Is the Stop Killing Games campaign destined to fail?

0:00This week, is the Stop Killing Games campaign destined to fail? Hello and welcome to the Game Business Show. This week's show is sponsored by Keyword Studios. We've spoken about keywords a few times already on this show because, well, they just do so much across the whole spectrum of making and selling. Video games have got 13 ,000 people in 26 countries who help studios build, launch and support games globally and at scale. They like to say they are supercharged by technology and shaped by long-term partnerships keyword studios connects specialist expertise around the player experience one of the things they're perhaps best known for certainly historically is how they help studios prepare games for more markets languages platforms launch windows all sorts while importantly keeping the quality context and control where they matter most they do localization planning testing localization testing that's really important that was my first job in video games localization testing and of course launch support as well keywords helps protect meaning tone and release quality at a global scale you can find out more on the keyword studios website and of course in today's edition of the game business newsletter that was your advert for the week now back to the show we took a break last week and it gave me a moment to look back on the summer that we've been having as a video game business and it's been rough it started okay go back to spring go back to may and there were so many hits sports horizon 2006 007 first light lego batman to a degree subnautica 2 in fact all year whether it's triple a new ip like pragmata and crimson desert established franchises like resident evil tons of indie hits like mugenics for instance there's been lots of failures too of course high guard was a high profile one but there's been a lot of successes and summer game fest was great tons of big game reveals from all three platform holders this year very strong showings that set up the end of year nicely i think but that's not what the conversation has been about over the last few months we've had these rising prices of consoles it's become a real crisis as playstation xbox and nintendo significantly increase the cost of their machines to compensate for the rising component prices specifically the price of ram and storage it feels like an existential threat to the typical forward trajectory the industry has been going on we've had amazon lunar on the show and nek fix to a lesser extent too which are these streaming platforms alongside xbox that they might offer some solution an avenue to get games out there that doesn't require expensive hardware there's renewed industry interest in this we had strauss on it talk about it several times during last week's take two financial calls but it's easy to be skeptical streaming outside of you know players that want to play their games on other screens it hasn't really caught on technically it still isn't quite good enough for hardcore players for non-gamers or more casual users there are still barriers to use you know the cost of these things the fact you still need a controller maybe maybe it will work this time maybe there's a way forward but you can understand the skepticism so we've had that big story and we've also had this big story around physical discs no longer being produced by playstation from january 2028 sony says it's because gamers have shown they don't want physical discs and to be honest few of us expected the next generation of consoles without disk drives built in.

3:12But no disk drives at all, not even an external one. No disks. The industry uses percentages to highlight how small the physical market is for games, but that doesn't paint the truth. We're talking millions of gamers here. In the UK, around 40 % of people who bought Resident Evil Requiem this year bought it in a box, that's according to Ampere. Sure, it's a third party game, but it's a classic PlayStation IP. I bought that one physically because I'm a fan and I've got physical copies of resident evil dating back to the original which i bought on pc this has to be a margin play with the aforementioned cost rises on hardware plus games generally this is a way to cut out a distribution channel that is frankly quite costly where the margins just aren't as good i do get it but for me it still feels odd nintendo has changed it so that if you want a physical game it costs more than a digital one i still buy those games physically because well i'm a fan if the next resident evil game well not the next one the next one's out next year so that will be available on a box but the one after that if that game is 80 as a download and 100 as a physical good i would still buy the physical good because i'm a fan in the same way i dropped 50 pounds on a fancy colored lincoln park vinyl it's a small industry of course it's not going to drive things for the industry but there's a business in it and it will keep audiences happy ish in fact it might even improve the quality of physical goods being created because they're being made not as a mass produced product but as a specialist collector's item the vinyls you get today are really cool that's where i thought physical was heading not into oblivion it certainly upset a lot of gamers at a time when well frankly as an industry we need them and finally the other big stories of course have been around layoffs it's just been constant it's been constant for years i was just writing about the cuts at supermassive games but the big headline cuts have come at bungie and of course xbox xbox has laid off 1600 people sold two studios let two other studios leave there's another 1600 cuts to come including more potential studio departures we've talked extensively about the business and how congested the market is how hard it is to succeed and how everyone over invested and etc etc yes there are successes across the industry every year i listed a bunch of them earlier but it's a crowded space costs are high and success is hard this is leading to closures of companies are struggling to break through investors are getting scared whereas big organizations like Xbox are focusing in on the more reliable bets.

5:29This isn't unique to Bundy and Xbox. Everyone is doing it. What appears to be cropping up, and you might have heard this in our Sumo interview, which we did on Tuesday, is these smaller teams are appearing. A handful of people who are finding the fun, getting to the heart of the game, that's what they say, before scaling up. They do that first. And sometimes that scaling up is internal, but in any cases, it isn't it's with outsourcing companies and contractors this is more theory at the moment we're not necessarily seeing it everywhere but certainly some companies are doing it but if this is the direction of the industry if we are talking a future where we have a load of small teams that scale up when they need probably using outsourcing in cheaper locations and then scaling back afterwards what does that mean for the existing companies with hundreds of staff of course live service games might need that internal resource but does everybody the model won't work for everyone but i can see it becoming something that works for both people and businesses it might require some professionalized union protections of course but generally this might be the model but if it is and that is where we're heading and that's no sure thing then i think painful layoff stories well painful layoff stories are going to continue this is going to be a long transition it's going to take a long time to get us to that place and um yeah i think that this might be part of it now all of that the price rise the death of this and job cuts it is bleak it's miserable but change change isn't always good but good things do often come from it and it is inevitable and this industry remains a creative force an entertainment leader it's where hollywood is going you know it's where they're turning because of our strong ip it's where other industries are learning you know they're learning from us in terms of how to engage people and speak to audiences and looking more immediately you know september looks really good the lineup of games the quality on show october is also looking pretty good november it's got one game in it but it looks pretty good um there are so many challenges but we will overcome it because we have to and we'll do it together that's what we're about in the game business i'm i'm not jason schreier i'm not even steven tortillo we're not kotaku we're not ig and they do their jobs exceptionally well it's important that they do but for TGB our job is not to avoid the tough conversations quite the opposite but to tackle them in a way that's designed to move things on to take a sort of more reasonable pragmatic approach to what we're facing so we can all learn from it and be inspired together and hopefully find a sustainable way forward I'm hoping we can get there and I'm genuinely very grateful to all the industry leaders who have come on and just shared their thoughts and candid in you know opinions and all sorts i hope to keep doing this for a long long long long time and you know those people make this job interesting and exciting and hopefully useful for you all and indeed i want to thank paying subscribers we don't have a lot but we have a good number and it's helping us to sort of plow forward with the game business so thank you for your support if you're not if you'd like to become a paid subscriber you can find out more at thegamebusiness.com now today we're going to tackle an altogether different conversation although it does loosely tie to the physical disc story it's around the stop killing games campaign you may have heard this name come up a few times now stop killing games is a consumer movement that is largely concerned with preserving video games it has expanded a bit from that it started in 2024 in response to ubisoft shutting down the crew that's a 12 year old racing game that requires a constant internet connection to play despite being mainly single player it's also most recently joined a lawsuit against playstation it's digital pricing that's the dutch lawsuit that claims that playstation are a monopoly it's also taking issue with streaming technology a lot of this is wrapped up in the conversation of game ownership preservation and consumer rights it has triggered responses particularly via petitions both by the uk government and the european union the industry trade bodies have got involved against this movement due to how complicated it is to keep games alive indefinitely and it's faced some defeats the uk said it considered existing consumer protection laws sufficient and just this june the european commission ruled out proposing new legislation to legally mandate that video game publishers keep discontinued games playable and shortly after that a california bill called protect our games act which was backed by stop killing games failed to get through the state senate so it keeps losing some small victories here and there but it keeps losing um and it is facing big opposition for major industry players but why why why are we so against saving our games why is it so complicated surely you want this art to kill you forever to help me work this out and see if stop killing games has any hope of success i had a chat with a real industry expert on video game policy she's been actively involved in conversations around stop killing games and is director of public policy and public affairs at flux digital policy her name is dr celia pontin and here she is hello celia welcome to the show hi thank you for having me now i think it's important to say up front you're generally pro preservation you're sort of sympathetic to what the stop killing games campaign's about that's right yeah yeah i i understand people's passions behind it and that they want to continue playing a game that they have particularly loved or enjoyed and invested time in and i can see exactly why that is important to an awful lot of people because when we start getting into some of the challenges they may say it may sound like we're being down on it but i don't think in various trade body meetings and that kind of thing and have you been involved in those conversations and stuff yeah so there are there are enough conversations happening around this at a policy level and i've been lucky enough to be part of those and it is i think it's a mark of how seriously it is being taken and that it's not just a side issue that's being punted away you know people are talking about this and are really trying to find the way forward that works practically and legally and gives the industry on both sides what it needs.

11:24Yeah. Well, this ties into what I was going to ask, because I'm surprised to see trade body statements around this issue. I'm surprised that it's not being just pushed away and ignored. Why is the industry, why are game publishers, why are trade bodies not ignoring it and pushing it under the carpet? I think they are engaging with it seriously and I think fairly intensely because the campaign has been very vocal across multiple jurisdictions. And so it's not like this is just an American issue and we don't hear about it in the UK or it's not just an EU one. It's being shared everywhere, particularly in those three areas.

12:00And so it's hard to escape and it's not something that you can really back away from. It's also gaining momentum as a talking point, not necessarily on one side or the other, but as something that's in the more general public consciousness because it speaks to a move towards a digital learning culture. and that's not just games. It's also music, it's also film, e-books, things like that. This is something that we are moving towards, and as a society, when it comes to how we intake our culture and our media and our inputs. And so, although games are kind of at the forefront of it in terms of what's happening in public commentary, but, like you said, they're not just pushing it away.

12:46They do seem to be trying to counter it. They seem worried. that's where i'm coming from that stop killing games is calling for legislation they're causing the calling for change then the reaction of the publishers seems to suggest they're worried that that might happen um if they're not careful and so is that you're nodding your head yeah um well everyone everyone in every industry is worried about new legislation because it's a big unknown right like so whenever there is uh new legislation on anything on the horizon then um people start getting a little bit concerned because there's a little bit of a better the devil you know thing that happens within regulation but i think one of the issues and one of the concerns that you see is a mismatch between what people uh what the public might be calling for and what is possible not necessarily just uh technologically although there are some barriers there but also when it comes to how existing legislation works whether that's consumer protection or ip law as well as the practical implementation of it so there might be some ideal solution being touted by some of the really engaged players in this space but that might not actually work out and so if that were to be legislated for then you could have this real tension of something having been called for and supposedly supported but actually the industry gets caught in the middle having to deliver something that might not actually really work in practice and i think that can be a real concern to them yeah let's dive into it this seems more like a consumer rights issue right if this is this is really what we're talking about here are consumer rights being violated here in that area it's very case by case and specific right and so it would be hard to call that one way or another in general.

14:43What I would say is that there are existing protections, and actually that's kind of the point, like are consumer rights being violated? Well, they already exist to be violated, if that makes sense. There is already a framework for dealing with these sorts of things about contracts having to be delivered as laid out in terms of service and things like that, and whether what you have been provided as digital content or a digital service, whether that matches up to your expectations and to what was promised. So I think there are aspects of that and the EU and I think the UK have called those out, but there are aspects of those that already exist and actually already provide what's being asked for.

15:28Well, because this gets down to it, right? Stop Killing Games is arguing that when you buy a copy of a game, you should own it. But that's never been the case, has it? That's not even been the case when you bought a physical disc even if in practicality you do own it right the technically you don't is that that's right it's the niche thing for me to just call to mind but when you used when you used to play a dvd and therefore you had to watch the beginning bit where it said like what the rights were things if you was the holder of this dvd um because you couldn't skip things back in those days, you would have to read the bit that said it's not licensed for distribution or for showing in...

16:11I think it's usually prisons and schools are mentioned, which as an ex-teacher, I very much appreciate that equivalence. And you would... So, because you were being given a license to use it, like it was personal use. You weren't supposed to be showing it to make money out of screening it or something like that, right? Because it It was a license to be able to use this bit of media in a really specific way. That's just what I remember as a really concrete example of this. But games have those as well. And yeah, you can't really revoke someone's copy of a PS1 game without going into their house and taking it away from them, which does seem a bit over the top.

16:52But it's nonetheless a bit more complicated than just, I have this disc and it is mine. Well, yes, there's the technicality and then the reality. You know, people did sell their games. In fact, there was even an entire mechanism set up around doing that. Now, obviously, this all comes from the crew, right? It all comes from... It started there. The game became offline. It's no longer accessible. There is, of course, their call for why couldn't they just give that to the players or why couldn't they make that available in other ways? And I think this is where we get down into the complications around IP and all sorts of stuff.

17:25this is quite a big question but there are quite a few legal barriers to necessarily being able to do that right yes quite quite a few so I think firstly there are barriers in terms of intellectual property law and this is something that was directly cited by the European Commission recently so they commented on on whether or not they were going to immediately pursue new legislation, for example, to deal with this. And that came as a result of the Stop Killing Games campaign, getting a bunch of signatures and having a debate in the EU. So they directly called out IP law and it's the same in the UK as well, broadly speaking.

18:08Now, here's a caveat. I'm not a lawyer. Seek legal advice if you're affected by these issues. But it's not straightforward when it comes to video games because they are a instead of being one single item that has one kind of intellectual property right associated with it it is this like bundle and cloud miasma of all these interconnecting different tiny bits of copyright works okay it's it's not just one thing it is the script and the voiceover and the graphics sometimes even frame by frame right it's this big old bundle and that means that if you are talking about handing over a game to the fans that's not really a very straightforward way of thinking about it in certain aspects of the law right so although in consumer protection law you know if you're being sold a game you're being sold a game that's not how it works in other areas of regulation and i think it's hard for people who have never come across this idea before to really immediately get that it's not some kind of kicking it down the road free pass argument it is genuinely something that adds a lot of complication um because you might not actually as a as a company be legally able to hand that stuff over even if you wanted to because it might not all be yours but even if it were there's a certain degree to which you might question whether someone can be compelled to do something with intellectual property that they hold the rights to yeah um you know that it is their thing so you have that aspect yeah that's a barrier to it and it is one that looks simple on paper when you say well just get someone the ip or we're not asking for rights over it Well, actually, it's not that straightforward.

20:05But you also have technical barriers when it comes to the integration of third party services and platforms and things. And so obviously there are technical issues with that and how you hand over maybe the contracts or the way that those plug in and integrate with certain features of your game. But there is also the idea of, well, who has liability if a third party no longer provides their services, right? So if I, as a game creator, want to sunset my game and I hand it over to the fans, I might have this web underneath of different third-party services to do things that I haven't done myself.

20:44And fine, I could maybe hand over the arrangements if I could get that worked out. But then if one of those services goes under or they're bought out or they just cease to exist for whatever reason, then what happens to the game that was dependent on them, you know, that then has a weakness to it that means that that still might not be persistently available. And does that third party service have any obligations in this? And again, it starts to get quite complicated and it's another, you can't just hand this over to someone else. Yeah. Well, it's not easily. No. Some instances you probably can, but it's just, it's not a case that it's always able in some instances that happens i guess it's also the thing that i think uh someone said it to me before was like what happens if you've got a license for a song or maybe it's a car game maybe it's a license to a certain type of car and that license is for 10 years for a set period of time and you've handed it over to someone else you know those licensing agreements that might expire is this amateur group maybe let's say of people who are looking after the game know they have to take this out of the game and then who's liable if they don't and there are other liabilities um if you've got and of course we are mainly talking about multiplayer and live service games i know there are some questions over single player that's um that's got always online and whether that's necessary and that's kind of its own thing but overwhelmingly we're talking about multiplayer or live service and when you take over that you may well find that you have regulatory obligations under things like Ofcom's Online Safety Act implementation, right?

22:27Or if you've got player chat, that could well be subject to age restrictions from maybe spring onwards. All that stuff's kind of up in the air at the moment and whether it would apply. But it's an example of where you could have some obligations suddenly that you, depending on how you structure a takeover, you could end up being responsible for in quite a big way. and I don't know how cognizant people are of that necessarily and how serious that could be and how much work it could be even if they were willing and able to take it on. Yeah, it's all sorts of GDPR even. All of that, can they have to be compliant with all of these things and if you're just a group of people that are doing it in your spare time who are on a games forum, it's like you're running a business.

23:17I mean, you basically said a moment ago that if they own an IP, they don't have to release it right they don't have to put it out there this is an example of an online game that isn't it is an online game but when nintendo did the super mario 35 game for the 35th anniversary of mario they said it was going to be available for six months and it was you know part of the subscription service and after six months it doesn't exist anymore the game's gone and that is in a way what the stop killing games is about we don't we don't want you to do that but from nintendo's point of view that was specifically created to celebrate the 35th anniversary of mario and from their point of view it's not the 35th anniversary of mario anymore the game shouldn't exist anymore it was it was designed for being a moment in time and that's because they are free to do with their ip as they want and i guess that's you can't force people to release stuff or or do these things i guess and that's where maybe some of these um ambitions are gonna um run into some brick walls i guess is what i'm trying to say um it wasn't a question was it um yeah um i was actually just trying to look up there was a game that was released on the nintendo website for the wii and it was like a christmas game and the idea was you unlocked something every day as a christmas advent calendar was done by a marketing agency and i really read the story recently i thought it was fascinating and that game of course when the christmas was over it stopped existing but the marketing agency got the rights from the game from nintendo and actually re-released the thing and continued it nothing to do with what we're talking about that's of cool though i didn't know about that yeah i'm looking i was trying to i should have done it before i started the podcast and the um is we christmas browser game i i was a whole article about somebody who's their favorite game they played over christmas but um anyway i'll put it in the in the newsletter i want to know what that is but it does exist they have made it and they've obviously removed some of the nintendo bits it's commitment to a minimum if a game company said look, we're going to make this online service game.

25:07It is online. It is connected. Is saying we can guarantee you this will be available for six, seven, eight, nine, ten years. Is that a potential? It's not a solution, but is it a potential middle ground? I think it depends on how it's communicated and what expectations are. I think in the example you gave, a very short-lived, effectively promotional game. you know that's one context where it is intended to be available for the short period of time and people are aware it's a little bit like having a limited edition of something right you've only got this amount of time to visit the natural history museum pokemon pop-up shop and once it's gone it's gone still on i think um yeah i am i mean i was you know early doors on that but i so much money spent so much money oh but even um if it's a game that's gonna be you know it's just marketed as a game then you would expect it to be running for longer than just a few months for sure yeah but guaranteeing a specific amount of time wouldn't necessarily be at odds with consumer rights you know if it forms part of the material information if it is indeed something that is going to be available for that certain amount of time um then depending on the context that could be something that consumers need to know before they decide whether or not to purchase that product or to engage with it because it could apply to free to play as well because it's about whether you engage with the commercial decision rather than when you actually buy something but i i don't know if it answers the question of some of the people who are raising concerns because some of the asks of some of the stop killing games campaign have been around um being playable in perpetuity and being able to be handed over and so there is a question over whether saying that it's going to be available for a minimum period whether that addresses that side of it so i think there's a couple of different things going on within the same umbrella and some of it is about whether it continues to be available and some of it is whether about you know what you're getting when you buy it.

27:31I think there are difficulties with minimum commitment periods in terms of whether you can guarantee that that's going to be available. I mean we've talked before about third party services or whether there could be hiccups in it and it's going to be more manageable for some games than for others um but you tend to have to have a principle of the law is the law or regulations or regulations or enforcement is enforcement for everyone and i would be wary of whether a small indie developer can necessarily make the same kind of commitment as someone who's got maybe a simpler game or is more experienced or is larger, right?

28:16I think it needs to be done under the context of will it work and is it feasible? Kind of how you can like force that into law or legislation that has to be available for a certain amount of time either because whatever company doesn't, you know, as you said, things get turned off, companies go bust. I've just been linked to it, by the way, the game I was talking about was Mission in Snowdrift Land, which was an Nintendo and German advent calendar to promote the way that turned into a game that exists. Sorry, just deviating off a little bit. What makes this look more topical at the moment is that there's this talk around the end of physical games, certainly on PlayStation.

28:53Is that putting even more momentum behind this Stop Killing Games campaign? Because I guess that is something these games are now tied to us, you know, digital stores and services. I think it is being talked about in those circles. I've definitely seen people posting about it in stock in the game spaces online and talking about it. And it's been interesting looking at those discussions because there is a mix of people saying that the Dusheloni distribution is very linked to stock games because of that kind of ephemeral feeling about it. But then on the other hand, there are some people saying, We get why this is linked, but it isn't the same kind of thing.

29:42Yeah. And we don't want to detract from the ultimate aim of this. And I think their point of view on that is because an awful lot of people buy games digitally, even if they are available in physical formats. And so it's already a live issue when it comes to digital distribution, right? like the conversation is already happening. I do think this has kind of pushed it up a little bit as well. But it's not the... it's not the thing that has put this on the agenda. I also... I also think it highlights kind of where there's an overlap between digital only and physical distribution in that there's, you know, the code in a box, like approach to physical distribution where you are getting a box and you can buy it from i'd say toys r us and then i realize that hasn't existed for a very long time it exists within wh smith sorry tg jones i've lost track and sad i'm now firmly aboard smith's toy superstore but you can go and you can physically buy it but actually you're not buying the disc to go in the machine, right?

30:57It's an access code, effectively like a Steam key, right? So sure, that's physical distribution, but it is also, in a sense, a digital distribution. And so it's one of those areas where things are a little bit messy and mixed together at the moment. And in due course, I mean, eventually everything's going to be digital only distribution. I think it's just a case of when that happens and in what format yeah i it's a weird i mean i've got my views on it i'm a bit surprised that they're stopping disproduction entirely i always think there's going to be always a group of people that will happily spend over the odds for physical items even if it's a small industry i think there is still an industry for that i guess the concern from a consumer point of view is the same concern that you know you could switch it off for example nintendo has these things called the key cards which are a bit like code in the box but work better in the sense that you can still lend your friend the game and they put it in their machine and they can download it and play it just as they would in the other game but it still requires download if there's a time in the future when that store gets turned off or that ability to download that game gets turned off i think that physical item that you bought is it's not useless because you might have downloaded it onto a hard drive somewhere but you can't use it anymore you can't move it on a different device different machine and that's part of that preservation calling what i can't see from this talking about this i don't know what the solution is um i don't know is there anything that can be done is this desk is this the stop killing games campaign destined to fail it feels like there's too many reasons why this can't win that's a really big question um the impression i get from publishers i think there's consumers have a certain impression and i completely understand that impression that publishers don't care they're laughing maniacally as they turn off their games going haha you can't play this anymore they don't want to do that they don't want these games to fail they want them to live forever um but there is there is costs involved and there is you know resources involved and there's difficult things and all that kind of stuff but they would love there to be a way that they i guess a framework um to go right how do we do this and i always get the impression as well speaking to certain developers they are increasingly thinking about what if or when does this game ends what do we do what happens to it so there is they're trying to work those plans into the beginning but obviously for some games it's a case of we can package it up and make it available open source and some people it's a case of well maybe we can take off all the offline modes and make it available as a standalone single player experience it's going to depend on the game and there's no legislation there's no one rule that will fit all that i do get the impression the industry is now thinking about it more but from sort of a legal legislative point of view i don't i can't see a i can't see an avenue here that doesn't conflict with all the various different rights and and ip law and all sorts so i think when it comes to the arguments around IP.

33:43It is very complicated, but also really, really importantly, it is linked to international distribution, right? Like every country in a jurisdiction or group of jurisdictions have their approaches and their law, but there are, you know, interlinks between them. And again, Yeah, very complicated subject. And if you were going to change something in one country, the rickles outwards and how that then changes and functions would be enormous. And I think that that is an area where change would have to be on a systemic level, and it would have to be for a reason and on its own merits. I think it would be really hard to justify...

34:31I think the European Commission kind of basically said this reading between the lines, it would be really hard to justify a change to that mechanism and to that kind of web of international approaches for this when there are already consumer rights protections for contracts and services and your expectations and the way it's sold to you and the rights that you have and the contracts that you sign. So I think that the consumer protection avenue would be a much more likely avenue to be pursued if regulations were going to change on this and if regulatory priorities changed on that side of things though you've also got to consider whether things so whether games already exist and how those could be impacted in general you tend not to have things that are retroactively applied.

35:31This is a very broad and heavily caveated statement, because there may be instances where particularly live games are expected to fall in line with things like the Online Safety Act, right? Like Opcom enforce it as it's a service, so you have to be making changes to it to make it comply with your regulatory requirements. But there are other aspects where, well, if you've created a game that's made in this way that couldn't be passed on it would be really hard to justify changing regulations or changing the law to say oh well you now have to recreate it in this way so that you can pass it on so i think there are always going to be things that can't be retroactively moved into a always available in perpetuity kind of model if it doesn't already suited but you also have to think about what does available what does continuing to be available look like and what does it mean and what standards do players set for that and is playable the same for one person as it is for the other and is playable the same for one kind of game than it is for another if i can play a multiplayer game by myself right in an open world but no one else is there is that playable or is it only playable if there is the live service aspect where i can be matched with other people and then you have to start figuring out how legislation would work for different scenarios and how it would account for the vast variability both in game genre and in player expectations of those and in some instances i'm not sure there is one solution that would work even if there were a legislative appetite to do so it's really complicated well this is what this is what i'm getting from it and i do you know and there's also different types of companies like i bet if it's destiny is a game that's not being updated anymore and you can foresee a future where they go right again it's not like it's costing us money we're going to close it down and and it might be a situation there where fans can spin up some servers and run the game themselves look after the game themselves and because it's sony it's bungee because the big company have got money they can go well we can afford to have a very low level oversight on this to make sure you know it's all above board and everything's fine and kosher a smaller company who's maybe spun up there was a somebody my my um our sales guy george his daughter loved a online sort of so-called sort of a game sort of community thing and they've just closed it down and she was apparently devastated and somebody's found an old version of it and they've spun it all up but that sounds like a small company where fans have basically just taken the code and just and done and done their thing with it and and and it's a very different world it doesn't sound to me like this there's something that legislation can fix or legal requirements can fix i think it's just something the industry almost needs to say what stop killing games noted we've heard this and we'll do our best but i guess there's trust there right and there's always a lack of it you know we do we trust you and maybe part of it is just making consumers aware that this online game they've played may eventually not exist anymore maybe it's an awareness thing and an education thing i think there is something to be said for the awareness bit as well um and if nothing else i think the campaign has highlighted both for games specifically but also i think like i mentioned earlier media more broadly that when it comes to digital media of certain types it's not about whether you are purchasing the media it's you are purchasing access to it for example um and how that functions and you'll see that some platforms um are putting on there quite clearly that you're purchasing a license and i think it is becoming more and more well known and well understood particularly as a result of this i do wonder this is this is me as a millennial sitting here saying well that gen z um but But genuinely, I do wonder if Gen Z are going to have less of a problem with this because this is just how a lot of things work now.

39:43I agree. I have this thing where when I was young, and I guess when you were young as well, younger, not saying we're old, there wasn't a lot of stuff. You know, things like I didn't have access to every single TV show in the world immediately in the touch of a button. and owning a DVD was important because sometimes there wasn't anything on the telly I wanted to watch and I couldn't just boot up Netflix or Amazon Prime Video I had to put on a DVD, I had to select a game I'm now, there is so much I hate the word content but just games and music so much of it all around me all the time that need to have a collection of DVDs is almost non-existent, every now and again I might have the urge to watch an old classic that I can't get access to, isn't on one of the services but those aren't very regular moments for me and I think if you're in a generation where you've got so much entertainment at your fingertips oh I can't, oh that film isn't available anymore, or there's about a billion others you can watch instead that I think changes the motivation, I think it just limits stuff, you've got access to so much so much great stuff as well that suddenly the fact that something from years and years ago isn't available anymore isn't so much of an issue I also think preservation today today isn't i'm a doctor who fan and in the 60s and 70s 60s in particular like hundreds of doctor who episodes were set on fire right put in a furnace they don't exist anymore and there's treasure hunters that go around the world to like tv stations in africa to see if they've got old reels of this old destroyed episode of doctor who when they find one it becomes headline news right it's like we found the episode of the dalek episode that was last year i think so that happens and they've all in games today they are preserved on laptops they are preserved in private collections they do exist still they can come back out it's obviously clear an issue for a certain group of people but i do think it's quite a small vocal group of people and i think um and i'm be clear i like my physical goods i like having my collections but i haven't bought a cd in years that's fine i own fewer than a dozen cds and they're all in the glove box in my car because that's the only CD player I own.

41:51Yeah. And I haven't had a disc drive in my computer for about 13 years. So the, yeah, physical media definitely is, has a different place in my life than it used to. If I want to listen to something I can listen to at any time for the thing. And even if I can't listen to it, I can listen to every other song in the world. And it's, and so it's, you know, I still want to, I am of a generation that likes physical I still buy all my Nintendo games in box form even though it's cheaper to buy them digitally but I do as well I don't know why that's the one that I do everything else is digital yeah I I don't know why I know actually and I have a practical reason today is my my six nearly seven year old plays on the switch too and I play a game and I like being able to just unplug it plug it into his and he can play it without having to work out hang on is the account connected can I share my digital code license and that's quite messy um but um anyway have i missed anything is there any other complications i don't know if it's something that's missed per se but um something that i'm quite keen to have stated uh reasonably clearly which is that a lot of this is complicated particularly when you are trying to apply a solution across a really diverse industry and diverse in terms of the types of game there are, not just genres, but whether they're, you know, multiplayer or single player or required lobbies or, you know, the server architecture and the technology that lies behind that, but also the sorts of companies that you have from like one or two people's studios through to multi-billion dollar companies with, you know, thousands and thousands of staff trying to get to a point where you have a solution that works across that and including across the diversity of what people will think of as what it means to play a game and to be able to access it.

43:50I think that's a really tall order and it's not necessarily something where you can suggest a neat solution, particularly if you have to take into account a patchwork of overlapping and also dependent bits of regulation across different jurisdictions. And I think there is sometimes a cynicism that when particularly a big company says that something can't be done, there's a level of cynicism in people to think, well, you would say that because it's commercially convenient for you to say that. And there are times when something that may be commercially convenient may also be true. Mm-hmm. And that's really important to recognize.

44:38And that it is also sometimes true for the little studios as well as true for the big studios. And that we need to make sure that their voices don't get lost in the mix as well, and that you're not going to end up putting out suggestions that would perhaps work to get what you want for a big game, and then stifle innovation because a small studio thinks that they can't engage with that process to a sufficient degree to be able to know that their game does what it needs to do if it comes to the end of its life. You want to make sure that you've got an ecosystem that is going to work and support new talent, right, and new sorts of games and new things that work rather than stifle them.

45:24Celia, thank you so much for your insight. I'll let you get back to your important policy work. I won't bore you about Nintendo Advent Calendar games anymore. I'm very glad you did it was lovely thank you so much for your time thank you thank you to Celia there for joining us it is a really tough conversation ultimately you know developer wants to kill their games and we don't want unhappy fans so hopefully we can find a way forward that can satisfy as many people as possible all that's left me to do is to wrap up the news in the last week except we weren't here last week so we're gonna wrap up the news in the last two weeks it's a lot of news so bear with us we're going to start with news that's a bit more recent and let's start with Remedy's financials I just Remedy we feature them a lot on the show and so I thought it'd be good to start with them their Q2 revenue hit 10.2 million euros which is down 40 % year on year had an operating loss of 3.9 million euros for the half year sales were down 23 % and losses hit 2.9 million euros part of the decline is due to the gain FBC fire break that came out in the same quarter last year and even though it didn't do as well as people hoped or Remedy had hoped it nevertheless was in that quarter and so boosted revenue in that time the firm is building up some big launches and well one particular big launch control resonant is out in september it launches in a very competitive market you might be a bit nervous about that but it has attracted a large number of steam wish lists 1.5 million that the game looks great if it wasn't going up against wolverine i feel a lot more confident about it but hopefully it'll do well it certainly looks great um and again that has started to do pretty well as an wake 2 the game has now sold 3 million copies worldwide it's not a huge number i think it should be doing better than that but it is profitable it's a profitable game and hopefully will be seeing more from alan in the future sticking with financial square enix has had a strong q1 uh profit rose 175.5 to 83 million dollars a number of titles helped to achieve that um the big one though was final fantasy 7 reba which arrived on nintendo switch 2 and on xbox formats in june the game initially launched on ps5 in february 2024 and pc in january 2025 and square enix also saw an uptick in users for its mmo final fantasy 14 so some decent numbers there sticking with japanese companies bandai namco its digital segment which includes games did have a bit of a drop 15.6 decline to 573 million dollars profit fell 30.19 to 94.5 million dollars this was due to there being no major pc or console release in the quarter uh this time last year it had elden ring night rain in that quarter which which did quite well for them it has some promising talks coming up ace combat 8 which is out in october has had some real good buzz around it's got some decent numbers they've got a new dragon ball game coming out as well it's also handling the publishing of a promising rpg called blood of the dawn walker that's also out in september so some big titles coming out from bandai namco sega they didn't have a big game in q1 either but actually it did a little better than expected sales increased slightly to 432 million dollars sega's bigger titles are due later in the year they've got stranger than heaven and persona 4 revival coming out in sort of the early 2027 other upcoming titles uh include alien isolation 2 crazy taxi world tour total war warhammer 40 000 and virtual fighter all of them will be in the next financial year or beyond but there are quite a lot of games coming to sega and and as a old school sega fan i'm looking forward to playing those moving away from financials at least for a little while um ampere analysis shared some interesting data on linkedin that i really want to draw your attention to it's about resident evil requiem the game's physical share of sales um up to the end of june differs from a little over 10 to more than 50 in some territories what that means is in the u.s 22 of resident evil requiem sales were physical in france it was 55 in japan 51 43 in australia 40 in the uk that's a good number of games you know copies of a big triple a game sold physically just goes to show that some markets will react differently when playstation stops making disc games available in january 2028 there's an education process to be done for sure oh this is a good story this is just broken nc which you might not heard of nc if i tell you what they used to be called nc soft you might remember them um they're taking over the global publishing of throne and liberty they were making throne and liberty that's their game it's an mmo that it was making alongside its studio fast spark games but it was being published by amazon games globally amazon is shifting away from mmos now and it's towards more mainstream games better suited to its lunar platform so nc has now taken over the publishing of the MMO so hopefully does well oh we've got some indie games that have done pretty well um Mecha Chameleon the game that's dominated the summer 20 million copies sold now it is the biggest selling game of the year even at six dollars which is how much the game costs it was the second biggest revenue generator in June in the US real hit excellent hit speaking of sort of games in this friend sloppy genres that are doing quite well co-op adventure game Big Walker sold one million copies worldwide that's the game from house house that's the australian studio famous for untitled goose game so that's two nice indie hits there a bit of a negative story this one well it's a negative story supermassive games the uk developer behind horror story titles such as until dawn which is brilliant and the dark picture anthology which i haven't played but i've heard is also pretty good is laying off a further 75 employees it is his third round of job cuts the studio i don't know what's going on within the studio and sony it made a bunch of games as sony it hasn't done for a while and it isn't working on until dawn 2 that's being made by fellow uk developers fire sprite the best of luck to the folks of supermassive because their games are good um and the horror genre is you know hot right now uh in a more positive story uk charity games a does rate 82 000 pounds that were distributed amongst four charities afk autistica rays of sunshine children's charity and solving kids this cancer each receiving 20 500 pounds each i used to be a trustee of that charity um it's nice to see them still going and doing quite Well, long time ago that.

51:04And now let's move into the stories that we cover these in the micro. So if you list the micro that is only available to paid subscribers, you will have heard of all these. But I'll rattle off with them quickly. Electronic Arts appointed Cam Weber as Chief Studios Officer and Dave Tinson as COO. After the completion of its$55 billion leveraged buyout, the company's majority owner is the Saudi Arabia Public Investment Fund with Silver Lake and Affinity Partners also among the investors. Take-Two did its financials and it beat its guidance for Q1. Q1 this was due to strong revenue from NBA 2K26 and Grand Theft Auto Online the classic 2 it says it will hit between 8 billion and 8.2 billion dollars in net bookings for the full year and that's all because of the launch of a certain Grand Theft Auto 6 I had a chat with Strauss Elnick it's on the game business website right now after the financial results and we talked a little bit about consoles I think this was the most interesting one because obviously the console market's going for a tough time uh rising prices and all sorts of things might impact the install base and he said the install base of this generation at christmas time will be roughly the same as the install base was when we launched gta 5 we're not concerned about selling to a smaller audience that bit's good but the intersection of the growth of pc as a format within console and pc releases from 1 to 50 over the last 20 years combined with our optimism about streaming service over the next three years we do think the audience for console and pc games could be 10 times or more the size of the business today and that does not mean we think our revenues will grow by 10 times but we do think the install base will grow materially really ambitious around streaming we mentioned it earlier i'm skeptical but uh if people are willing to give it a go i think it's um i think it's worth worthwhile the platform holders to their financials nintendo saw its operating profit jumped nearly 151 thanks to higher software revenue and a 300 million dollar u.s tariff refund however q1 sales were down 9.5 mainly due to unfavorable comparisons with the nintendo switch 2 launch in june 2025 another key number that i spotted in the nintendo financials was its digital sales rose 90 to 840 million dollars this is mostly due to higher download sales for games that are also sold in boxes so big digital transition happening there on nintendo remember nintendo now charge more for the physical versions of their games than they do for the digital versions playstation sales well they're basically flat uh for the for the quarter to 5.8 billion dollars operating income rose 37 again they were boosted by a u.s tariff refund however the cost of next generation platforms and restructuring has hit the company's overall earnings the firm says it is cautiously moving forwards with its controversial plan to base out discs xbox revenue we knew they had a bit of a tough time asha shah has been talking about it a lot that's the ceo of xbox their revenue was down seven percent for the full financial year 10 down during its financial fourth quarter ending june 30 game pass growth helped offset declines elsewhere including a 29 drop in hardware revenue what's not going to help that 29 drop in hardware revenue were the new prices for the Xbox Series S and X in Europe and the UK.

53:53We knew that the prices were going up. They said that already. They gave us the US prices. They didn't give us the prices for the US in Europe. They have now, and it is high. The Xbox Series S will increase by£130 and€150, while Xbox Series X will increase by£170 and€200. That's quite the price hike, I have to say. There was a time when you could buy a console for that amount of money. Another loads of financials, financial seasons. atari's core business returned to profit and its latest financial results and it hit its highest revenue number for more than a decade however losses within its newly acquired funderful business meant the group posted a 5.5 million dollar loss overall um roblox shares dropped by 30 after its q2 results which showed monetization was two percent below its guidance investors hated it but the company said this was because it had switched how it recommends games focusing on longer-term retention over short-term monetization it is also changing what games it showcases younger players following the introduction of age checks it's a good move but investors don't like it a company that doesn't want to be in the financial conversation anymore is devolver digital he wants to go private the firm intensity lists from the uk's aim market with shareholders set to vote on the matter on september 8th devolver went public in november 2021 with a valuation of nearly 695 million pounds today its market cap is 34.6 million pounds devolver cited the challenging video game market since 2021 and insists its share price does not reflect the true value of the business sticking with a uk related story secret mode has opened an internal development studio in sheffield uk the studio will support the publishers games by creating add-on content as well as porting titles for the platforms the new team is expected to grow to 20 people the secret mode was owned by sumo it bought itself out with the help of vamona capital and it's publishing the upcoming star wars galactic racer gamer it's really cool i'm gonna get them on the show soon because it's really cool story that one this isn't a cool story the studio behind the netflix fifa world cup game refactor games has laid off 85 of its staff the u.s developer previously made football simulator in 2022 sticking with unity triple dot studios has bought mobile publishers supersonic for 40 million dollars from unity unity announced plans to divest supersonic earlier this year razer has acquired the assets to cloud-based streaming platform stream elements which includes its technology brands and operations co-development studio vert paint has appointed former sumo group co-founder and ceo carl cave was obe as non-executive director and shareholder cave has left sumo in 2025 and frontier developments has appointed dan lazarades as chief marketing officer dan proves he worked as senior vp of marketing at sega europe and head of brand at bethesda over 10 minutes on the news um thank you for listening i hope you enjoyed today's show we've got some cool episodes next week really do uh i'll tease some more of them around the micro on Monday.

56:36If you want to get our micro, by the way, we do things. We wrap up the news. We give a bit of opinion on what's going on in the industry. You need to become a paid subscriber for that. And to do that, you can go to thegamebusiness.com and become a paid subscriber. But obviously, our big episodes are available for free. They always will be. And those will come out on a Tuesday and a Thursday. And we appreciate subscribers to that too. If you're not subscribing it to either a free subscriber or a paid subscriber, thegamebusiness.com. It's everything you need to know. That's it for me today. Thank you all for tuning in.

57:05until next time have a good week