's Fees Are Leaving Billions on the Table

Is the games industry crashing? What does it look like in 2030?

Watch instead of listen on YouTube: htt...

Is Asha Sharma's reset actually making Xbox a healthy business?

What the **** was Phil Spencer doing, and how did he survive 38 years at Microsoft to walk out with Xbox losing 64 cents on every dollar?

On a scale of 0 to 10, how do you feel about ads becoming standard on console and PC?

Funds moving from equity to project financing: bullish or bullshit? Is this the death of gaming VC, or a necessary evolution?

CHAPTERS:

2:22 - Xbox Cuts...

PlayStation ends disc production in favor of digital-only in January 2028. GTA 6 is rumored to ship with a TikTok-style social network built into the game. The Steam AI disclosure study showing AI-labeled games get 53% fewer reviews, the ESA report claiming the average gamer is a 37-year-old white man, and Mecha Chameleon, the $6 hide-and-seek game outselling Cyberpunk 2077 on Steam. The Gamified panel breaks down what the end of p...

CHAPTERS:2:30 - GoW: Laufey Revisited | Sentiment Score20:41 - Over/Under $2B GTA VI Sales After 72hrs43:56 - Summer Games Fest 95% Sequels | Red / Green Flag57:50 - Console vs Cloud | Bullish or Bullsh1t1:10:47 - Unreal Blueprints Deprecation | Buy or Sell1:20:49 - Immutable = AppLovin Games | What are the Odds

Watch instead of listen on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ERGSPAD9XYw

Two weeks ago this room mostly buried Laufe...

Sharma took over from Spencer last month and is already torching every major decision Xbox made. Employees are surprised. Retailers are confused. Layoffs incoming. Future Halo on PlayStation? Nobody knows.

Single-player cinematic games are the new prestige format. The shift already happened — prestige migrated from multiplayer/live-service to authored, story-driven experiences, just like it migrated from film to TV. Live-servi...

Have Steam wishlists become a vanity metric that no longer measures what people think it measures?

The market just split on AI, and gaming is the clearest example. Nintendo has no AI features and no AI roadmap - and investors rewarded them for it. Roblox is doing the exact opposite: going all-in, building its own generative foundation models and baking agentic tools into the core of how games get made.

The new God of War: Laufey make...

THIS WEEK ON GAMIFIED: Forza Horizon 6 leaked before launch - then broke every franchise record. 172K concurrent on early access alone. 302K by end of week. Nearly 4x FH5's all-time peak.

Sony held a staff town hall: single-player first-party games are PS5 exclusive going forward. No more Steam ports. A direct reversal of a six-year trend.

Nintendo stock jumped 6.8% in three days. The reason? Investors rotating out of AI stocks into ...

Watch instead of listen on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=02n2n7h5PVI

We score the health of the gaming industry 1 to 10. Gaming VC dropped 95% from its 2021 peak. 10,000+ jobs cut in 2024. Contraction or correction?

Sony paid $3.6 billion for Bungie in 2022. Both Marathon and Destiny 2 are at 10K players on Steam. The panel votes buy or sell.

Double Fine unionizes with 42 employees while studios shut down around them.

Sam r...

1. Ryan Cohen's GameStop makes an unsolicited $55.5B bid for eBay. Is this a legitimate M&A play or a $9.4B cash pile under pressure? The panel assigns odds from 2% to 50%+.

2. Gaming VC hit $627M in H1 2025 — down from $12.5B at the 2021 peak. The panel argues the bullish case and identifies which categories can still generate returns

3. Microsoft is reportedly exploring a free, ad-supported Xbox Game Pass tier.

4. Star War...

If you were running a studio, would you automate over or under 30% of it with AI?

After comments suggesting many studios are already using AI tools but are afraid to admit it publicly, the conversation turns into a fight over what AI should actually replace, whether studios are quietly cutting humans out faster than they admit, and what happens when the industry starts trading headcount for tooling.

The episode also breaks down the s...

This week on Gamified, the panel breaks down Stop Killing Games and whether it’s a real consumer protection issue or a bad precedent for the industry, Roblox’s new age-based safety changes and what they mean for the company’s future, and the State of Decay 3 reveal controversy after the game was announced long before it was actually ready to show.

2:29 - Stop Killing Games | What’s the Word?

36:18 - Roblox Saf...

The strange rollout of Borderlands Mobile, reports that Disney and Epic want to launch their gaming universe with an extraction shooter, the allegations surrounding Gunzilla Games + Ashes of Creation, and why Roblox games are getting movie deals.

2:51 - Steam’s AI Leak | What’s the Word?

19:26 - Borderlands Surprise Launch | Red or Green Flag?

30:22 - Disney Extraction Shooter | Sentiment Score

58:51 - Ashes vs Gunzilla | ...

The panel debates Take-Two (GTA6) cutting its AI team, whether game adaptations should be made for core fans or mainstream audiences, if PC is really about to overtake console, and if AAA is still the safer bet than indies. We also get into , AI’s role in preserving game history, and whether a curated indie subscription service can actually work.

2:08 - Fan Service in Game Adaptations | Bullish or Bullshit

12:37 - Would you rat...

Is Marathon already dead? Sony just raised PS5 prices for the second time in a year. And the CEO of an $11 billion company used ChatGPT to try dodging a $250M payout. Plus Chris Heatherly serves up a rumor about Disney. 2:55 Is Marathon Already Cooked?19:20 PS5's are 30% More Expensive 36:48 Metacritic's Top 10 Publishers48:08 Disney is Working on "Playable TV" 1:01:29 How Much Did Nintendo Pay for Hades 2 (Exclusive)1:14:12 Krafto...

Episode 153: The panel goes to war over Nintendo vs Marvel, dunks on Epic's disaster, dissects the $80B metaverse failure, and debates whether Crimson Desert's AI art scandal even matters.

4:00 Big Deal?: Crimson Desert AI Art Scandal

19:55 Buy or Sell: Cyberpunk TCG Kickstarter ($13M Raised)

35:49 Autopsy: What Killed the Metaverse? ($80B Lost)

46:45 Quickfire: GameStop Declares Xbox 360 "Retro"

53:06 Boardroom: Epic Games Lays Off 1,0...

Topics on today's show - 143 million Pokemon Go players unknowingly built a 30 BILLION image AI dataset. Microsoft announced Gaming Copilot for Xbox - an AI that can play the game for you. NVIDIA showed DLSS 5 and the internet lost its mind (in a bda way). Slay the Spire 2 sold 3 million copies at $25 - did they leave millions on the table? GDC rebranded as a "Festival" and nobody cared or noticed. And Roblox accounted for 67% of A...

Game Modes + Topics for this episode:

0:37 Netflix Valued Warner Bros Games at Zero

13:55 Marathon's Massive Sentiment Reversal

26:44 NY AG Sues Valve Over CS2 Loot Boxes

43:33 Where Does Gaming UGC Go From Here?

59:30 Pokemon Gen 10 Revealed

1:22:09 Should Celebrities Be Making Games?

Red Flag or Green Flag — Paramount just acquired Warner Bros Discovery, including Mortal Kombat, Batman Arkham, and LEGO Games. Netflix walked away a...