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In This Edition,
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GTA 6 reveal boosts console sales
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Newzoo on friendslop, sequels and growth
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Who won Gamescom?
Hello there!
We’ve barely recovered from Gamescom (in truth, we’ve not recovered at all), and we’re now hurtling towards Tokyo Game Show. It’s actually my first visit to Japan in over 20 years of covering the business of games. A terrible oversight I am looking forward to addressing.
After last week’s Thursday show/newsletter featured multiple interviews, we have a nice simple one for you this week. A few GTA stats, a bit of pondering on the future of the video game business, and an interesting observation on what caused the rise of friendslop.
Enjoy!
The GTA 6 Netflix reveal has caused a spike in sales of PlayStation and Xbox hardware.
According to Nielsen IQ, UK PS5 sales jumped 33% last week, while Xbox Series S and X sales leapt 34%.
31.1 million people watched the Netflix deep dive into Grand Theft Auto 6, which has caused game consoles to sell out at retailers worldwide. In the UK, just one model of the PS5 Pro is available to buy outright via Sony’s website, with almost every third-party retailer out of stock.
Nintendo Switch 2 also saw sales rise a third, ahead of the console’s price rise this week.
The news will come as welcome relief to the console sector, which has seen sales plunge as prices have risen due to high component costs. In the UK, console hardware sales by the end of July are down 14.4% year-on-year. This is primarily due to a fall in sales of PS5 consoles (down 32%). Xbox Series S and X sales are actually up 3.1%.
Meanwhile, in the US, console sales just had its worst July since 2020, when consoles were in short supply due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Newzoo’s Ronan Patrick warns that any uptick in hardware sales as a result of GTA 6 may not be as significant as hoped.
“The PS5 in inflation-adjusted terms is 67% more expensive [than at launch]and Xbox is twice as expensive,” he told us on today’s The Game Business Show.
“We expect, because of [GTA] and Call of Duty, to see an uptick in the install base, but nothing particularly massive. But perhaps some of the fears are overblown when it comes to software. It’s important to remember that the lion’s share of time is often spent on older titles, and the closest analogy we have to a hardware shock is during the 2020-2021 GPU shortage, and you didn’t see engagement or revenue being taken off course. You basically saw a reallocation of spend into software.”
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Friendslop is proof that the wider video game industry can benefit from Roblox, suggests Newzoo management consultant Ronan Patrick.
In today’s edition of The Game Business ShowPatrick talks about the potential positive impact of popular platforms like Roblox, and browser-based services such as Poki and CrazyGames. These platforms may be taking up more and more consumer time, but they’re also leading to new types of experiences that developers can bring to more traditional places like Steam.
“Friendslop is basically Roblox coming to Steam,” Patrick noted. “It’s the existing play pattern of highly casual, low graphical fidelity, and an overwhelming emphasis on doing absurd, funny, gimmicky things with your friends, and then that’s just being captured by Steam. We’ve done work on this. We’ve looked into the ultimate question of whether Roblox players age up or age out, and spoiler alert: the answer is both. But, that’s definitely one of the things you’re seeing happen, where as people age up, they’re still looking for these social experiences.”
Patrick goes on to stress that this doesn’t mean all games should go down the friendslop route.
“There is no one video game industry anymore. If you look at the people who play games, since 2000, we’ve gone from basically 19 to 39-year-olds, overwhelmingly men, to aging up and down simultaneously. That’s one of the reasons why we need all sorts of games.
“It personally frustrates me tremendously when you see articles where they’re basically saying, ‘X is dead, long live Y’. They’ll say, ‘These high intensity, high graphical fidelity premium games are dying because the younger generations want this’, or vice versa. We just need to serve both audiences. They have different needs and different wants.”
Only 6% to 7% of game revenue on consoles go to new titles, states Newzoo.
The data firm said that publishers are becoming increasing defensive when it comes to the games they’re choosing to fund, which could impact the industry’s ability to grow.
“We are ultimately in the entertainment space, and we have to surprise and delight,” said Newzoo’s Ronan Patrick. “But on the other hand, what consumers often want are sequels, franchises, and existing titles. People haven’t always liked me pointing this out, but it’s important. If you look at the share of revenue that goes to new titles, excluding franchises, sequels, etcetera, on console, it’s around 6 to 7%, and then on PC, it’s around 10 to 17%, so a bit higher. But then within that, you basically have a handful of IPs like Cyberpunk, Hogwarts Legacy, Arc Raiders… often big budget games that take that [share]. So, there’s a difficulty in that we’re often going to see publishers taking a very defensive stance, which is to reinvest around their core IPs.”
Of course, innovation can happen within existing franchises, too.
“I couldn’t agree more,” Patrick said. “Just because there’s a focus on sequels and franchises doesn’t mean you don’t need to innovate. The way I describe it is like an Apple model, where there’s a priority based on capturing an existing audience, but then trying to move them laterally onto different innovative products and new upgrades.
“You had [Jagex CEO] Jon Bellamy on a couple of weeks ago. That was a really interesting one to listen to, because he pointed out that for Dragonwilds, around 75% of those who took that game up were existing RuneScape users. It’s innovation in the sense that Jagex is spreading to console and trying to increase that market share, but it works in large part because they have this base, this existing community, that they’ve moved over.
“And the ultimate epitome of innovating within an existing play pattern is the biggest title that’s going to launch this year, GTA 6.”
Check out our full chat with Newzoo in today’s edition of The Game Business Show.
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Gamescom 2026 drew in 368,000 visitors from 131 countries, a 6% increase over the previous year (Note: Gamescom counts footfall as visitors. So, if someone goes for four days, that’s four visitors). In total of 1,743 companies from 66 countries exhibited, which is up 11% from 2025. International exhibitors accounted for 72% of participants. The event had 36,000 trade visitors, with around 50% coming from outside of Germany.
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The most viewed game of Gamescom was the 11-year-old The Witcher 3. The new DLC for the game, Songs of the Past, was shown, alongside a remaster of the original 2015 game. The Witcher 3 clocked up 50.7 million trailer views, according to LevelUp. The No.2 trailer was Anata from NetEase, with 47.2 million views, followed by Hoyoverse’s Nodusfall with 45.5 million.
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Planet Coaster and Jurassic World Evolution developer Frontier has signed a deal with Disney to create a game based on its IP. It’ll be fully funded by Frontier and is in the ‘creative management sim’ genre… sounds like a licensed Planet Coaster to me.
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CD Projekt Red made $116.5 million in the first half of 2026, which is a rise of 23% year-on-year. Profit rose 37% to $66.7 million.
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Brian Ward is stepping down as CEO of Savvy Games Group after five years. Turqi Alnowaiser, deputy governor of Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund (PIF) and head of its International Investments Division, will serve as interim acting CEO.
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Star Wars Zero Company developer Bit Reactor furloughed around 80% of its workers ahead of the game’s release, reports GameFile. The decision was not related to EA, Star Wars or Disney.
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Godot game engine company W4 Games has raised $18 million in a Series B funding round led by Tencent. It has also signed an agreement with the Chinese conglomerate to scale Godot in Asia. W4 has raised $33 million in total. It was formed in 2022 by the founders of Godot, which is an open-source engine, to provide services to developers using the tech, such as console porting.
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Games mod platform Nexus Mods has acquired SteamDB.
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Playdate maker Panic has received a refund from the US Government after the tariffs it introduced last year were deemed illegal. Playdate is passing the refunds onto consumers, as it had initially increased the price of the device.
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Roblox will open a headquarters in Riyadh in Saudi Arabia to support its creator program in the Middle East and North Africa.
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NetEase’s free-to-play wuxia open world action RPG Where Winds Meet now has had 100 million players. It launched in November 2025.
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1047 games es is shifting away from live service shooters and ending active development on Empulse and Splitgate: Arena Reloaded.
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IO Interactive CEO Hakan Abrak will host a 007 First Light session at Game Republic New Horizons. This is the same event where we’ll be interviewing multiple video game leaders, including Ken Kutaragi.
That’s it! Join us next week for a big interview with Maverick Games about their journey to finding a publisher after being dropped by Amazon. It’s a fun one!
Thank you for reading.
