Exclusive no more

Happy Weekend! In our last issue, we spotlighted our take on the rumored sale of D&D IP to Tencent. According to Wizard’s statement to VGC, these conversations are not happening.

—Tim Rhyne, Derek Neville

MAIN QUEST: Creators gonna create, users going to stay

Gone may be the days of big deals for live-streaming content creators. Twitch was expected to lose massive communities as rival platforms began announcing large deals with their top streamers over the past couple of years. Twitch likely noticed these deals weren’t impacting them heavily in the long term and began to believe that their product was enough to maintain their dominant market share.

Twitch began to allow multi-streaming on other platforms and recently made changes to uncap their 100k limit to their 70/30 split for top earners. Making it possible for those who left under non-exclusive deals to potentially return. Unfortunately, this means Twitch can afford to cut the spending and staff behind deals of their own.

Pokimane, after a near decade of partnership, has not been re-signed and, among other reasons, is making the move to YouTube. It doesn’t stop with just Twitch, Ludwig also mentioned that YouTube has informed him that when his current contract ends they will not be resigning him either.

Step Back: These platforms have potentially learned user retention models on live-streaming platforms are not heavily tied to maintaining first-party/exclusive creators. This doesn’t mean the end of content creators getting sponsorships and successfully navigating a career that allows freedom to retire their parents, just more opportunities to expand their audiences.

HUD

• Data.ai report shows Genshin Impact passed $5 billion in revenue on Google Play and iOS App Store after 40 months on the market. The open-world RPG is the fastest mobile game to reach this mark beating out Clash of Clans at 51 months.

• The Scottish Government has begun building an economic strategy around the games industry. This comes after games contributed more than £188.5 Million to their economy in 2023 rivaling that of other major tech-based sectors.

• In a survey by Griffin Gaming Partners of 537 game studios, it is reported that 95% of the studios are actively looking to release live service games. 66% believe live service is necessary for a game’s long-term success.

MAJOR W

• 👏 Coffee Stain Studios announced Satisfactory will be leaving early access sometime this year. It has accumulated over 5.5 million copies sold since March 2019.

• 📈 Dragon: Infinite Wealth has crossed 1 million copies sold in its first week. It is the 8th entry in the Yakuza series.

F IN THE CHAT

• ⛔️ Reports that Fntastic employees and “volunteers” were working under awful conditions to release The Day Before, including poor leadership direction, endless crunch, workstation monitoring, fines for delivering poor work, and termination for “lack of will.”

• 👎️ Devolver Digital replaces CEO Douglas Morin with Harry Miller, their previous CEO. This move happened alongside their studio Artificer cutting 28 staff members on January 31st.

CAREER CORNER

• Senior Product Manager — Uken (Remote, CA)

• Senior Mission Designer — Velan Studios (Troy, NY)

• Producer — Stardock (Plymouth, MI)

HIVE MIND

WEEKLY CHECKPOINT

Have you been keeping up with this week’s headlines? Welcome to the weekly checkpoint, where we test your knowledge of the biggest gaming stories from the past week. Do you have what it takes to ace this quiz?

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