Deconstructor of Fun

Half of Roblox’s 2025 revenue came from steal games, and the platform can’t seem to quit them. This week we debate whether steal mechanics are a passing trend or the real engine behind Roblox’s growth, ahead of an earnings call that will likely reward the algorithm rollback. Tim Sweeney says AI will bring a golden age of gaming, while Steam data shows AI-disclosed releases tripling and players pus...

Discord spent years saying it would never run ads. Now it sits on 90 million daily users who mostly play games with friends, and Chief Business Officer Jules Shumaker, who previously built ad businesses at EA, Zynga and Unity, is turning that audience into a growth channel for game makers. She walks through why players linked through the Social SDK retain 31% better by D28, why Nitro subscribers o...

Is Steal an Egg the real engine behind Roblox’s revenue? This week the crew argues over a Konvoy piece saying Roblox should go private. With the stock well off its highs, $6B in cash and a long-term HD strategy that Wall Street keeps punishing, is a buyout the only way out of the brainrot cycle? We also look at the AI-driven surge of first-time creators on Roblox, Arc Raiders’ new big-update conte...

Riot shipped one game in ten years, then four in the next two. Mark Sottosanti, CFO of Riot Games, was there for all of it. He joined in 2012 as head of monetization after running a hedge fund, and has been at Riot ever since. We start with how Riot went from League of Legends to a multi-game publisher. That covers the 10th anniversary reveal, why five of its seven launches worked, and what Legend...

Xbox has a franchise problem, and Gears of War E-Day just made it obvious. This week we look back on Mobidictum in Istanbul and argue about why Turkey became the puzzle capital while Sweden didn’t. Then we pull apart Aream’s Q3 report: the M&A number is inflated by the EA deal, the IPO window stays shut, and seed funding is at a five-year low. We also cover the EU’s new action against ten game com...

Retrofitting AI into a 1,300-person company and building one around it from day one are different problems. Mishka Katkoff sits down with Liaz Kamper, AI Experience Architect at AppsFlyer, and Maor Cohen, CTO of Vibes, to compare the two.00:00 — AI-first vs. AI-native companies06:19 — Transforming an established company with AI16:22 — Building an AI-native organization20:40 — Coordination and shar...

AI-made mashups of games like Skate 3 and Modern Warfare II took over social media, and publishers responded with takedowns. Google launched Playground, joining Roblox and Meta in the race to build prompt-to-game platforms. New InvestGame data shows 2026 already has more deals than any year since 2022, but buyers are paying less for each dollar of revenue, and the market has reopened on their term...

Most startup hiring mistakes come down to two things: hiring too fast and hiring too narrow. Garry Hill, head of talent at Makers Fund, sees both across a portfolio of 130+ companies. Before Makers Fund, he recruited at SpaceX, Amazon, Blizzard, PlayStation and Reddit. We start with the hires who looked perfect on paper and still failed, from pedigreed engineers who burned out at Blizzard to Space...

Strip out inflation and the games market has barely grown in a decade. This week we dig into Newzoo's latest numbers and what they say about where growth comes from: mature Western markets, existing players and five giant companies taking almost all of it. Then we look at how cheap social games like Big Walk and How to Fish cracked the top 10 PC revenue chart, what Naughty Dog's new Last o...

War Dogs sold 2.2 million copies in four days and nobody saw it coming. This episode we break down Bulkhead's early access hit. A hardcore milsim with three teams, no matchmaking and a $40 price tag beat Helldivers 2's launch curve on Steam, and its peak concurrents grew every day of launch week. We get into the persistent cash economy that might be the teamwork fix Battlefield never found...

Mark Pincus founded Zynga that was later acquired of $12.7B by TakeTwo and still thinks he misplayed the hand. On this episode he unpacks the playbook behind Life at the Speed of Play: why all new fails, how to run a company as a democratic dictatorship why anyone lecturing you about culture has a team rolling their eyes behind them. Life at the Speed of Play: https://www.lifeatthespeedofplay.com/...

Xbox is cutting niche studios and signing a niche Kojima project in the same month. We try to make it make sense. Sony pulled funding on Physint after budget concerns, and Xbox picked it up as a franchise with film and TV rights attached. Meanwhile Microsoft keeps restructuring into clean verticals, with Halo moving under Activision and Obsidian joining Bethesda, which has us asking whether Xbox i...

Disney Solitaire is one of the biggest launches of the year, and it might be too successful for its own parent company. This episode breaks down how SuperPlay turned a solitaire game into a Disney-powered hit, why Playtika's debt and earn-out deal could push it to sell, and how Disney Solitaire stacks up against Tiki Solitaire, Grand Harvest and Candy Crush Solitaire. We also look at the full...

Michael Martinez, co-founder and CEO of FunCraft, tried to sell his mobile game studio in 2025. Trusted people said "don't do it yet". He chose otherwise. A banker pitched the company to 40 buyers. Zero offers. Then the company doubled to a $50M run rate with just 15 people. Rejection like that either breaks a founder or forces a better business. For FunCraft, it did the second. In this episode, M...

Gaming is back, and this week had a lot to talk about. BlizzCon delivered the biggest slate of announcements Blizzard has had in years, but the timelines and team sizes raise real questions about what Microsoft pressure is doing to the studio. Roblox used RDC to push standalone apps, browser play and a developer wallet, and we debate whether any of it actually improves discoverability. Plus Kojima...

Cyberpunk 2077 sold 13 million copies in ten days, then Sony pulled it from the PlayStation Store. CD Projekt Red joint CEO Michal Nowakowski was the one taking the calls. He walks through what actually broke, why the investors weren't the reason, and how the studio went from a Polish box distributor to owning The Witcher outright. Plus the transmedia strategy, the move to Unreal Engine 5, and why...

400 episodes in, and yes, we swear more than anyone will admit. This is the big one. Before the retrospective, we tear apart the latest "video game industry is crashing" clickbait using actual employment data, then get into what OpenAI's new Astra model means for teams already shipping with AI. Then we open the vault: eight years of TWIG, the origin stories nobody remembers the same...

McKinsey, the United Nations, Skype, Rocket Internet, Facebook, King. Then Akin Babayigit co-founded Tripledot, spun out Luna Labs, and now runs Arcadia Gaming Partners, a $100M fund he deploys alone. He left Türkiye at sixteen and never moved back, which makes him one of the few people who can talk about Istanbul as both an insider and an outsider. We get into how the ecosystem was built, why Sid...

GTA VI just proved it can break Netflix, the EU just put Roblox under its strictest rulebook, and one of the best reviewed games of the year is already falling apart behind the scenes. The crew breaks down the numbers behind GTA VI's Netflix trailer drop and what it means for pre-orders, why PlayStation is quietly winning the entire hype cycle, and how rising RAM prices could delay the PS6. Th...

Shooters are having one of their best summers in years, and every major franchise still can't agree on what to do about it. The crew runs through the battle pass shakeup hitting Call of Duty, Battlefield and Overwatch, breaks down why Battlefield is quietly beating Call of Duty on Steam, and picks apart Apex Legends' run as the most consistent live service in the genre. They also dig into...

Mattel owns Barbie, Hot Wheels, UNO, Masters of the Universe and Street Sharks. Marcus Liassides runs its digital business, which now Roblox, Fortnite, and a licensing program that puts Mattel IP in creators' hands without approving what they build with it. This episode is about how a studio actually gets an IP deal with Mattel, and what you get beyond the logo.00:00 - Why Mattel is at a games sum...

Rockstar is fighting a leak it cannot plug, and the leaker has turned the whole thing into a token economy. Episode 398 covers a week where the data says growth and the job market says something else. Newzoo puts 2026 at 214 billion, Makers Fund closes another 250 million that looks nothing like venture capital, Google Play turns RAM into a store requirement, and Gamescom hands us Nodusfall, Palwo...

Everyone's telling you cohort financing is free money to scale. It's not, and the contract fine print is where that story falls apart. Josh Chandley (President & COO, Wildcard Games) sits down with Phil Mohr (CEO & Co-founder, Metica) and Martin Macmillan (Founder, Pollen Capital) to break down what cohort financing actually costs, who really takes the risk, and how founders keep getting b...

In March 2025, Jon Bellamy became CEO of Jagex and Alexis Bonte became CEO of Stillfront. Both inherited companies with legacy, scale, and a long list of things that needed to go. This episode is about what actually happens in a games industry CEO's first 100 days. Timestamps00:00 - The first 100 days05:24 - Knowing the company09:15 - Cultural shift15:16 - Choosing focus19:33 - Public versus priva...

Crew breaks down another packed week in games. Roblox faces mounting pressure over child safety as Congress launches an investigation, Apple rewrites its EU App Store economics while Germany forces changes to ATT, and Netflix Games keeps shrinking with two more studio closures. Meanwhile, Webtoon makes a $100 million bet on gaming, Devolver Digital heads for the exits after a brutal public-market...