'This new phase allows me to focus on strategic initiatives, M&A, and capital allocation.'

We did it gang. We completed another week in the impossible survival sim that is real life. Give yourself a appreciative pat on the back and gaze wistfully towards whatever adventures or blissful respite the weekend might bring.This week I've mostly been recovering from my birthday celebrations, which entailed a bountiful Korean Barbecue that left me with a rampant case of the meat sweats and a pub crawl around one of Manchester's finest suburbs. There was no time for video games, but that's not always a bad thing. Distance makes the heart grow fonder, after all.I was welcomed back to the imaginary office with a news bludgeon to the face. The headlines this week have come thick and fast, bringing hardware announcements, more layoffs, and some notable sales milestones. As always, there's a lot to digest, so let's venture once more into the fray. The first Xbox handhelds have finally arrivedvia Game Developer // Microsoft finally stopped flirting with the idea of launching a handheld this week and unveiled not one, but two devices called the ROG Xbox Ally and ROG Xbox Ally X. The former is pitched towards casual players, while the latter aims to entice hardcore video game aficionados. Both devices were designed in collaboration with Asus and will presumably retail at price points that reflect their respective innards. We don't actually know yet, mind, because Microsoft didn't actually state how much they'll cost. You have the feel that's where the company really needs to stick the landing here.Related:Switch 2 tops 3.5 million sales to deliver Nintendo's biggest console launchvia Game Developer // Four days. That's all it took for the Switch 2 to shift over 3.5 million units worldwide to deliver Nintendo's biggest console launch ever. The original Switch needed a month to reach 2.74 million sales by contrast, while the PS5 needed two months to sell 4.5 million units worldwide. Xbox sales remain a mystery because Microsoft just doesn't talk about that sort of thing anymore, which is decidedly frustrating for those oddballs (read: this writer) who actually enjoy sifting through financial documents in search of those juicy juicy numbers.Inside the ‘Dragon Age’ Debacle That Gutted EA’s BioWare Studiovia Bloomberg (paywalled) // How do you kill a franchise like Dragon Age and leave a studio with the pedigree of BioWare in turmoil? According to a new report from Bloomberg, the answer will likely resonate with developers across the industry: corporate meddling. Sources speaking to the publication explained how Dragon Age: The Veilguard, which failed to meet the expectations of parent company EA, was in constant disarray because the American publisher couldn't decide whether it should be a live-service or single player title. Indecision from leadership within EA and an eventual pivot away from the live-service model only caused more confusion, with BioWare being told to implement foundational changes within impossible timelines. It's a story that's all the more alarming because of how familiar it feels.Related:Sony is making layoffs at Days Gone developer Bend Studiovia Game Developer // Sony has continued its Tony Award-winning tun as the Grim Reaper by cutting even more jobs within PlayStation Studios. Days Gone developer Bend Studio was the latest casualty, with the first-party developer confirming a number of employees were laid off just months after the cancellation of a live-service project. Sony didn't confirm how many people lost their jobs, but Bloomberg reporter Jason Schreier heard that around 40 people (roughly 30 percent of the studio's headcount) were let go. Embracer CEO Lars Wingefors to become executive chair and focus on M&Avia Game Developer // Somewhere, in a deep dark corner of the world, the monkey's paw has curled. Embracer CEO Lars Wingefors, who demonstrated his leadership nous by spending years embarking on a colossal merger and acquisition spree only to immediately start downsizing, has announced he'll be stepping down as CEO. The catch? Wingefors is currently proposed to be appointed executive chair of the board of Embracer. In his new role, he'll apparently focus on strategic initiatives, capital allocation, and mergers and acquisitions. And people wonder why satire is dead. Related:Hong Kong Outlaws a Video Game, Saying It Promotes 'Armed Revolution'via The New York Times (paywalled) // National security police in Hong Kong have banned a Taiwanese video game called Reversed Front: Bonfire for supposedly "advocating armed revolution." Authorities in the region warned that anybody who downloads or recommends the online strategy title will face serious legal charges. The game has been pulled from Apple's marketplace in Hong Kong but is still available for download elsewhere. It was never available in mainland China. Developer ESC Taiwan, part of an group of volunteers who are vocal detractors of China's Communist Party, thanked Hong Kong authorities for the free publicity in a social media post and said the ban shows how political censorship remains prominent in the territory. RuneScape developer accused of ‘catering to American conservatism’ by rolling back Pride Month eventsvia PinkNews // Runescape developers inside Jagex have reportedly been left reeling after the studio decided to pivot away from Pride Month content to focus more on "what players wanted." Jagex CEO broke the news to staff with a post on an internal message board, prompting a rush of complaints—with many workers explaining the content was either already complete or easy to implement. Though Jagex is based in the UK, it's parent company CVC Capital Partners operates multiple companies in the United States. It's a situation that left one employee who spoke to PinkNews questioning whether the studio has caved to "American conservatism." SAG-AFTRA suspends strike and instructs union members to return to workvia Game Developer // It has taken almost a year, but performer union SAG-AFTRA has finally suspended strike action and instructed members to return to work. The decision comes after protracted negotiations with major studios who employ performers under the Interactive Media Agreement. SAG-AFTRA had been striking to secure better working conditions and AI protections for its members, and feels it has now secured a deal that will install vital "AI guardrails."A Switch 2 exclusive Splatoon spinoff was just shadow-announced on Nintendo Todayvia Game Developer // Nintendo did something peculiar this week when it unveiled a Splatoon spinoff out of the blue. That in itself might not sound too strange, but for a short window the announcement was only accessible via the company's new Nintendo Today mobile app. It's a situation that left people without access to the app questioning whether the news was even real. Nintendo Today prevented users from capturing screenshots or footage, only adding to the sense of confusion. It led to this reporter branding the move a "shadow announcement," which in turn left some of our readers perplexed. Can you ever announce and announcement? What does that term even mean? Food for thought. A wonderful new Big Walk trailer melted this reporter's heartvia House House (YouTube) //  The mad lads behind Untitled Goose Game are back with a new jaunt called Big Walk. This one has been on my radar for a while, but the studio finally debuted a gameplay overview during Summer Game Fest and it looks extraordinary in its purity. It's about walking and talking—and therein lies the charm. Players are forced to cooperate to navigate a lush open world, solve puzzles, and embark upon hijinks. Proximity-based communication is the core mechanic in Big Walk—whether that takes the form of voice chat, written text, hand signals, blazing flares, or pictograms—and it looks like it'll lead to all sorts of weird and wonderful antics. It's a pitch that cuts through because it's so unashamedly different, and there's a lot to love about that. I'm looking forward to this one.

Meta is looking to up its weakening AI game with a key talent grab. Following days of speculation, the social media giant has confirmed that Scale AI’s founder and CEO, Alexandr Wang, is joining Meta to work on its AI efforts. Meta will invest $14.3 billion in Scale AI as part of the deal, and will have a 49% stake in the AI startup, which specializes in data labeling and model evaluation services. Other key Scale employees will also move over to Meta, while CSO Jason Droege will step in as Scale’s interim CEO. This move comes as the Mark Zuckerberg-led company goes all-in on building a new research lab focused on “superintelligence,” the next step beyond artificial general intelligence (AGI). The arrangement also reflects a growing trend in big tech, where industry giants are buying companies without really buying them — what’s increasingly being referred to as “acqui-hiring.” It involves recruiting key personnel from a company, licensing its technology, and selling its products, but leaving it as a private entity. “This is fundamentally a massive ‘acqui-hire’ play disguised as a strategic investment,” said Wyatt Mayham, lead AI consultant at Northwest AI Consulting. “While Meta gets Scale’s data infrastructure, the real prize is Wang joining Meta to lead their superintelligence lab. At the $14.3 billion price tag, this might be the most expensive individual talent acquisition in tech history.” Closing gaps with competitors Meta has struggled to keep up with OpenAI, Anthropic, and other key competitors in the AI race, recently even delaying the launch of its new flagship model, Behemoth, purportedly due to internal concerns about its performance. It has also seen the departure of several of its top researchers.  “It’s not really a secret at this point that Meta’s Llama 4 models have had significant performance issues,” Mayham said. “Zuck is essentially betting that Wang’s track record building AI infrastructure can solve Meta’s alignment and model quality problems faster than internal development.” And, he added, Scale’s enterprise-grade human feedback loops are exactly what Meta’s Llama models need to compete with ChatGPT and Claude on reliability and task-following. Data quality, a key focus for Wang, is a big factor in solving those performance problems. He wrote in a note to Scale employees on Thursday, later posted on X (formerly Twitter), that when he founded Scale AI in 2016 amidst some of the early AI breakthroughs, “it was clear even then that data was the lifeblood of AI systems, and that was the inspiration behind starting Scale.” But despite Meta’s huge investment, Scale AI is underscoring its commitment to sovereignty: “Scale remains an independent leader in AI, committed to providing industry-leading AI solutions and safeguarding customer data,” the company wrote in a blog post. “Scale will continue to partner with leading AI labs, multinational enterprises, and governments to deliver expert data and technology solutions through every phase of AI’s evolution.” Allowing big tech to side-step notification But while it’s only just been inked, the high-profile deal is already raising some eyebrows. According to experts, arrangements like these allow tech companies to acquire top talent and key technologies in a side-stepping manner, thus avoiding regulatory notification requirements. The US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) requires mergers and acquisitions totaling more than $126 million be reported in advance. Licensing deals or the mass hiring-away of a company’s employees don’t have this requirement. This allows companies to move more quickly, as they don’t have to undergo the lengthy federal review process. Microsoft’s deal with Inflection AI is probably one of the highest-profile examples of the “acqui-hiring” trend. In March 2024, the tech giant paid the startup $650 million in licensing fees and hired much of its team, including co-founders Mustafa Suleyman (now CEO of Microsoft AI) and Karén Simonyan (chief scientist of Microsoft AI). Similarly, last year Amazon hired more than 50% of Adept AI’s key personnel, including its CEO, to focus on AGI. Google also inked a licensing agreement with Character AI and hired a majority of its founders and researchers. However, regulators have caught on, with the FTC launching inquiries into both the Microsoft-Inflection and Amazon-Adept deals, and the US Justice Department (DOJ) analyzing Google-Character AI. Reflecting ‘desperation’ in the AI industry Meta’s decision to go forward with this arrangement anyway, despite that dicey backdrop, seems to indicate how anxious the company is to keep up in the AI race. “The most interesting piece of this all is the timing,” said Mayham. “It reflects broader industry desperation. Tech giants are increasingly buying parts of promising AI startups to secure key talent without acquiring full companies, following similar patterns with Microsoft-Inflection and Google-Character AI.” However, the regulatory risks are “real but nuanced,” he noted. Meta’s acquisition could face scrutiny from antitrust regulators, particularly as the company is involved in an ongoing FTC lawsuit over its Instagram and WhatsApp acquisitions. While the 49% ownership position appears designed to avoid triggering automatic thresholds, US regulatory bodies like the FTC and DOJ can review minority stake acquisitions under the Clayton Antitrust Act if they seem to threaten competition. Perhaps more importantly, Meta is not considered a leader in AGI development and is trailing OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google, meaning regulators may not consider the deal all that concerning (yet). All told, the arrangement certainly signals Meta’s recognition that the AI race has shifted from a compute and model size competition to a data quality and alignment battle, Mayham noted. “I think the [gist] of this is that Zuck’s biggest bet is that talent and data infrastructure matter more than raw compute power in the AI race,” he said. “The regulatory risk is manageable given Meta’s trailing position, but the acqui-hire premium shows how expensive top AI talent has become.”

Who Could Buy Unity? / News / June 7, 2025 / Business, Unity Earlier this week 80.lv ran the incredibly misleading (some could say click-baity) article Analyst Suggests Apple Might be Considering Buying Unity After Legal Defeat to Epic Games. Might is doing some heavy lifting there as there is no actual evidence that Apple or any other company are currently looking to purchase Unity Technologies. That said, it is an interesting topic as a pure thought exercise. So today we are going to discuss the companies that could be potential suitors for Unity. Unity The obvious place to start is with Unity Technologies, which is to say they can simply stay an independent organization. While they are not profitable, their financial situation has been trending in a positive direction of late and they have sufficient cash and resources to stay independent for the foreseeable future. Should things get bad at Unity, it is possible one of their largest investors (Silver Lake Group, Vanguard Group, Sequoia Capital, Black Rock, etc) could take the company private again. Put simply, Unity does not need to be purchased and things can be kept as they are. Apple The original premise of this article is that Apple should buy Unity. Reasons why Apple should buy Unity: Apple and Unity have a long history, with Unity having been originally a Mac exclusive application and it has always supported Apple platforms Unity is by far the most used application for creating games on the Apple App Store Unity Grow products (ads, user acquisitions, analytics, etc) could have good synergy with Apples products Apple could prevent a potential future rival, especially around 3rd party app stores Reasons why Apple won’t buy Unity: Apple has never made a purchase anywhere near the size of Unity. Their largest acquisition to date (Beats) would be 1/4 to 1/5 the size of acquiring Unity Apple has never really gotten involved in gaming beyond small initiatives in the past Apple mostly grows in-house over acquisition and more acquisitions are subsumed into other Apple products, Unity is not a good fit here Amazon Amazon have heaps of cash and aren’t afraid to use it such as acquiring MGM, Whole Foods, Twitch and many more companies over the years. They also have several gaming-oriented interests and have made an attempt (that failed badly) to become a major game developer in the past. Reasons why Amazon should buy Unity: Amazon tried to enter gaming in a big way once already with the licensing of CryEngine to create Lumberyard (now O3DE) and buying up or forming several game studios. Unity would provide a much larger and more established foothold should they wish to buy their way in Amazon web services could be a good compliment to Unity’s server side offerings, while Unity’s Grow division could be a good fit for Amazon platforms Integration with their gaming platforms (Twitch, Luna, etc) Reasons why Amazon won’t buy Unity: Their last attempt into game development was a massive failure and much of it was rumored to be a culture problem Tencent Tencent have invested HEAVILY into the world of gaming (Ubisoft, Epic Games, Riot Games, Supercell, Snap, Funcom, Activision Blizzard, From Software, etc) and aren’t afraid of throwing money around, so Unity could be a good fit in that portfolio. That said recent political climate changes would render this acquisition very unlikely. Reasons why Tencent should buy Unity: Tencent have a presence across the entire gaming industry and already have a minority stake in Epic Games (Unreal Engine). This would more or less give them a controlling influence over two of the biggest players in the space Access to or ownership of Unity’s recently created China Joint Venture Integration with Tencents other holdings like WeChat or Snap might provide some synergies Reasons why Tencent won’t buy Unity: Not a snowballs chance in hell that regulators allow this acquisition to happen, from antitrust issues of owning stakes in both Unity and Unreal Engine, to just more broad geopolitical issues in the modern world Microsoft Microsoft are heavily invested in two areas that overlap with Unity, gaming and software development tools. On paper they might appear to be the perfect suitor for Unity and they have the cash hoard to make such a purchase with ease. Reasons why Microsoft should buy Unity: Unlike Apple, Microsoft has long been a proponent of growth via acquisition with some of their pillar products coming in the form of acquisitions. They also do not shy away from huge dollar purchases such as Activision Blizzard (69B), LinkedIn (26B), Nuance (20B), Skype (8.5B), ZeniMax (7.5B), GitHub (7.5B), Nokia (7B), Mojang[Minecraft] (2.5B) Microsoft have a long history of leveraging their development tools to grow their platforms Microsoft gaming studios/relationships/holdings such as XBox, Game Pass/PC Gaming, DirectX, Havok, etc. could benefit from a tighter relationship with Unity Like Amazon, Microsoft server-side services (Azure) could be used to power Unity Grow services Reasons why Microsoft won’t buy Unity: Microsoft only just finished their acquisition of Activision and it was an arduous and nearly doomed process. Buying another company in the gaming space might be a step too far for regulators While Microsoft doesn’t mind spending huge money on acquisitions, they also don’t mind killing those companies off after (Nokia? Skype?), especially if there is a market downturn like we are experiencing now AppLovin If there is a company that is most likely to buy Unity, and that would synergize best with Unity products, it’s AppLovin. In broad strokes, AppLovin, IronSource and Unity (Grow) are all in the same business. On top of that many of AppLovin’s biggest customers and products are directly tied to the Unity ecosystem. In fact, Unity and AppLovin are such a good fit that AppLovin attempted to buy Unity for nearly $20B back in 2022, when Unity instead pursued it’s doomed merger with IronSource. So, why would it make sense for AppLovin to buy Unity now? Well, these two 5 year stock performance charts more or less tell the entire story: It becomes crystal clear from that fateful date in August of 2022 which company has performed better and right now AppLovin is absolutely flush with cash. If there is a company that makes sense to acquire Unity, it’s AppLovin. Of course now that Unity owns IronSource, there are certainly questions of regulatory approval if this would even be allowed. Once again, this entire exercise is simply a thought exercise, just for fun. There is no public available news that ANYONE are looking to acquire Unity, nor that Unity is looking to be acquired. You can learn more about my thoughts on the matter in the video below.