Dennis Yi

EA Announces Agreement to be Acquired by PIF, Silver Lake, and Affinity Partners for $55 Billion. This is your daily reminder that game franchises are worth billions. EA shareholders will receive $210 per share, a 25% premium over its pre-deal price, and once the transaction closes in fiscal 2027, EA will no longer trade on public markets. This is one of the biggest moves in gaming history, comparable in scale to Microsoft’s Activision Blizzard acquisition. EA is one of the five major Western publishers, sitting on franchises like Battlefield, Apex Legends, The Sims, Dragon Age, Mass Effect, and a portfolio of sports games that generate billions annually. Going private could allow EA to operate without quarterly shareholder pressure, but the deal is financed partly with $20 billion in debt, which means cost-cutting is inevitable. Layoffs, studio closures, and selling off dormant IP are all realistic outcomes. This acquisition is also part of a bigger Saudi strategy. PIF has spent years diversifying away from oil, investing in esports, Formula 1, and now one of the most profitable gaming companies in the world. It signals how seriously Gulf states see gaming as a future growth industry and a cultural tool. From a consumer standpoint, this could go in two directions: If the consortium truly wants to grow EA rather than strip it for parts, it could mean reviving neglected franchises and experimenting with new IP without the quarterly earnings pressure. On the other hand, private equity deals often focus on generating value quickly, which could mean more microtransactions, subscription pushes, and a further narrowing of EA’s focus to guaranteed earners like EA Sports FC and Battlefield. One of the most recognizable names in gaming has been taken off the public market and placed under the control of foreign investors. It is the clearest sign yet that video games are no longer just a niche hobby but a major asset class that nations, sovereign funds, and global financiers are willing to spend tens of billions to control.

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I'm happy to welcome Adam Orth, Charlotte Cook, and Cisco Maldonado to our Midwest Games team. As we grow the business and global opportunities to help game publishing and dev teams succeed, adding even more experienced leadership expands our capabilities in many exciting ways. Ben explains the details well in his post below, but as a final point I'll just say it is great to have this momentum and extra horsepower heading into GDC. Can't wait to talk with folks there about the opportunities that may come from partnership!

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Unpopular opinion: Valve is not the "good guy" of gaming. The Steam Winter Sale starts tomorrow. Millions will log in for the deep discounts. But what have these low prices cost the game industry? I've been analyzing Steam's $10B business model. Here is the dark truth behind those amazing deals. 1. The "M" Word Steam controls 75% of the PC market (IconEra, October 2025). Last year, they made $10.8 billion. Compare that to Epic Games. Epic has more users (295M vs 132M) but made 42x less revenue. Epic has accounts. Valve has customers. EA and Ubisoft tried to leave. They came back. Because you can't boycott the ocean. 2. The Flash Sale Weapon Valve figured out that deep discounts are a drug. A game you'd never buy at $60 becomes an instant buy at $4.99. A consumer win, but what's the long term impact? Customers stopped asking, "Is this worth $60?" Now they ask, "How long until it's $15?" 3. The Real Math Everyone talks about Valve's 30% cut. That isn't the real problem. The problem is the Average Selling Price. If your game lists for $60 but only sells during sales, your average price is $35. You aren't losing 30% of $60. You are losing 30% of $35. Worse? You don't control the calendar. Valve dictates when you make money. And when that sale hits? You are competing against 18,000 other games with the same discount. 75% off isn't differentiation anymore. It's table stakes. (But don't worry, Valve will let you run a "Publisher Sale" so you can discount your entire catalog by 90% too.) 4. The Trap This model fundamentally changed the industry... It kills retail: GameStop can't compete with a digital file that costs $0 to ship. It creates lock-in: Your backlog is a sunk cost. You won't leave Steam, or you lose your library. And your wishlist locks you in too... when those games go on sale, you're not shopping, you're harvesting. The "new release" moment is rare: 33% of gamers buy a new game less often than once a year. They're playing backlog, subscriptions, or free-to-play. (VGC, citing Circana's Q3 2025 Future of Video Games survey, October 2025) 5. Valve is no Villain Let's give credit where it's due. Steam saved PC gaming when it was a nightmare of manual patches and lost discs. They gave indies a global shelf. Stardew Valley, Hades, and Hollow Knight found audiences that retail never would have supported. They created the "long tail." In the 90s, if you were off the shelf, you were dead. On Steam, a 5-year-old game can still spike. The Takeaway Valve didn't just build a store. They built an architecture that killed retail, locked in customers, and forced publishers to play by their rules. But here is the irony. I know exactly how this machine works. I know it devalues the art I love. But when that "Wishlist is on Sale" notification hits my phone tomorrow? I'll open my wallet just like everyone else. See you in the checkout line. Part 1 of the Valve Series. #Steam #GameIndustry #Valve

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Community Request: Analysis to Tease Out Year-over-Year Steam CCU Trends 🎮 What this is For a while now, folks have asked if I could break down Steam data to normalize the huge volume of annual new game releases and identify trends in breakout performance. The question: "Out of the 1,000… 5,000… now 20,000+ new games released each year on Steam, how many actually go big? And is that number increasing?" 📊 What I did • Pulled every game released on Steam by year (excluding 2025 since it's in progress). • For each year, I measured how many new titles hit specific peak CCU thresholds. • Then I calculated: 1. The number of new games by year that hit each threshold 2. The percentage of all games released that year that hit each threshold 3. The normalized rate, i.e., how many games per 10,000 releases hit those marks 📈 Key thresholds analyzed 100, 500, 1,000, 5,000, 10,000, 50,000, and 100,000 peak CCU 📌 A few interesting takeaways • Only 683 of the 20,584 new games released on Steam in 2024 even hit 100 peak CCU • Just 52 hit 10,000, only 16 hit 50,000, and a mere 7 reached 100,000 • In 2024, only: - 1% hit 1,000 peak CCU - 0.25% hit 10,000 - 0.03% hit 100,000 → In other words, only 0–3 out of every 10,000 new games hit 100,000 peak CCU in most years • Two of the middle years (2012–2013) are interesting outliers: only ~400 new games released each year and CS:GO and Dota 2 dominated 📊 The last 3 years (2022-2024) are very consistent in terms of % of new games hitting different peak CCU marks • ~3% of new games hit 100 peak CCU • ~1.5% hit 500 • ~1% hit 1,000 • ~0.4% hit 5,000 • ~0.25% hit 10,000 • ~0.075% hit 50,000 • ~0.03% hit 100,000 🧠 Bottom line Don’t stress too much about how many new games are released on Steam. In most years for new titles: • Only 500-600 even hit 100 peak CCU • Only 200–300 hit 500–1,000 peak CCU • Only ~50 hit 10,000 • And just ~5-7 hit 100,000 📝 One last note You might think there are more high-CCU titles, than what I am sharing here, based on the Steam Charts. You're right, but this analysis is only for new games by year of release. Games with ongoing success are only counted once, in the year they launched. Hope you enjoy digging into the data!

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The 'Senior-Only' hiring trap is a ticking time bomb for the gaming industry. 💣 Every studio wants a 'Senior' who can hit the ground running. We get it. But the current obsession with experience-only hiring is creating an unsustainable talent vacuum. Without a junior pipeline, your seniors are spending 40% of their time doing mid-level work, leading to burnout and eventual turnover. The crisis isn't just a lack of talent: it's a lack of balance. Surgical recruitment isn't just about finding the one senior dev; it's about building a sustainable team structure that protects your leadership from burnout. Let's talk about building for the long term. #GameDevelopment #TalentCrisis #TeamBuilding #GameRecruiter #RecruitmentStrategy #BurnoutPrevention

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Hathora is sunsetting game hosting, my thoughts. Many of you will have seen the news that Hathora has sold its game infrastructure business and is transitioning customers over to Nitrado’s GameFabric platform. Coming so soon after Unity’s decision to wind down its own Multiplay Game Server Hosting service and transition customers towards Multiplay by Rocket Science, it’s clear there is a lot of movement in the multiplayer infrastructure space right now. For teams running live multiplayer games on Hathora today, this kind of change can feel unsettling – especially when you’re balancing roadmaps, live ops, and player expectations all at once. My thoughts are with the Hathora folks affected by this move (I will miss your posts Gabi), and with the studios now figuring out what this means for their games, just as many Multiplay customers have been doing over the last few months. I’ve spent years around Multiplay and similar platforms, and I know how much invisible work goes into keeping sessions stable, scaling capacity, and quietly firefighting issues so players never notice. One thing I do want to stress is that a lot of this capacity is landing in good hands. I know people at both Rocket Science and Nitrado, and they’re folks who genuinely care about keeping games online and doing right by developers, not just ticking boxes on an MSA. That doesn’t magically make these transitions easy, but it does mean there are teams on the other side who understand what’s at stake for your players and your studio. The good news is that there are viable paths forward. Hathora and Nitrado are collaborating on a structured migration to GameFabric, with the goal of continuity for existing titles rather than a rushed lift-and-shift. In the Multiplay case, Unity is keeping the hosting service running through March 31, 2026 while Rocket Science ramps up, again with a clear transition window rather than an overnight shutdown. Across both situations, the pattern is the same: if you start planning early, you can shield your players from most of the pain. If you’re a Hathora or Multiplay customer and you’re unsure about timelines, risk, or alternatives, I’m always happy to be a sounding board – whether you end up working with Code Wizards or not. We care deeply about this corner of the industry, and if a quick chat helps you navigate the change with a bit less stress, that’s a win in my book. If you’d like to talk through your options, feel free to DM me here on LinkedIn. I did a post last year on the options available. https://lnkd.in/gfRDSM8j This makes me think I should do an updated version to reflect the rapidly changing landscape.

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Arcosa just closed the $450M barge deal to Wynnchurch. Everyone saw the headline. No one saw the trapdoors. I ran it through the new Raven Advisory engine this morning. Flagged in seconds: → $1.5B debt acceleration on Change of Control → OBBBA 2028 tax credit cliff → Net debt cash netting trap ($150M) → Excess cash flow “voluntary” prepayments that aren’t voluntary This is why Associates & VPs at boutiques are still doing 4AM clause checks while Big Law ghosts $5-100M deals. Full 7-page Raven Advisory report is in the document above. Comment TRAPDOOR and I’ll DM you the 60-second Loom showing exactly how it caught everything on your next deal (free, no pitch). Who else is staring at one of these in their current pipeline right now? #M&A #ChangeOfControl #PrivateEquity #CarveOut #LMM #DealRisk #InvestmentBanking

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“The video game industry is approaching $200B in global revenues and so nearly any business plan is worth funding!!” At least, that was the sentiment a few years ago. With the deflation in investor enthusiasm tied to failed returns from this euphoria, spending on new projects has dropped dramatically. Even so, pitch materials still often reference the entirety of interactive to entice funders. In addition, many pundits looking for compelling angles commonly use statements like “Roblox has grown 30% since last year and dwarfs the concurrent player base of Battlefield 6 – traditional game developers had better transition if they want to remain in business!” This is false equivalency. What do mobile F2P, PC/Console premium, online, Roblox/UEFN, VR, casino and web games have in common? They are interactive experiences and require similar development roles to create them. Because of this, they have been placed under a single entertainment umbrella, but in reality they target vastly different markets. A typical mobile slots player was not lured away from League of Legends. Someone might enjoy each of these, but this is no different than liking to both watch baseball and to play Clash of Clans. Certain interactive segments even have more in common with other media, such as strategy games and tabletop games, than with other video games. It is the 𝘦𝘯𝘵𝘪𝘳𝘦𝘵𝘺 of entertainment that is zero sum, so UEFN player growth may well be a much larger problem for social media apps, TV and recreational sports leagues than for PC gaming. As Netflix CEO Reed Hastings indicated back in 2019, “We compete with (and lose to) Fortnite more than HBO”. The consequences of mistaking ourselves as one homogenous industry are hindering forward progress. We are still clearing the terrible wreckage from oh-so-many new IP $100M+ PC games that have been scrapped one after another. When an investor is looking at a pitch for a premium PC/Console game, what should matter is the size, stability and growth of the PC/Console premium game industry. At DDM, we have seen so many game pitches untethered to this market reality. As an industry we are all navigating the consequences of funder hubris and outsize project expectations. It is certainly true that there is a struggle to find an audience given the tsunami of entertainment content, yet marketing difficulties have been a consistent complaint since the first game disks & cartridges were sold. Throughout 2025, we have seen one PC game success after another on a regular cadence, many from smaller companies, who have sized their projects correctly and created community. It is vital to remember that we are many industries! It is incumbent on all of us to scale appropriately and take risks accordingly in order to weave sustainability into interactive. With this, investor and publisher confidence will continue to return in measured ways, strengthening industry stability and generating a lot more positive news.

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As someone who sees >$100M in gaming budgets executed annually, I want to share what might be an "unpopular opinion”. The biggest waste in media plans is lean-back & lean-forward attention bought separately. The industry seems blind to the connection of CTV and in-gaming advertising, and yet they’re complementary attention environments at the most important moment in the funnel. Here’s what media buying teams should understand clearer 👇
 📺 CTV = premium lean-back entertainment 🎮 In-Game = premium lean-forward entertainment Both capture heightened attention. Both live at the top of the funnel. Both shape what happens mid and bottom-funnel. When you run them together, something special happens which I like to call the “entourage effect”. 🎭 As lean-back and lean-forward settings complement one another; brand awareness, consideration and purchase intent compound. This is how I like to think of it: 🧘‍♀️ CTV captures attention during down-time cognition 🧠 Gaming captures attention during active cognition Different posture.
Same human.
Higher overall cognitive imprint. Smart advertisers leading in 2026 aren't doing it by squeezing another 0.2% out of social... they're adjusting media plans with tactics like this. Keen to hear if anyone else out there has spotted this opportunity?

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The open secret back in the IDFA days was that publishers were contacting their biggest spenders to purchase currency in bulk via bank transfer to avoid the 30% Platform fee and get currency at a more favorable rate. “VIP services”

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What I’m seeing in the marketplace right now feels like a split screen. On one side: AAA publishers. EA just went private at a $55B valuation, big capital doubling down on IP, sports franchises, and predictable cash flows. Safe bets, multi-year cycles, global reach. On the other hand, UGC breakouts. Roblox reporting shows games like Plants vs Brainrots, a 4-week-old title that peaked at 3.3M CCU and nearly 200M visits. Simple loops, community-driven, algorithm-fueled. Zero to millions overnight without a massive marketing budget. Two completely different models. Both are shaping the same audience: 9–34 years old, global, and spending more time (and money) within digital economies. This is the dichotomy brands, agencies, and investors need to understand.  • AAA = reach, prestige, longevity  • UGC = speed, culture, explosive upside The EA news and Roblox data together tell the same story: the future of gaming isn’t one or the other. The real opportunity is in connecting the worlds. Where do you see the next billion-dollar franchise coming from: a AAA publisher or a Roblox dev team?

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Roblox announced major policy changes amid mounting pressure from multiple fronts 🚨 Louisiana (yes, the state) filed a lawsuit alleging the platform enables predator networks, while the #FreeSchlep controversy continues over their ban of a creator who helped arrest 6 predators. Now they're rolling out significant changes: - Explicit ban on "implied sexual content" (major expansion from previous rules) - Social hangouts with bedrooms/bathrooms restricted to ID-verified 17+ only - Nightclubs, bars, dance clubs limited to 17+ verified users - Unrated experiences blocked for most users -Automated real-time detection systems for inappropriate behaviour These aren't minor policy updates - they represent fundamental changes to content moderation. The "implied sexual content" expansion suggests previous policies had significant gaps that community investigators were exposing. Louisiana's lawsuit specifically cited "lack of safety protocols" while demanding platform shutdown. These changes appear designed to address those exact concerns. Roblox is making necessary but overdue changes under intense scrutiny. The platform clearly needed stronger safety measures, but the timing - amid legal action and community backlash - makes these look reactive rather than proactive. They're a step in the right direction, I hope more is to come!

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GPT-5 isn’t just a smarter chatbot, it’s a game-changer for iGaming. In social casino development, we’ve always relied on player psychology, LiveOps, and data-driven economies to drive retention and monetization. Now, GPT-5 adds something new: Context-aware intelligence that can act like a real team member. Here’s where GPT-5 can transform studios like Ruby Seven Studios, Inc. 🎯 Game Development – Faster code prototyping, theme ideation, and art briefs. 📅 LiveOps – Data-backed event ideas, reward tuning, and A/B test optimization. 💬 Player Engagement – AI concierges that answer player questions instantly and craft personalized VIP messages. 💰 Economy Design – Predictive simulations for bet tiers, chip packages, and mission rewards. 🌍 Global Rollout – Instant localization and compliance-friendly messaging. 📚 Internal Knowledge – An AI-trained hub with all your docs, so every team member has the right answer instantly. The iGaming playbook is evolving. Studios that pair domain expertise with AI context will launch faster, engage deeper, and monetize smarter. I see GPT-5 not replacing people but amplifying what our designers, engineers, and LiveOps teams can do. Intelligence was the barrier. GPT-5 removed it. Now, context is the new competitive edge. #GPT5 #iGaming #SocialCasino #LiveOps #GameDevelopment #AI

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A friend recently said to me about his game company employer, “We always be re-orging.” Re-organization really is a way of work for many companies. Video games aren’t alone in their ample use of the re-org. I’ve been through a few myself. Sometimes it is a useful tool in the corporate strategy tool box. Sometimes, it’s just an in-between state before another re-org. Anyway, that statement from a friend and this news about Amazon opting out of publishing an in-development open world racing game from Maverick Studios, felt like a reminder of where several major game companies are right now, in the throes of a re-organization. Amazon, Microsoft and Netflix have all hit reset on their strategy. All have had plenty of reorganization during these strategic resets. What we don’t know yet for any of them - is this just an in-between state or something more? It’s hard to say from my perspective. There’s a lot of politicking insights that I’m lacking any serious perspective on as an outsider. But for those of us who love working in video games and want to see investment in the industry climb, we all want to see Amazon and their tech peers figure it out.

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