What You Missed: The Last Few Weeks in Gaming
It’s been quiet here while other things took priority, so here’s the catch-up — four stories from the past few weeks worth actually knowing about, not just skimming past.
The EA Consolidation Isn’t Finished
Back in August, Electronic Arts officially closed its $55 billion leveraged buyout, taken private by a consortium led by Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund. That alone was one of the biggest ownership shifts in the industry’s history. Now there’s reporting that the Saudis are weighing merging EA with Savvy Games Group — PIF’s existing gaming holding company — to create a single global gaming giant under one roof.
Worth watching alongside this: Savvy’s own CEO stepped down in late August, right as this merger talk surfaced. Whether that’s routine leadership churn or a sign of bigger restructuring ahead isn’t clear yet, but the timing is hard to ignore. If EA and Savvy do combine, you’re looking at a single entity with stakes spanning EA’s entire catalogue plus Savvy’s existing portfolio — a scale of ownership concentration the industry hasn’t really seen before. Between this and Atari quietly assembling the biggest retro-emulation operation in gaming, it’s shaping up to be a genuinely odd year for who actually owns what.
Don’t Nod Is Running Out of Runway
A less headline-grabbing story, but a genuinely worrying one if you care about mid-size studios surviving. Don’t Nod — the French developer behind the Life is Strange series — published financial results showing gross cash fell from $17.9 million at the end of 2025 to just $9.3 million by the end of July 2026. Net operating revenue dropped by more than half over the same period. Without external financing or a major restructuring, the studio has said it risks running out of money by January 2027. There’s a bleak irony in a studio built on games about consequences and branching choices now facing a genuinely binary one of its own.
The studio’s own framing is that the video game market has become profoundly transformed, with financing now far more selective than it used to be. That’s exactly the pattern we wrote about a few weeks back: big publishers retreating into legacy IP and safe bets while genuinely creative mid-size studios fight for financing that’s increasingly hard to find. Don’t Nod isn’t a hypothetical example of that pattern any more. It’s a live one, with a countdown attached.
GTA VI Is Already Breaking Things, and It Hasn’t Launched
An exclusive Netflix peek at Grand Theft Auto VI topped the platform’s viewing charts at the start of September — genuinely unusual territory for a game trailer to out-draw scripted content. That came on the heels of yet another leak in late August, the latest in a long line since the game’s troubled development became public. At this point the leaks are arguably doing more marketing work than the official trailers, which is either a PR disaster Rockstar can’t plug or the most efficient hype campaign in the industry, depending on how charitable you’re feeling. Take-Two has since had to publicly address questions about the game’s online multiplayer mode, a sign of just how much scrutiny every detail is now under ahead of the November 19 launch.
Market research firm Newzoo is projecting GTA VI could bring in somewhere between $3.25 billion and $5.2 billion globally in its first week alone — numbers that make our earlier question about whether four times the budget buys four times the game feel almost quaint. Whatever else is true about the state of the industry right now, that revenue projection alone explains why every publisher with a fall release is trying to avoid launching anywhere near it.
Switch 2’s Battery Just Got More Repairable — Because Europe Made Nintendo Do It
A smaller story, but a satisfying one: to comply with EU right-to-repair regulations, Nintendo has confirmed a staged rollout of a Switch 2 revision with a user-replaceable battery for the European region, alongside discontinuing the original Switch. Nintendo is not a company that volunteers repairability improvements out of goodwill — ask anyone who lived through the great Joy-Con drift saga — so this is regulation forcing a genuinely better outcome for owners, and it’s worth noting as exactly that rather than crediting Nintendo for a decision it didn’t really choose to make. Sometimes the good outcome just needs a law behind it.
Worth Watching
Tokyo Game Show runs 17-21 September, right as this goes up, and BlizzCon 2026 already wrapped in Anaheim earlier this month. Expect more from both once the announcements settle. Back to regular coverage from here — and hopefully a shorter gap before the next one of these.
