Jon Grande

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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As I read more and more reports about the recent Xbox layoffs one thing becomes clearer about MSFT’s intent in this round: This wave was not driven by a desire to replace workers with AI as some have speculated. Instead I believe the intent was to “improve” a Span of Control KPI. What I notice is that a great number of the layoffs occurred among quite senior employees level 64-66 at the Director and Senior Director level. That is middle management. If this had been an AI replacement exercise MSFT would have kept more experienced people and fired mostly junior people as AI replacement tends to produce better results with more experienced humans in the loop. The driving out of experienced middle management, and I’m talking about some absolute legends in the industry, points to a different organizational goal: Span of Control. MSFT and many other tech firms have in recent years looked at the ratio of management to direct reports and sought to increase the number of reports each manager has as some measure of organizational efficiency. Misguided or not this is a trend that has been widely reported on before. It also doesn’t hurt that middle management is paid better and makes a juicer target for cost cutting when a business unit’s targets are not met. If you don’t make the margin goals Corporate needs you to make, you have to offer a tribute or face their wrath. And that is what I believe this is all about. Just my opinion. #xbox #gameindustry #gamedev

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What a phenomenal RDC 2025!🔥 This year’s Roblox Developers Conference (held Sept 5–6 in San Jose) was packed with major announcements, and I couldn’t be more excited by the direction the platform is heading: • Roblox Moments: A built-in short-form video feed for capturing highlights and instantly sharing them across the platform, think a TikTok-style discovery tool tailor-made for Roblox. • Creator earnings boost: DevEx rates increased by 8.5%, putting more cash back into creators’ pockets. • Huge growth metrics: Over $1 billion paid out to creators in the past year, with daily active users climbing toward 112 million. • Emerging tech & safety upgrades: From acoustic simulation and hydrodynamic enhancements to emissive mapping, CSG on meshes, and server authority for anti-cheat measures • Infrastructure & community support: A new data center in São Paulo is now live, improving latency for Brazilian users, and the platform is reinforcing its commitment to safety with over 100 updates and better age-based moderation. This year, Lootbloc turned up with some unforgettable moments: • Partner Dinner: We hosted a special dinner for our 60+ partners, an opportunity to connect, eat great food, and relax after a long RDC weekend. • Claw Machine: We partnered with the Roblox Commerce team to have our Lootbloc-branded claw machine featured at their booth, where attendees could win merch • Luau Plushie Launch: We unveiled an exclusive Luau whale plushie with Roblox, themed after the Luau logo that attendees could earn by completing a scavenger hunt at the Luau booth • Co-hosting Quataun party Friday night at RDC where we gave away thousands of plushies, shirts, hats and more to fellow developers. Lootbloc is only continuing to grow by bringing on new partners this year like Piggy, Pls Donate, Murderers vs. Sheriff Duels, Twin Atlas and more! Bottom line: RDC 2025 wasn’t just about big tech announcements, it was a celebration of community and all of the successes this past year. I’m so excited by the possibilities ahead, and inspired by how platforms like Roblox and partners like Lootbloc continue to grow together. Here’s to next year, bigger, bolder, and even more connected.

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Well, that's my 31st GDC in the books (if you count the remote version in 2021). This year's version was a reflection of the industry in many ways. For many years, you could see the industry and conference relentlessly growing in unison. This seemed to accelerate sharply with the aggressive entry of venture capital in the Facebook gaming era and ramped up through the pandemic. This year, the crowd was noticeably smaller than in just about any Moscone year I can remember. The tourists have fled the field (h/t Chris Heatherly). Outside of the students and early career folks, it was a committed core of game makers from around the world who were there to meet, learn, and do business. Oh yeah, and knock back a few drinks. AI was at the center of a lot of conversations, and rightly so. It is already changing the shape of the workforce in our industry in significant ways. I am personally looking forward to seeing some mind-blowing new forms of gameplay in the next few years that couldn't have existed without AI. The folks who figure that our first will make a huge impact on our industry. The conference was smoothly executed and the fistful of sessions I attended were rock solid. I attended some fun new events, including one featuring some pretty serious TV folks and some Magic: the Gathering matches. (Thanks Joshua English!) And I definitely met a lot of cool new folks. Although the conference may change and the way I interact with it may change as well, I think it's fairly safe to consider me a GDC dead ender. Even though game industry conferences have proliferated and some mobile-focused conferences may be more important for my business, GDC is still the place where the game industry professional world comes together and I love spending time in the midst of it. #GDC2026

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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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For those of you who might be interested, I am giving 3/4 of a talk at GDC this year along with Brad Hendricks, the CEO of Blind Squirrel. Our talk is about "building a global development team" and my part of the exercise details some of the production practices we use to manage our different teams in different locales around the world in a consistent manner. In particular, I'll be deep diving into how we capture and utilize KPI's from our teams to try and avoid issues in advance of them occurring. The date and time of this extravaganza is: Thursday, March 12 | 11:50am - 12:50pm. Location: Room 3002, West Hall. I hope to see you there!

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베이스 앱의 크리에이터 토큰과 관련한 논쟁으로 CT가 뜨겁네요. 하지만 베이스 앱의 KSF는 크리에이터 코인 메타 자체에 있다고 생각하지 않습니다. Over the past few days, seeing Base CT flooded with feedback on the baseapp- sparked by Brian Armstrong and Jesse Pollak’s call to the community- gave me a huge boost of energy. I couldn’t stop organizing my thoughts around my own ambition: building a game product distribution strategy on the Base app that could one day rival the App Store or Google Play. I just hope this feedback isn’t coming too late. ⸻ 1️⃣ From a product strategy perspective, the biggest game changer the Base app brings is onchain content posting. I strongly believe this marks the beginning of a redefinition of the Web3 industry. As users encounter different forms of onchain posting, they’ll naturally start to adopt Web3. Creator coins, follower trading, and the sharing of mini-apps are, in my view, what will ignite this change. ⸻ 2️⃣ In the end, the Base app’s key success factor lies in how creatively it can design onchain posting- and how effectively it can make it accessible to massive Web2 audiences that no one has reached yet. So far, our(Bases) chosen weapons have been stablecoins, creator coins, and the mini-app ecosystem. ⸻ 3️⃣ I don’t think the core of creator coins is sniping. It’s about building communities as efficiently as possible around follower–following relationships. That’s why Base app creators shouldn’t be narrowly defined as just TikTokers. We need a clearer definition of what “content” means so creators can attract meaningful followings. For example, @Roblox creators have completely different traits and business models from TikTokers, yet they’re a powerful force driving the Roblox ecosystem. Thinking about how creators from projects like RemixGG could leverage Base posting feels like a very strong strategic move. ⸻ 4️⃣ As every Base builder knows, the mini-app ecosystem is unique and overflowing with ideas. If we focus on how to help builders plan effective onchain postings, meaningful change will follow naturally. That said, right now we’re spending a lot of time just defining bug cases around account linking between Farcaster and the Base app 😭 ⸻ 5️⃣ How to surface diverse mini-apps to Base app users is the most practical and immediate challenge. Expanding new mini-apps menu or category-based content to 20+ apps will require thoughtful and healthy follow-up mechanisms. Otherwise, the mini-app ecosystem risks ending up like other platforms- flooded with airdrop-driven mini-apps 🤔 ⸻ There’s a lot more to unpack, but it already feels like this brilliant community has surfaced a ton of valuable feedback. Because the creator ecosystem must move in sync with the mini-app ecosystem, local & IRL services, and baseposting, I’m confident even better strategies will follow. What’s clear is this: this isn’t a short-term narrative—it’s a long-term direction. That’s why I’m still a Base believer in 2026.

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