Mikko has been on the buying side in gaming companies. Coffee Stain is apparently the largest position in his portfolio.
Pekka, on the other hand, wouldn’t touch TTWO with a ten-foot pole and predicts the entire industry will change completely.
Pekka, on the other hand, wouldn’t touch TTWO with a ten-foot pole and predicts the entire industry will change completely.
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AI is going to completely revolutionize game development. In games, as in any field involving even a hint of creative work, it’s not about which company is talented enough to come up with the best solutions, but rather which company can produce the best results within the allotted time and resources. AI accelerates iteration, and ideas can be tested in practice much faster than before. As Pekka envisioned above, the amount of game content is set to explode. Scenarios like “good idea, but not enough time/resources” will decrease significantly.
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The number of games has already exploded, and as a result of AI development, this number will surely increase even further, but I don’t see this significantly changing the existing “winner takes it all” dynamics of the gaming industry or the Pareto distribution.
Currently, a few percent of games account for practically all revenue. Correspondingly, more than half of the games released on Steam do not even make $1,000 in sales.
Source
With GenAI, the proportion of poorly selling games will likely only grow. Even now, two-thirds of players’ time is spent on games 6+ years old. Only about 15% of playtime is spent on games released within the last year, and this is the portion that new GenAI games will compete for in the short-to-medium term.
Likely, a few startup-minded new indie studios will be able to use AI to make breakthroughs larger than their size (case: Clair Obscur: Expedition 33). For every such case, however, there will be thousands to tens of thousands of failures.
IP is king. Marvel Rivals replaced Overwatch because it was Marvel and the game was fun enough. Simply making a “fun enough” game is not enough. Players mainly choose IPs with which they have already formed some kind of emotional bond—whether it’s childhood superhero comics or previous experience with a predecessor in a game series.
And AI will not replace human imagination anytime soon in creating something that does not yet exist. After all, AI is trained on existing material. This does not include art styles, stories, and game mechanics that do not yet exist.
Publishers and game studios sitting on big IPs can calmly watch which direction the market moves and how players receive “AI slop.” Of course, even with a big IP behind them, poorly managed companies (case: Ubisoft) can still destroy value whether AI is used or not. Smart companies wait patiently and cherry-pick the best opportunities, either by acquiring these excellently scaling indie-led teams that utilize AI effectively or by adopting the best AI tools.
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A report came out from GDC. I’ll leave a couple of links here, I couldn’t get the actual report open for some reason…
[GDC 2026 report: 36% of devs use GenAI; 28% target Steam Deck and 8% target Linux | GamingOnLinux]
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This is such a hot take that it’ll burn your fingers, but the more likely explanation is still that Blizzard, in its greed, trashed Overwatch 2 when there was no real competition, and the player base shifted to Marvel Rivals because it was absolutely a better game in every way. The Marvel IP certainly brought some casual players in, but these “movie games” have a very poor reputation among gaming enthusiasts (e.g., the flopped Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League), which may have also deterred players because of the use of the Marvel IP. The feat would surely have succeeded even with a completely new IP, because the market was practically begging for a competitor to Overwatch 2.
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There is likely some conscious logic behind this at Blizzard as well. They have now killed hardcore gaming in all of their long-term multiplayer games (StarCraft is a bit of a borderline case). Because all players think they are part of this vocal hardcore player base, it always looks in the media and on social media as if Blizzard’s games are dying one after another, when in reality, this actually small portion of players is just moving on to greener pastures. Despite complete casualization, WoW, Hearthstone, Diablo, and Overwatch continue to live on as popular games. Compared to its peak years, Blizzard also doesn’t need to maintain esports with its own money or market with such massive budgets.
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This is good to remember.
Gamers are a vocal bunch on the internet, especially HC players.
Everything is always ruined.
Companies look at sales, game data, retention, etc. They aren’t blind. Probably in some or even many cases, it makes sense to take a game in a more casual direction in pursuit of bigger money and lure HC players to another game, let them adapt, or leave on a case-by-case basis. Especially long-running games evolve with the times, and not all players adapt to change.
I have a lot of respect for game companies’ Community Managers. Inderes might have a few shitstorms a year and it’s ruined about half the time. Games are ruined every day and the community is outraged every other day. 
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A brand is like a bank account. Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back was a huge financial success, but through its brilliance, it also managed to accumulate more brand equity into the Star Wars brand bank. TFA was an even bigger success than Empire, but it only succeeded by withdrawing brand equity from the brand bank and leveraging it with nostalgia. You can pull this trick a few times, but sooner or later those deposited assets are eaten up, as has now happened with Star Wars, and the brand’s appeal is no longer more than a fraction of what it was in the old days when every kid wanted to be a Jedi Knight and the biggest fans argued loudly over plot details.
Inderes has made similar capital withdrawals in recent years, and many Inderes employees have actually remained outside the Inderes community, as Tuulikki put it in plain language:
At Inderes-corpo, a large part of the employees are starting to be NPCs nowadays, who come here to the forum during office hours to talk about work matters if they find time from other tasks (often they don’t). It’s generally quite pointless to learn these people’s names, because in a few years they’ll disappear into better jobs in the cigar-scented corridors of the financial sector’s old boys’ club anyway, leaving no trace of their existence, and we’ll never hear from them again. This phenomenon, in turn, eats away at Inderes’s power to differentiate itself from traditional financial players, because canned answers about stocks can now be obtained from ChatGPT as well, and around the clock at that.
Blizzard also succeeded in building an incredible gaming company by creating one hit game after another, and in recent years it has clearly been a time for harvesting and running down the brand. Every company has a natural life cycle, and Blizzard likely has only 10 to 20 years left. Turning a ship of over 10,000 people is not necessarily possible anymore, no matter how hard you try. The momentum is too great. Ubisoft serves as a good example in this regard: once you withdraw all the capital from the brand bank and no longer know how to create anything new, it is no longer so easy to climb back to the top from the brand debt trap.
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A good point; shouldn’t the studios that have succeeded so far (large or small) rather be able to achieve better efficiency by utilizing AI? The fact that the number of unsuccessful games increases a hundred thousandfold shouldn’t change the situation for the profit-makers at all.
I suppose there’s something similar here to the music business; making music has become easier and AI-generated content is being flooded onto the market, but it doesn’t show up in the market’s distribution of money or in the share prices of music companies at all.
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Believe it if you want, but Take Two claims that GTA VI won’t be delayed anymore and marketing will begin this summer.
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[ https://store.epicgames.com/en-US/news/epic-games-store-2025-year-in-review ]
Epic Store’s 2025 numbers have been published.
Personally, I haven’t played anything through this service, but I occasionally click a free game into my library; if I ever end up on “holiday” for months, at least I’ll have something to do in the queue…
The Free Games Program also continued to drive discovery and engagement. In 2025, players claimed 662 million titles through the program. Over 77% of games set an all-time peak CCU record on the Store during the week of their free offer. This delivered a measurable halo effect across the broader PC ecosystem, including a 40% lift in Steam CCU while the title was free on the Epic Games Store.
Quite interesting info; Remedy should bring AW2 to Steam before they give the game away for free on Epic (wink wink).
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Remedy actually can’t bring it to Steam because they made a deal with Epic for PC exclusivity on the Epic Games Store. They likely can’t influence which games Epic chooses for their free giveaways either (though developers probably still receive some compensation for these freebies).
So, as far as AW2 is concerned, it’s entirely in Epic’s hands. Of course, anything is possible, at least if enough money were to change hands and Remedy bought back the publishing rights for themselves. I still find it unlikely that we’ll ever see it on Steam.
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We got a Finnish-speaking character in Overwatch before the release of GTA VI. This wasn’t on the 2026 bingo card 
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Regarding the discontinuation of Ubisoft’s game development and failed projects: little birds (read: developers) have revealed that, for example, Prince of Persia was handed over to India for development. It came as a huge surprise when nothing came of the project, even though India was supposed to have skilled coders galore. Eventually, the project was brought back to Europe to be salvaged, but local developers finally concluded that you can’t polish this turd.
And the same problem has affected many other projects. This is in addition to the general lack of vision from management (e.g., the MOBA craze, which is still ongoing).
Apparently, the constant outsourcing of work and scattering teams across fifty different locations has failed as the company has grown. Oversight has faltered, and things have, so to speak, gotten out of hand.
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