Player Driven

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 of AI agents. Stephen Lenz says people and verification still matter. Then the conversation turns to Call of Duty, and to every panelist's scariest Halloween games.

Greg Posner is joined by Simon Pulman of Pryor Cashman, Justin Ruiss of BWG Global, Colan Neese and Stephen Lenz.

IN THIS EPISODE
- Microsoft's buyout: who is eligible, what "offered, not laid off" means, and Justin's line that you can never cost cut your way to growth
- Simon on why AI and cost cutting look like the same thing right now
- Are coders the exposed role? Colan and Stephen on AI agents, and who checks the machine-written code
- Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4, and whether it won players back by being good (Colan's read)
- The Call of Duty movie, and whether the franchise needs teenagers who are on Roblox and older, cheaper games
- Our scariest Halloween games: Simon's Gabriel Knight, Resident Evil 7, Visage and Until Dawn; Stephen's Left 4 Dead and F.E.A.R.; Justin's Silent Hill 2 and P.T.; Colan's The Room, Resident Evil 4 and Kingdom Hearts; and Greg's Silent Hill, a Titanic adventure game and SkiFree, which he insists is a yeti
- Where horror game attention goes: the top of the market and the long tail, and Colan's case that Dead by Daylight is the Fortnite of horror
- What's keeping us entertained, including Phantom Blade Zero

The figures and claims are the panelists' own opinions and recollections and have not been independently verified.

Never Entertained airs every Friday at 10:00 a.m. Eastern.

Watch the full episode: https://youtu.be/96Q7rJu9MVQ
Just want the horror? Watch the Halloween games cut: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I_NZHaSdobA
Read the full write-up: https://playerdriven.io/live/never-entertained-microsoft-buyouts-ai-or-cost-story?utm_source=podcast&utm_medium=shownotes&utm_campaign=never-entertained-008
The Operator's Briefing, every Tuesday: https://playerdriven.io/newsletter?utm_source=podcast&utm_medium=shownotes&utm_campaign=never-entertained-008
Join the Discord: https://discord.gg/zdwAqvgvfy

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 aimbot, and that the answer is to watch what players actually do. He compares server-side detection to a prosecutor with a recording rather than a cop stopping a crime.

The conversation also covers the risk of kernel-level anti-cheat, why even 1% of cheaters can ruin a match (Guy's figure), how detection handles aim snaps, wall hacks and "closet cheaters," a false positive that exposed a studio's data bug, and what a small team can do first. Guy is clear that client-side and server-side defenses work together. Numbers in this episode are Guy's own and have not been independently verified.

What you will hear:
- Why cheating in multiplayer differs from cheating in a single-player game
- Why a client-side tool cannot see an AI aimbot
- The cop and prosecutor way of thinking about anti-cheat
- The security risk of kernel-level anti-cheat
- Why a flagged NPC pointed to a bug in the studio's data
- Where a small studio can start

Chapters:
0:00 Cold open and intro
0:35 What Guy plays and where he started
2:10 How cheating evolved, from INI files to multiplayer
6:20 Why cheating matters: churn, the cheat economy and kernel mode
11:01 Which games have cheaters
12:19 Client-side versus server-side anti-cheat
13:37 AI aimbots and why client-side cannot see them
15:05 Server-side detection: the prosecutor view
18:18 What if a player is just really good?
21:46 Closet cheaters and the limits of detection
23:45 Why this was not built sooner
25:37 What a studio needs to get started
26:15 The "primal seven" player actions
29:23 Griefing and game observability
30:25 Feedback, false positives and the NPC aimbot
32:14 What small studios can do first
37:43 A layered defense
38:26 Wrap

Guest: Guy Kroupp, founder, GetGud (getgud.io)

Full episode page and recap: https://playerdriven.io/podcast/is-the-anti-cheat-arms-race-over-guy-kroupp-getgud
Join the Player Driven Discord: https://discord.gg/GC5PkbKFH

Disclosure: Guy is the founder of a company that sells anti-cheat tools. No sponsorship or payment was involved in this episode.

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 Midwest Games is building
3:15 New York Games Week and what the New York ecosystem lacks
6:16 If games stay in four cities, the US falls behind
8:53 Lower cost is not lower quality
9:28 What is a publisher, really?
9:56 40 disciplines: publisher or marketing agency?
11:12 Full-service publisher vs fractional publishing
12:06 You no longer need a big-box publisher to get help
12:48 Can AI make you an expert? The fractional CMO trap
14:26 Why people overgeneralize how easy things are
15:46 Nuance beats the prompt: AI, engineers and vibe coding
17:01 Expertise, doing it recently and pulling all five levers
18:09 One-hit wonders and why IP takes decades
19:53 What Ben would do differently four years in
23:59 Earning your lessons the hard way
25:55 The week before the money runs out
26:57 Find the people who stick with you
30:58 Support systems and getting feedback early
33:11 Why MDEV feels like true community
36:35 Keeping a volunteer nonprofit sustainable
38:08 MDEV keynotes: Jesse Schell and a Friday kickoff
41:30 You do not have to live in Wisconsin to join
43:06 Where to find MDEV, Ben and the Games Alliance
44:30 Madison cheese curds and the Capitol Square

Read the write-up: [RECAP URL]?utm_source=youtube&utm_medium=video&utm_campaign=2026-10-w3&utm_content=longform
MDEV: https://www.mdevconf.com
Wisconsin Games Alliance: https://wisconsingamesalliance.com

Ben Kvalo is the founder of Midwest Games, president of the Wisconsin Games Alliance and chair of MDEV, with earlier roles at 2K and Netflix.

A new conversation every Tuesday. The Operator's Briefing and the community are at https://playerdriven.io and the Discord is at https://discord.gg/zdwAqvgvfy

#GamePublishing #GameDev #MDEV

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 answer was the line of the episode: "Nobody knows anything." Nobody predicted K-Pop Demon Hunters, or Sony would never have handed Netflix the rights. You don't find the next big franchise by only funding the last one.

Greg Posner is joined by Simon Pulman of Pryor Cashman, Justin Ruiss of BWG Global and Stephen Lenz.

IN THIS EPISODE
- Galactic Racer and Gears of War: E-Day both scored 87. Why the Steam numbers only tell half the story
- "You know what really works? Call of Duty": Activision as Xbox's shooter factory
- Who is the biggest entertainment company in the world right now? Greg says Disney. Justin says YouTube: "All of that IP lives rent free on YouTube."
- Xbox's dormant catalogue: Rare, Banjo, Viva Piñata, Perfect Dark
- Is Xbox just picking a fight with Sony it already lost once? And who is producing the Zelda movie?
- Who gets to stream GTA 6, the report and Xbox's correction, and the new cloud streaming caps
- A round of our favorite licensed games, from X-Men Legends to GoldenEye, and why licensed games are a graveyard of dead IP
- AI can now rebuild almost any game. Simon on why selling an AI copy gets you shut down, why the real fight is over the tools, and the indie developers being cloned in real time
- What's keeping us entertained, including Angel Down, this year's Pulitzer Prize winner for fiction

Two corrections after recording: Matthew Ball said Xbox's GTA 6 streaming rights are not exclusive; he did not rule the game out of the cloud. And the last mainline Gears of War was Gears 5 in 2019, not twenty years ago.

Never Entertained is live every Friday at 10:00 a.m. Eastern.

Watch the full episode: https://youtu.be/QOQOQ1XBc_I
Read the full write-up: https://playerdriven.io/live/never-entertained-whose-ip-is-it-anyway?utm_source=podcast&utm_medium=shownotes&utm_campaign=never-entertained-005
The Operator's Briefing, every Tuesday: https://playerdriven.io/newsletter?utm_source=podcast&utm_medium=shownotes&utm_campaign=never-entertained-005
Join the Discord: https://discord.gg/zdwAqvgvfy

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 founder and CEO of Wolfjaw Studios, which builds that layer for other people's games. He came to games from finance, he never wanted to make a game of his own, and he has an unusual business problem: his games do not fail, so almost nobody knows his studio exists.

In this episode:
• Why the reward for a flawless launch is a smaller contract
• Why the infrastructure vendors you can name are usually the ones attached to a public outage
• The first system a small multiplayer team should build, and why everything else hangs off it
• Why he refuses to advertise where any of his staff used to work
• What he learned the two weeks he paid payroll out of his personal bank account
• What he would tell a three person team to do on Monday morning

Chapters
00:00 The half of every online game nobody thinks about
00:03 Why a finance guy started the studio nobody wanted to build
00:08 Launch day, and why nobody can predict the curve
00:12 Hybrid on-prem and cloud, and why redundancy is the only security
00:13 Punished for being good: the five engineer contract
00:16 Selling work whose best outcome is that nobody notices
00:22 Identity is step one, and everything hangs off it
00:23 The TwitchCon origin story
00:25 The hill he dies on: past credits are not your credits
00:28 What cash flow actually teaches a founder
00:33 What a leader can honestly promise right now
00:35 The Among Us call
00:41 Where the back end goes after games
00:45 What a three person team should do Monday morning
00:47 Wolfjam, and where to find Wolfjaw

About the guest
Mitchell Patterson is the founder and CEO of Wolfjaw Studios, a backend and co-development studio in upstate New York. Wolfjaw builds matchmaking, inventory, identity, and live service infrastructure for other studios, with client relationships running seven years.

Player Driven is the learning network for the people who design, run, and rebuild live games. New conversation every Tuesday.

Get The Operator's Briefing each week: https://playerdriven.io/
Join the operators in Discord: https://discord.gg/GC5PkbKFH

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 the Destiny content it
deleted six years ago. A game from 1996 made sixty million dollars at the box
office. Underneath all three is the same question nobody in the industry
likes asking out loud: when the person who decides is never in the room for
the outcome, who is actually on the hook?

Greg Posner is joined by Colan Neese of ScreenEngine ASI, Simon Pulman of
Pryor Cashman and Justin Ruiss of BWG Global.

IN THIS EPISODE
- Why fourteen years and four declining Halo games produced no consequence
- The opportunity cost problem: why Activision will always make another Call
of Duty map instead of reviving Spyro
- Whether Halo's DNA was ever the campaign, and why the remake shipped
without multiplayer
- Simon on the five divested studios: "imagine Adidas buys a t-shirt company"
- What a private equity buyer would actually own if they bought one
- Why subscription funding divorces a studio from cause and effect
- The engineering reason Bungie vaulted Destiny content in the first place
- The rule nobody states about video game adaptations, and why Resident Evil
worked where a Dead Space film would not

A correction we made after recording: Ninja Theory was not sold. Microsoft
could not find a buyer, two deals fell through, and a proposed closure was
confirmed the same day we recorded.

Never Entertained is live every Friday at 10:00 a.m. Eastern.

Read the full write-up: https://playerdriven.io/live/never-entertained-nobody-is-on-the-hook
The Operator's Briefing, every Tuesday: https://playerdriven.io/newsletter
Join the Discord: https://discord.gg/zdwAqvgvfy
Colan Neese writes Patch Notes: https://patchnotesgaming.substack.com/

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 back catalogue. Four separate stories, one argument underneath all of them: almost every way this industry gets a player in front of a game is a cheque somebody else can stop writing.

In this episode:

Control Resonant landed at 84 on OpenCritic with a 6 and a 10 in the same week, and why the spread is more interesting than the average

Why review scores arrive too late in the funnel to move units, and what a strong score actually buys you

The release-date rule almost nobody follows: do not ship the same day as EA FC

What success even looks like for Remedy, and why that question cannot be answered without knowing the budget

Everyone's top three game trailers of all time, including one a panellist can still quote thirteen years later from a game he did not like

The leaked Game Pass changes, and why two million players on a free tier is not two million players

The case for advertising inside games, argued by the people who would get blamed for it

Blizzard, BlizzCon, and the millennial nostalgia wave landing inside a single month

Never Entertained is live every Friday at 10am ET.

Full written recap: https://playerdriven.io/live/never-entertained-why-players-come-back
The Operator's Briefing, every Tuesday: https://playerdriven.io/newsletter
Join the Discord: https://discord.gg/zdwAqvgvfy

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 media, Justin Ruiss on advertising and the business, and Colan Neese on the news and the numbers.

Three arguments in this one. Nintendo is taking the shelf space Sony and Xbox are giving up, and doing it on purpose. A Wolverine game built for everybody landed for nobody, and the panel splits on whether that is a design problem or a culture one. And Netflix is reaching for cinemas while the person already paying for it every month cannot name a single thing on the service.

CHAPTERS
00:00 Intro
01:30 The internet is asking the wrong question
01:56 Meet the panel
03:04 Nintendo's foil box and the shelf everyone else left
06:21 Going outward versus going inward
07:38 What the new Zelda actually sells
10:32 Nintendo's real problem is the Switch 2 transition
12:57 Nostalgia as a purchase driver: the Costco napkin
14:27 "I don't know who Sony is aiming at"
18:29 The barbell: aggregators, IP, and the middle you die in
24:32 Sony's risk is becoming a machine, not a brand
25:01 Wolverine lands, and the discourse is not about the score
28:40 A culture where games must be for everybody
31:02 Discovery, mastery, and what a guidance line costs
34:24 Six-year dev cycles aimed at a moving culture
36:48 Everyone gets one strike
39:31 What Marvel actually cares about
42:38 "94% of the market hasn't played your game"
45:20 Netflix wants cinemas, and is reporting box office
47:02 Why Netflix's hand was forced
52:04 "A midlife crisis company"
55:14 You can license the show, you cannot own the creator
57:08 Last words
59:03 What we are working on, and where to find it

WATCH IT INSTEAD
https://youtu.be/bTgaleZwS5I

THE WRITTEN VERSION
The arguments laid out properly, with the quotes and the numbers attributed:
https://playerdriven.io/live/never-entertained-gta-6-vs-zelda-wrong-fight

IF YOU RUN A COMMUNITY
Community Driven is a three part series that gives you a method rather than a think piece. You start with the game rather than the channel, work out where your players already gather, and build a hunt map as you read. It hands you into a free Academy pack at the end.
Part one: https://playerdriven.io/blog/start-with-the-game-not-the-channel
The pack: https://academy.playerdriven.io/packs/find-where-your-players-gather

THE REST OF THE WEEK
Tuesdays: this podcast
Wednesdays: Design Desk with Lewis, on systems, player psychology and game design
Thursdays: live with Colan
Fridays: Never Entertained, live at 10am ET

MORE FROM PLAYER DRIVEN
The Operator's Briefing, every Tuesday: https://playerdriven.io
Join the Discord: https://discord.gg/GC5PkbKFH

Player Driven is the learning network for the people who design, run and rebuild live games.

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 watched a games showcase in their lives begins at NFL kickoff.

Greg Posner and Colan Neese, SVP of gaming at Screen Engine/ASI, spend the hour on what that does to everyone else. Whether the number in the launch press release is one billion or two. Why every other fall release is losing oxygen rather than losing on quality, including a Call of Duty that Greg played and liked. And the thing Rockstar is quietly doing to protect the players it already has, which is the only defense on the table that does not require a marketing budget to run.

They also get into why Sony's Tokyo Game Show State of Play reads as a completely different show depending on which continent you are watching from, why consoles took hold in the West for reasons that turn out to be mostly about living room square footage, and how Guitar Hero used to turn songs into hits before games traded the needle drop for interchangeable orchestral filler.

Then they argue about Weezer.

(00:00) Show open
(00:45) Sony's State of Play, and who it was actually for
(09:47) Why your game does not travel: China, mobile, and the space a console needs
(17:15) The billion dollar question is already stale
(21:02) The bite GTA 6 takes out of the box office
(25:36) The marketing has not started yet
(27:58) Call of Duty is not losing on quality
(32:29) What Rockstar is doing to protect the players it already has
(39:20) Stage Tour, and the return of the rhythm game
(40:17) The ideal set list, and an argument about Weezer
(48:09) How games forgot to use a song
(51:20) Wrap

Full write-up and notes from this episode:
https://playerdriven.io/live/gta-6-has-not-started-marketing-yet

The Operator's Briefing, every Tuesday. One email: the best thing we published, the next thing we are doing, and one open argument.
https://playerdriven.io

Bring your own read to the room. Colan takes questions in the Discord, and genuinely wants the argument.
https://discord.gg/GC5PkbKFH

Colan Neese writes Patch Notes:
https://patchnotesgaming.substack.com

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 joins Greg and Lewis to explain why kids in treatment wish for games (her word is "lifeline"), what a gaming wish actually looks like, and why even Make-A-Wish hears no from game studios more than yes.

In this conversation:

• Why gaming tops the "to have" category worldwide, and why the Nintendo Switch is the most-wished-for console
• The wish stories: a day at Mojang's Stockholm HQ, a Brawl Stars wish built around vision loss, and Arrowhead's dev team spending a day with a Helldivers superfan
• The research: measured wish outcomes in the high-90th percentile, now presented at pediatric oncology conferences
• How studios of any size can help: the giving program starts at $5,000, and codes, studio days, dev time, and introductions count too
• How New Blood Interactive became Make-A-Wish International's biggest gaming donor at $100,000
• The John Cena playbook: what 650+ wishes of preparation looks like up close
• Roll for Wishes, the TTRPG fundraising month running all of October
• Learn more or start the conversation: https://worldwish.org/ (the wish impact research is under Our Impact)

Find April Stallings on LinkedIn.

Player Driven is the learning network for the people who design, run, and rebuild live games.

• Get The Operator's Briefing, our weekly newsletter: https://playerdriven.io/
• Join the community on Discord: https://discord.gg/GC5PkbKFH

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 game studios
• Why Disney appears to be leaning harder into gaming after years of keeping the industry at arm’s length
• Kingdom Hearts, Dreamlight Valley, and the power of Disney’s IP flywheel
• Why licensing games to the right studios may be one of Disney’s smartest strategies
• The backlash around Marvel’s Wolverine and whether Insomniac really needs to reinvent its formula
• Why not every game needs to be open world
• Whether Netflix should stop trying to build gaming internally and borrow a page from Disney’s playbook
• What we’re playing right now, including Saros, Marathon, Fortnite, Madden and more

Plus, things inevitably get a little off the rails when Disney World vs. Disneyland enters the conversation.

Guest: Justin Ruiss, BWG Global

Hosts: Greg Posner and Colan Neese

Player Driven covers the business, strategy and people behind games, from live ops and community to player experience, monetization and the industry stories shaping what comes next.

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 that watching someone else play was a real business. Epic, building the NFL zone inside Fortnite. Now VP of Global Brand Partnerships at Overwolf.

His argument is that the creator economy we photograph is the smaller one. Sixty-six games account for more than eighty percent of all the time people spend playing, most of them are a decade old, and what keeps them there isn't the publisher's roadmap. It's thousands of people whose names nobody knows, building mods, add-ons, wikis and private servers on top of games they didn't make.

We get into what the ladder from first dollar to first million actually looks like, why advertising stopped being a toll, and the single sentence that finally moved publishers after years of losing the argument.

In this episode

00:00 Intro
02:19 Nathan Lindberg
02:34 GamePro, Curse, Twitch: what changes and what never does
10:24 Triple-A, indie, and where a creator lands after building something good
11:15 George Clooney walks into a coffee shop. So does Banksy.
13:59 The ladder from first dollar to first million
15:37 Rev share, and the tax problem nobody warns you about
18:21 Do CurseForge, Tebex and the ads actually connect?
20:09 The one number every team is judged on
26:06 The case for advertising, made by the ad guy
31:26 The generational split on ad tolerance
33:14 "What am I getting in return?"
36:49 66 games hold 80% of all playtime
38:07 The wiki maintainers nobody credits, and why tools outlive personalities
40:47 "Like allowing someone to take a highlighter to a Rembrandt"
44:11 PUBG, Hytale, and why indie studios said yes first
45:26 Why "good for the community" never gets past the CFO
47:27 Spotting Arc Raiders before anyone was talking about it
50:24 What GTA 6's creator economy could unlock
54:05 Wrap, and if not now, when?

Numbers Worth Keeping
66 games account for more than 80% of all time spent in games. Overwolf shares 50 to 70% of revenue with creators, sometimes up to 80%, and its in-app ads carry an on-screen line saying 70% goes to the creator. The largest apps on the platform have sold for over €40 million. Every department in the company is measured against one metric: creator payouts.

Guest
Nathan Lindberg is VP of Global Brand Partnerships at Overwolf, the tools and services company behind CurseForge and Tebex.

Mentioned: Hytale, the Krafton partnership bringing mods to PUBG, Gamer Grid, Arc Raiders, and the proverb Nathan took from his time at Curse: if you want to go fast, go alone, if you want to go far, go together.

If the CFO conversation is one you keep losing, we built a free Academy program about exactly that. Three short packs on why safety and community arguments die in front of finance, how to read what a public company actually spends, and how to build the one-page case. academy.playerdriven.io

New episodes every Tuesday. Get The Operator's Briefing at playerdriven.io/level-up, or come argue with us in Discord.

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, or are you just getting better at extracting from the pool you already have?

Greg Posner and Colan Neese are joined by Simeon McMillan, founder of the media and tech stocks newsletter Accrued Interest, who came up through TV, radio and cable ad sales before he started writing about the companies. Plus the debut of Bull or Bear, where we assign the side and make you argue it whether you believe it or not.

In this episode
00:00 Cold open and intros
03:05 Rockstar announces a trailer, and premieres it on Netflix
09:27 Greg thinks it's a stunt. Colan doesn't.
12:26 The black hole: why games launching before GTA are already losing share
14:51 Bull or Bear, round one: can GTA 6 hit investor expectations?
18:35 13% attention share against a 2% field
22:16 How to actually read an earnings call, and why EPS is the wrong line
27:51 Nintendo: profit doubled, forecast unchanged, and the tariff asterisk
29:05 The number nobody leads with: 130 million players, flat for three years
37:02 Ocarina of Time, the Zelda film, and Nintendo's two-ponds problem
43:22 How Switch became the value machine by standing still
49:13 Bull or Bear, round two: has Switch 2 already proven itself?
52:35 House notes
53:42 Roblox: what trust and safety actually costs a platform
55:11 Trapped in kid land, and the ad ceiling Roblox can't move
01:00:50 Where to find everyone

Numbers worth keeping
GTA 6 at roughly 13% demand share against a field where most fall titles sit near 2%. Nintendo's total player relationships flat near 130 million for about three years. Roblox averaging around a minute and a half per experience.

Demand-share figures are Colan's own MindGame data at Screen Engine/ASI.

Guests
Simeon McMillan writes Accrued Interest at accruedint.com, also on Substack.
Colan Neese is SVP of Gaming at Screen Engine/ASI and writes Patch Notes on LinkedIn and Substack.

Correction: Greg refers to Roblox reporting "yesterday." Roblox reported its Q2 2026 results on July 30, a week before this conversation.

Player Driven Live runs every Thursday. Get the week's argument in The Operator's Briefing at playerdriven.io/level-up, or argue it out with us in Discord.

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)

Cheating touches every player, and almost nobody covers it well. In this episode Greg sits down with Andre Pimenta, CEO and cofounder of Anybrain, a company that takes a completely different approach to anti-cheat. Instead of scanning your game's memory, Anybrain reads your inputs, your mouse, keyboard, and controller, because the way you play is effectively a signature that a human can't fake.

Andre traces the unlikely path from his PhD on detecting mental fatigue, through workplace wellness and esports performance coaching, to catching aimbots, bots, smurfing, and boosting. Then the conversation gets to the part every operator needs to hear: AI has collapsed the barrier to cheating. You used to hunt a forum or GitHub for a script. Now an LLM writes it and computer vision lines up the shot, and new input-injection devices bring the same techniques to consoles that everyone assumed were safe.

But the through-line is trust. Most players genuinely can't tell if they were beaten by a cheater or by someone better, and that doubt is what erodes a game. Andre makes the case for transparency (publishing ban numbers, like Crytek did on Hunt: Showdown), explains how humans stay in the loop on every ban, and shares one of the most surprising uses of the tech: flagging a likely adult on a kids' server from behavior alone, without ever revealing an identity or an exact age.

What you'll learn

• Why behavioral anti-cheat reads your inputs, not your game's memory, and why humans aren't random
• How AI (LLMs plus computer vision) lowered the skill floor for cheating, and why volume is rising
• Why "you can't cheat on console" is no longer true
• Why the real damage from cheating is the doubt, not the loss
• How transparency and published ban numbers rebuild community trust
• How Anybrain estimates a player's age band from behavior to help keep kids' servers safe, without revealing identity
• Why cheaters are still bad players (you can automate aim, not game sense)

Chapters / timestamps

• 1:30 The most impossible cheat patterns you'll ever see
• 4:19 From a burnout-detection PhD to anti-cheat
• 9:39 How a cheater looks in the data
• 14:18 Beyond aimbots: bots, parallel economies, smurfing, boosting
• 18:48 The cat-and-mouse game, and why you can't fake a signature
• 20:08 AI erased the barrier to cheating
• 21:18 Consoles aren't safe anymore
• 23:55 Fireball round
• 26:42 Why you can't tell a cheater from a good player
• 31:32 Crytek, Hunt: Showdown, and the case for transparency
• 34:51 Where the humans fit in (appeals and evidence)
• 37:36 Age verification with no ID
• 41:56 Where to find Anybrain, and one thing operators should understand

(Times are on the raw-recording timeline. They'll shift by a few seconds once your edit cuts land, re-stamp against the final export.)

Notable quotes

• "As humans, we are not random. We have our own way of playing, and the random is possible to detect, because the way we play games is not random. We have our own signature."
• "In the past, you needed to look for a forum or a GitHub to get your script. Nowadays, you can use an LLM that will help you create a program."
• "Most people have no idea if they were killed by someone good or a cheater. At the end, it's about trust that we need to build."

About the guest

Andre Pimenta is the CEO and cofounder of Anybrain, which he cofounded almost eleven years ago out of his PhD on using AI to analyze human-computer interaction. Anybrain's behavioral platform monitors millions of players and works with studios including Crytek (Hunt: Showdown) and Embark. Andre is based in Portugal.

Links

• Anybrain: https://www.anybrain.gg/
• Andre Pimenta on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/andrepimentaribeiro/
• Full episode: [full episode link]
• Get The Operator's Briefing (weekly, Tuesdays): https://playerdriven.io/level-up
• Join the Player Driven Discord: https://discord.gg/GC5PkbKFH

Call to action

If you design, run, or rebuild live games, this is the conversation to send your trust and safety and community team. Subscribe, drop your take in the comments, and join the operators talking it through in our Discord.

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 invisible to the people measuring them?

Recorded on a rooftop in New York at Games for Change 2026, this episode brings together three people running the organization. Susanna Pollack on twenty-plus years of arguing that games carry purpose beyond entertainment. Then Dr. Rachel Kowert and Arana Shapiro on brand-new research that says the panic about kids and gaming is not coming from the evidence.

Guests

• Susanna Pollack, President, Games for Change
• Dr. Rachel Kowert, Research Director, Games for Change
• Arana Shapiro, Chief Program/Operating Officer, Games for Change

Interviews by Lewis Ward.

Chapters

00:00:00 Cold open: the story of Mats Steen
00:00:42 Games for Change 2026
00:04:38 Susanna Pollack, and this year's awards
00:06:30 What Games for Change actually is
00:09:05 Rebuilding the festival: workshops and the Playtest Lab
00:12:23 The argument the industry keeps failing to make
00:14:37 Games are one of the few places failing is fine
00:15:41 The education spine, and kids in 92 countries
00:18:25 Raising Good Gamers: the 2019 origin
00:22:11 Going global, and working with the UN
00:27:54 What's coming next
00:28:57 Dr. Rachel Kowert and Arana Shapiro
00:30:00 The white paper, and 200,000 articles
00:31:43 Why bad news about games travels further
00:32:52 Stop counting hours, start asking why
00:33:55 Most media is passive. Games are not.
00:35:17 SPACE: the five moves
00:36:25 60% of kids want their parents to play
00:36:57 What Raising Good Gamers ships
00:41:53 Self-determination theory and the Proteus effect
00:43:41 Academy, Intel, and the Discord

What you'll take away

• There is more positive coverage of games than negative. The negative just gets shared further, which leaves parents inside what Dr. Kowert calls a biased information ecosystem.
• A game does not need to be designed for impact to have it. Joy, stress relief, connection, and a space where age, gender and location stop deciding anything.
• Games are one of very few activities where failing is acceptable and repeatable. That is how mastering a system quietly builds resilience.
• The parental concerns have not changed in fifty years. What changes is the question: not how many hours, but what purpose the play is serving.
• SPACE, the framework: Start with curiosity. Play together. Adjust for context. Cultivate digital citizenship. Establish boundaries together.
• 60% of kids want their parents to play with them. What stops most parents is assuming they'll be bad at it.

Mentioned in this episode

• Raising Good Gamers, and the white paper by Dr. Rachel Kowert. Free, along with a conversation guide and a family gaming code of conduct template. Workshops rolling out through the PTA, Boys and Girls Club, and libraries.
• The Remarkable Life of Ibelin, the Netflix documentary about Mats Steen. A feature film is in development.
• The Games for Change Student Challenge, 10+ years, participants from 92 countries.
• 2026 award winners: South of Midnight (Compulsion Games), the Vanguard Award to Jenn Panattoni, and the Giving Award to SpecialEffect for their adaptive controller work.
• The Proteus effect, first described by Nick Yee, who joined us back in February.
• Katie Salen, professor of informatics at UC Irvine, co-creator of Raising Good Gamers.

Disclosure: the FTI Consulting media analysis underpinning the white paper was commissioned by Tencent.

Where to go next

• Academy — free, built in short packs you can finish on a commute. academy.playerdriven.io
• Intel — our prediction game. Call what the industry does next and see if you were right. intel.playerdriven.io
• Discord — where this conversation actually continues.
• The Operator's Briefing — Tuesdays, if you'd rather it come to you.

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 dollar spent), the decision to starve Minecraft to prop up everything else, the Game Pass numbers that never made the memo, and the blame pie: how much lands on Phil Spencer, and how much on CEO Satya Nadella. Then they split hard on the future. Colan makes the case that the fix is an ad-funded, one-to-one discovery engine. Greg goes down swinging for a different read of why players won't leave the games they already know.

Two live games along the way: ranking Microsoft's biggest IP by revenue (and where the AI got it wrong), and an invest-or-sell round on Xbox's dormant franchises.

In this episode
(0:00) Cold open, and the week that broke Xbox
(9:00) The layoffs and studio spin-offs: Avowed cancelled, a new Fallout greenlit
(11:54) The memo: losing 64 cents on every dollar, and starving Minecraft
(18:15) Phil Spencer, the "wayward son with a credit card"
(19:07) Restructuring, and the Game Pass numbers that never got named
(23:49) Colan's "script for Asha Sharma," and why Xbox is a distant fifth platform
(29:24) The pitch: ad rev-share, the way YouTube pays creators
(32:00) Game: rank Microsoft's biggest IP by revenue
(37:35) Game: invest or sell Xbox's dormant franchises
(44:49) The blame pie: how much is on Satya Nadella
(49:56) The debate: is discovery broken, or are players just comfortable?
(1:09:00) Games for Change NYC, and what's next

Quotables
Colan Neese: "You lost 64 cents on a dollar, and you took from the profitable engine that was Minecraft."
Colan Neese: "Ads are just content. It's just a different kind of content."

Links and mentions

Player Driven: https://playerdriven.io/
The Operator's Briefing, our weekly newsletter: https://playerdriven.io/level-up
Join the community on Discord: https://discord.gg/GC5PkbKFH
Games for Change, NYC, July 21

About
Player Driven Live breaks down the business behind the games every week, for the people who build, run, and rebuild them. Hosted by Greg Posner with analyst Colan Neese. If this is your kind of conversation, subscribe, and come argue with us in the Discord.

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 with the actual law and economics. We break down the difference between a bootleg server that steals an MMO's revenue and the licensed community and private servers most players actually use, why AAA studios walked away from private servers in the first place (hint: 10 to 25 cents per player, per month), and the four-word fix Jonathan thinks changes everything: license, don't litigate.

We also get into City of Heroes coming back from the dead, why Minecraft's real magic was never the game itself, and the legal-plus-technical-plus-revenue "trifecta" that's finally making publishers say yes. Context: the ESA's comments came while opposing California's AB 1921, the Protect Our Games Act, which failed committee on June 29 but was granted reconsideration, and the Stop Killing Games campaign says it's taking the fight national.

Short description (for feeds/Shorts):
The ESA called private servers piracy. Nodecraft's Jonathan explains what it actually meant, why studios killed private servers, and why "license, don't litigate" beats suing your own fans.

Chapters

• 00:00 Cold open: "Running a private server is piracy?"
• 00:35 Meet Jonathan and Nodecraft, and why this got muddied
• 02:30 Bootleg vs community vs private: the terminology the ESA fumbled
• 04:10 Your town's Minecraft server is fine (and legal)
• 07:20 Why AAA studios really killed private servers: follow the money
• 10:00 The 10-25¢ per player problem and the live-service runway
• 11:40 License, don't litigate: what the mod lawsuits actually show
• 13:30 Rockstar, FiveM, and licensing IP like it's Roblox
• 19:00 Games don't have to die: City of Heroes, Project 1999, Black Mesa
• 22:30 The trifecta: legal + technical + revenue, and Nodecraft Studio
• 28:00 Trust & safety, tooling, and why publishers are leaning back in
• 34:00 Minecraft was never built as a model game: forever fans
• 37:00 Where to find Jonathan and Nodecraft

Mentioned in this episode

• Nodecraft — game-server hosting: https://nodecraft.com/
• AB 1921, the Protect Our Games Act — California's Stop Killing Games-backed bill (Assemblymember Chris Ward)
• The ESA (Entertainment Software Association) and its private-servers clarification

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 in six years, runs about a billion gameplays a month, and is the market leader in over 100 countries — and yet it's arguably the biggest gaming platform nobody's talking about.

The conversation gets into the gap the report exposes: developers still tend to see web as a nostalgia or legacy channel, while players are rating these games high quality, coming back daily, and treating web as a genuine discovery engine. Stein and Greg unpack what actually makes a web game sticky, why zero-install friction changes everything about how games get made, and how "competing for attention" now means competing with Netflix, TikTok, and YouTube rather than other games.

It's a good one for anyone in player support, community, live ops, or game dev who wants a clearer picture of where casual and accessible gaming is actually heading.

What we get into:

• Why web games aren't "casual" anymore, and the data that pushes back on the not-sticky myth (37% of players returning daily, 86% weekly)
• The perception gap between what developers think web is and what players actually experience
• How players hop through four to five games a session, and why curation beats open upload
• Web as the top of the funnel: discovery, IP and franchise fandom, and players who own consoles and spend real money
• The attention economy reality, with players multitasking across music, social, and shows while they play
• Why rising console and hardware prices are quietly making web the most accessible platform there is
• The "it's easy to publish but I'm not sure it's worth it" hesitation, and Stein's pitch to the cautious 36%
• HTML5, fast update cycles, and how a trending meme can be live in a game an hour later
• Why content updates, not gimmicks, are what keep players coming back
• Curation as player safety, and why an AI-slop free-for-all isn't the answer

About Poki: Poki is a browser-based gaming platform built on the idea that the easier you make play to access, the more people get to enjoy it. No downloads, no installs, no account required — just click and play. They work with a global community of developers to curate and release new games daily.

Find the report: Head to poki.com/blog to read the 2026 State of Web Gaming Report.

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 proprietary. Lewis Ward and Greg Posner sit down with Charlie
Olson, the engineer who helped architect Call of Duty's matchmaking rating
system back in 2015, to walk through what the white papers actually said,
what they left out, and what's broken about how the industry thinks about
multiplayer matchmaking.

"Matchmaking is part of the UX. It's not a technical problem. This is a
design problem." — Charlie Olson

👤 About Charlie

Charlie Olson is the co-founder and CEO of Invokation Games, a matchmaking-
as-a-service company powering ranked play and skill rating systems across
multiple multiplayer titles. He helped architect the matchmaking rating
system used in Call of Duty starting in 2015 with Call of Duty: Online for
Tencent, and the version he helped build is still running, essentially
unchanged, in every mainline release since. He spent roughly ten years at
Raven Software before leaving Activision in 2020 to launch Invokation.

📋 What You'll Learn

- What MMR and SBMM actually are, and the difference most people miss
- Where matchmaking fits inside the larger fabric of a multiplayer game
- What changed at Modern Warfare 2019, and why players felt it
- Why removing skill-based matchmaking makes games sweatier, not casual
- The math behind blowouts, retention, and the cascade effect on a player base
- Percentile-based versus MMR-based matchmaking, and the one thing Charlie
would change about Call of Duty
- Why Elo breaks down when used for matchmaking at scale
- What ranked play participation actually looks like across COD titles, and
what that tells you about your audience
- What Invokation Games is building, and what studios get wrong about
matchmaking as a buy-vs-build decision

⏱️ Chapters

00:00 Intro: why matchmaking is the argument of 2026
01:15 Charlie's background, from medical imaging to Call of Duty
04:00 What MMR and SBMM actually are
05:00 The three-loop framework: where matchmaking fits inside a game
10:00 Modern Warfare 2019 and the move to centralized matchmaking
11:00 Inside the 2024 Activision white papers
15:00 How team balancing actually works and where it breaks
21:00 Why XP is not tied to skill, and why Charlie thinks it should be
23:00 Favorite games: Street Fighter 6, Bloodborne, and the old Sierra adventures
24:00 Blowouts, player fun, and the deprioritization-of-skill test
31:00 The cascade effect: why removing SBMM kills the player base
36:00 Marvel Rivals and engagement-optimized matchmaking
40:00 Percentile matchmaking vs. MMR-based matchmaking
45:00 The one thing Charlie would change about Call of Duty
48:00 Why Elo breaks down when used for skill-based matchmaking
53:00 Ranked play, visible MMR, and the World War II Elo system
57:00 Who actually plays ranked, and what the participation rate reveals
63:00 The compression at the top: why Iridescent isn't what it looks like
68:00 What Invokation Games is building

🔗 Links and References

- Invokation Games: https://invokation.games
- Activision's 2024 matchmaking white papers (Modern Warfare 3 study)
- Activision's 2024 ranked play white paper
- Microsoft TrueSkill (referenced)
- Engagement-optimized matchmaking research (Marvel Rivals discussion)

🎯 About Player Driven

Player Driven is the learning community for people who keep games running.
Stories, strategy, and craft from the operational layer of the gaming
industry: player support, community, live ops, trust & safety, design,
and the practitioners doing the work.

💬 Connect With Us

Discord: https://discord.gg/Zxn22NG93
LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/company/player-driven
Website: https://playerdriven.io

If this episode landed, share it with one person on your team who deals
with the downstream of multiplayer matchmaking. That's how we grow.

#CallOfDuty #SBMM #Matchmaking #GameDev #LiveOps #Multiplayer #FPS

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 studio to twelve. Months later, he bet what was left of the company on a six-week pitch to Paramount. The result, SpongeBob Tower Defense, became the number one tower defense game on the platform within a month and went on to be a top 15 game by earnings and the highest-earning licensed game in Roblox history.

This conversation is about what live ops actually demands once the game ships, why the release date is only chapter one, and the operating discipline that lets a fifteen-person team run four projects and ship every Friday.

What this episode covers

The 90-to-12 reset and what it cost. Zach is unusually candid about over-hiring on venture money, losing the studio's culture somewhere around thirty people, and the layoff he calls the most traumatic thing he has ever done. His honest takeaway is not that the cut was wrong but that the hiring was, and there was no painless way to unwind it.

Why he hires for attitude over experience. On Roblox, he argues, traditional industry experience does not translate one-to-one, and the people who survived the cut were the ones willing to roll up their sleeves and operate like a startup inside a company that already had a hit.

The Paramount bet, told straight. The studio was still hurting for cash when Zach pitched a licensed tower defense game in a thirty-minute window at RDC, signed a minimum guarantee he was not sure he could pay, and gave his team six weeks to build something good enough to save the company.

Audience mismatch as a user-acquisition strategy. The sharpest strategic idea in the episode: SpongeBob is a 25-year-old IP with near-universal recognition, and pairing it with the older, anime-adjacent tower defense audience let Wonder Works Studio pull an 18-plus demo (40% of players) with real spending power. The lesson extends well past Roblox, into older IPs like Star Trek and the broadly untapped older-gamer market.

Live ops as fantasy, not roadmap. Zach plans a roadmap and then describes throwing it out when players latch onto something unexpected. He runs a Monday-to-Friday update cadence he compares to the South Park production model: build live, stay relevant, capitalize on platform-wide trends as they happen.

Listening to the community at scale. How Wonder Works Studio moved from reading Discord by hand to software that surfaces what 200,000 members are saying, and why Zach still lurks in the server daily despite the tooling. His framing: a game studio as public servant, players first.

The case for Roblox developers. His argument to skeptical AAA studios is that Roblox devs are quietly the best-trained in the industry: free-to-play by default, no install friction, weekly live ops, brutal competition from solo developers working around the clock. Everyone on the team is a Swiss army knife by necessity.

Is the long-tail live-service game dying? Zach's view is genre fatigue more than game fatigue. For every GTA there are a thousand Crimson Deserts, and players burn out on the loop across experiences before they even realize it. The implication for anyone building or operating live games is worth sitting with.

The hardest lesson. The failure he learned most from was Overlook Bay 2: a more polished, more expensive sequel that lost everything the community cared about and made almost nothing. More polish does not mean a better game. Get to market, learn what the audience wants, and lean into it.

Notable moments

• The early-success trap: a game he thought would take two months took seven, and the real work only started at launch
• Roblox as YouTube's twin, and the humbling that followed the first hit ("nothing in gaming is guaranteed")
• The skeptic-turned-superfan creator who set out to dunk on SpongeBob TD and became the game's biggest influencer
• Why a roadmap often ends up "written on a napkin and thrown away"
• Turning down investor money earmarked for headcount: two projects with the right people over ten with the wrong ones
• A first look at Wonder Works Studio' first original in two years, Duck Duck, approved as a Roblox Standout

About the guest

Zach Letter is co-founder and CEO of Wonder Works Studio, the Roblox studio behind SpongeBob Tower Defense, now the #1 earning licensed game in Roblox history. He is a former full-time YouTube creator of more than a decade. Find him on LinkedIn, where he offers time to IP owners, people entering the space, and students looking for advice.

Links

• Wonder Works Studio: https://wonderworks.gg/
• Zach Letter on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/zachary-letter-0769b893/
• Join the Player Driven community on Discord: https://discord.gg/c6vBJbaQ6
• playerdriven.io