Player Driven

Gordon Thornton, Chief Commercial Officer at ZBD, says becoming a creator on one major game takes 27 steps, and every extra step drops people out. Gordon spent 19 years at PlayStation before ZBD. He joins Greg Posner to explain the money layer games forgot: how money moves in, around and out of a game, and why the best version is one the player never notices. In this conversation: - Why payout and...

Microsoft is offering buyouts to about 60,000 people. Is that an AI story or a cost story? Bloomberg reported the offer on Monday, and Greg's line is that 60,000 is the number eligible, not the number who will take it: offered, not laid off. The panel does not agree. Simon Pulman says AI and cost cutting are the same thing at present. Colan Neese thinks coders are the exposed role in a world...

Cheating in multiplayer games is as old as the INI file. What has changed is how it is done, and what a studio can see. In this episode, Greg talks with Guy Kroupp, founder of GetGud, about how cheating evolved from editing a text file to AI aimbots that read the screen and never touch the game. Guy argues that client-side anti-cheat can only look for tampering, so those tools cannot see an AI aim...

Everyone is calling themselves a publisher. Midwest Games founder Ben Kvalo explains what the word actually covers, why marketing is only part of it, and why nuance still beats the prompt. Ben also talks through two months on the road, why the US games industry needs more hubs, and how MDEV is being built to last. Chapters below. 0:00 Welcome back, Ben Kvalo 0:33 Two months of travel and what Midw...

Xbox says it wants to be the number one entertainment company in the world. Not the biggest game company: the biggest entertainment company, across film, TV, products and live experiences. The same week, it launched a division to do it. The panel's question is whether it has the IP to get there, after two years of cutting almost every bet that wasn't already a hit. Simon Pulman's an...

There is a half of every online game that almost nobody thinks about. Matchmaking, inventory, entitlements, and the account services that decide whether you actually get in on launch night. By Mitchell Patterson's own estimate it is about five percent of a game's budget, and close to all of whether a player ever reaches the thing the other ninety-five percent paid for. Mitchell is the fo...

A game takes four to five years to build. A vesting schedule takes four to five years to finish. So the people who greenlit it have been paid and moved on before anyone finds out whether it worked. Colan Neese said that about forty minutes into this episode and it reframed the whole hour. Microsoft moved Halo to Activision, cut 268 more roles and set five studios loose. Bungie started giving back...

Microsoft is reportedly ending day-one first-party releases on Game Pass and capping cloud gaming hours. Most people read that as a subscription story. On this episode it turns into a much bigger one. Greg Posner is joined by Simon Pulman, Justin Ruiss and Colan Neese for an hour that opens on Control Resonant shipping eight weeks before GTA 6 and closes on Blizzard reopening a twenty year old bac...

The internet spent the week arguing about which game wins the holiday. We think that is the wrong question, and the right one is which brand still has your attention after the controller goes down. This is the first episode of Never Entertained, a new show we do live every Friday at 10am ET. Four of us argue about the week in games, media and IP: Greg Posner on live games, Simon Pulman on IP and m...

GTA 6 is already the biggest launch Colan Neese's team has tracked since they started measuring in 2019, and it is on pace to pass Call of Duty: Modern Warfare's peak roughly two months before it ships. Here is the part nobody is pricing in. The marketing has not started. Everything the industry has reacted to so far was aimed at the industry. The campaign built for people who have never...

Make-A-Wish sorts every wish into four kinds: to go, to meet, to be, or to have. Travel is still the biggest category overall, but when a child anywhere in the world asks to have something, the number one request is gaming. April Stallings runs charitable gaming fundraising for Make-A-Wish International, the arm of the organization covering 43 countries with more than 650,000 wishes granted. She j...

GTA 6 is leaking all over the internet, Wolverine is getting dragged before anyone has even played it, and D23 may have quietly shown just how serious Disney is getting about games. This week on Player Driven Live, Greg Posner and Colan Neese are joined by Justin Ruiss from BWG Global to break down: The GTA 6 leaks, the ethics of covering them, and why leaks may become an even bigger problem for g...

If George Clooney walks into a coffee shop, everyone looks up. If Banksy walks in without the mask, nobody does, and the work outside is worth millions. That's  Nathan Lindberg's description of the gaming creator economy, and he's spent twenty years inside it. GamePro through the print-to-digital collapse. Curse, before it became CurseForge. Seven years at Twitch convincing people t...

Three of the biggest names in games reported inside a single week and the headline numbers pointed three different directions. Nintendo's profit nearly doubled. Roblox missed on revenue while its player count rose. Take-Two was hours from reporting a loss. Underneath all of it sat the same question, and it's the one worth asking about your own game: is the pool of players getting bigger,...

Most anti-cheat scans your game. Anybrain watches how you move. Andre Pimenta, CEO and cofounder of Anybrain, joins Player Driven to explain why your mouse and keyboard are a fingerprint, how AI just made cheating easy for everyone, why consoles are no longer safe, and why the real product isn't detection, it's rebuilding player trust. Episode summary (longer, for YouTube / site) Cheatin...

Mats Steen spent most of his short life indoors in Oslo. To his parents he looked like a young man with no one. When he died, hundreds of people reached out to say they had known him for years, inside World of Warcraft, as a character named Ibelin. His parents had no idea. That story sits at the center of this episode, and so does the question underneath it: how much of what games actually do is i...

Xbox just laid off thousands, spun off four studios, and cancelled games it had defended a day earlier. Greg Posner and games-industry analyst Colan Neese take apart Microsoft's restructuring memo and land on an uncomfortable read: this wasn't a bad week, it was the bill coming due for a decade of running gaming as a lifestyle business. They dig into the losses (64 cents gone on every do...

Episode description (full): A trade group that speaks for nearly every major game publisher told California lawmakers that running a private or community server is piracy. The catch: you can download a Minecraft server from Minecraft's own website, for free. So what did the ESA actually mean? We brought back Jonathan Yarbor, co-founder of game-server host Nodecraft, to cut through the outrage...

Web games went from the thing you played to kill time in study hall to a platform pulling 100 million monthly active users. So why are so many developers still thinking about it like it's 2008? In this episode, Greg sits down with Stein, COO of Poki, the world's largest web gaming platform, to dig into the 2026 State of Web Gaming Report. Poki went from 10 million to 100 million players...

The system that decides whether you have a good night in multiplayer almost never gets explained by the people who actually build it. Today it does. Call of Duty just walked back the biggest matchmaking change in its history. Activision recently published internal white papers explaining parts of how their system actually works, which is rare for an industry that usually treats this stuff as propr...

Zach Letter spent over a decade as a full-time YouTube creator with billions of views before he saw Roblox and recognized the exact platform mechanics he had already mastered: a title, a thumbnail, and an algorithm to beat. He founded Wonder Works Studio in 2019, rode early success into a scale-up from six people to ninety, burned roughly $600K a month drifting into work-for-hire, then cut the stu...

Lewis Ward spent sixteen years covering games as an analyst at IDC. Now he runs Design Desk at Player Driven, and his obsession has moved upstream, into the design layer where games are still just ideas. In this episode he and Greg get into the part of game-making most teams skip: the psychology underneath the code, the math underneath the fun, and the reason a strong blueprint so often falls apar...

Bungie's total mindshare has collapsed 86% since 2019, Destiny is winding down to a final mission, and Marathon is on life support. Greg Posner and Colan Neese (SVP Gaming, ASI Screen Engine) work through what happens when a studio forgets who its audience actually is, then pivot to Activision's surprise Modern Warfare 4 announcement, Bond's launch curve under the GTA 6 shadow, why...

Matt Ball just joined Xbox, and Colan is calling his shot: a free, ad-supported Xbox tier is coming, and people are massively underestimating what free does to an ecosystem. Greg thinks it's a trap that splits the audience and pushes core gamers to PlayStation. They go ten rounds on it. Then the conversation shifts. Google IO basically announced the end of the open web. AI is now answering th...

Guest: Tess Lynch, Founding Attorney, Clause and Affect When Crimson Desert announced "no AI in our game," the internet applauded. But does anyone agree on what that actually means? Tess Lynch — gaming and IP attorney, founder of Clause and Affect, and one of the more practical legal voices covering this space — joined Greg to untangle what studios are really promising when they make tha...