
China's Gacha Paradox
Why A Decade Of Extraction Made Chinese Players The Most Premium-Friendly Audience On Steam
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25 indexed pieces

Why A Decade Of Extraction Made Chinese Players The Most Premium-Friendly Audience On Steam

Sega cancelled an $882 million future in the same year it turned nine birthdays into a business unit. That is not a coincidence. That is the plan.

Slay the Spire 2, Megabonk, and 33 Immortals aren’t survivors of a graveyard that doesn’t exist yet. They’re proof the mechanism is already running. A structural read on what mid-2026 data already con

Iron Nest shipped with zero AI, Dragon Snacks put its AI in the build pipeline, and Valve’s own policy already explains why both of them won

The largest Next Fest ever ran 8,682 games. A quarter of the field disclosed AI use; one cracked the top ten. The winners entered with communities already built. The October clock is running.

The first 60 seconds in a game are the most critical experience for a player. Capturing their attention within this time is the difference between a good and bad game

You Weren't Watching Microdrama. The Audience Deciding Your Steam Launch Was.

The Industry Spent Summer Fest Wishlisting Dads. An Australian Studio with 18mn YouTube subscriber is Building for the Ten-Year-Olds Whose Taste Is Hardening Right Now.


The China Multiplier, and the studios already winning while Western publishers monitor the market

Live service spent four years turning its own label into a warning. Cozy is on the same arc, four years behind.

421 million views on a pilot. $1.7 million on a Kickstarter (fourth biggest in comics history). Netflix and Amazon distribution in 240 countries. Disney’s most acclaimed showrunner of the last decade

Push-marketing just cost Sony a billion dollars at Bungie. Three other engines are running the games that actually launched in 2026. Here's how to tell which one your studio is on.

AI didn't create your studio's biggest problem. It's about to reveal it.

Dead as Disco’s zero-budget playbook, the Next Fest studios that took it further, and the three questions every indie founder needs to answer before launch day.

Disney isn’t buying Epic for Fortnite. It’s buying the operating system it’s already built on.

What to Automate Without Guilt, What to Augment Carefully, and What to Protect Regardless of the Cost Savings.

What communities actually punish when AI assets ship without disclosure

$92M before the discounts started, one third of sales from China, and four AI controversies that couldn’t stop $500M. Here's what the numbers actually prove.

The pro-AI crowd coined it as an insult. The games industry is about to find out why that backfired.

How a Small French Studio Built 536,000 Wishlists Before the Game Was Finished

3,500 demos, a gameable metric, and why community health is the only number that can't be manufactured

Ramadan, gaming, and why the industry keeps is slowly catching up to the biggest synchronized audience on earth

Over-hubification, the living room, and why the hub has to be unbuilt before it can be rebuilt

Why I work in emerging markets, and why I’m never going to stop