Player Driven

Microsoft is offering buyouts to about 60,000 people. Is that an AI story or a cost story? Bloomberg reported the offer on Monday, and Greg's line is that 60,000 is the number eligible, not the number who will take it: offered, not laid off.

The panel does not agree. Simon Pulman says AI and cost cutting are the same thing at present. Colan Neese thinks coders are the exposed role in a world of AI agents. Stephen Lenz says people and verification still matter. Then the conversation turns to Call of Duty, and to every panelist's scariest Halloween games.

Greg Posner is joined by Simon Pulman of Pryor Cashman, Justin Ruiss of BWG Global, Colan Neese and Stephen Lenz.

IN THIS EPISODE
- Microsoft's buyout: who is eligible, what "offered, not laid off" means, and Justin's line that you can never cost cut your way to growth
- Simon on why AI and cost cutting look like the same thing right now
- Are coders the exposed role? Colan and Stephen on AI agents, and who checks the machine-written code
- Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4, and whether it won players back by being good (Colan's read)
- The Call of Duty movie, and whether the franchise needs teenagers who are on Roblox and older, cheaper games
- Our scariest Halloween games: Simon's Gabriel Knight, Resident Evil 7, Visage and Until Dawn; Stephen's Left 4 Dead and F.E.A.R.; Justin's Silent Hill 2 and P.T.; Colan's The Room, Resident Evil 4 and Kingdom Hearts; and Greg's Silent Hill, a Titanic adventure game and SkiFree, which he insists is a yeti
- Where horror game attention goes: the top of the market and the long tail, and Colan's case that Dead by Daylight is the Fortnite of horror
- What's keeping us entertained, including Phantom Blade Zero

The figures and claims are the panelists' own opinions and recollections and have not been independently verified.

Never Entertained airs every Friday at 10:00 a.m. Eastern.

Watch the full episode: https://youtu.be/96Q7rJu9MVQ
Just want the horror? Watch the Halloween games cut: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I_NZHaSdobA
Read the full write-up: https://playerdriven.io/live/never-entertained-microsoft-buyouts-ai-or-cost-story?utm_source=podcast&utm_medium=shownotes&utm_campaign=never-entertained-008
The Operator's Briefing, every Tuesday: https://playerdriven.io/newsletter?utm_source=podcast&utm_medium=shownotes&utm_campaign=never-entertained-008
Join the Discord: https://discord.gg/zdwAqvgvfy

Cheating in multiplayer games is as old as the INI file. What has changed is how it is done, and what a studio can see.

In this episode, Greg talks with Guy Kroupp, founder of GetGud, about how cheating evolved from editing a text file to AI aimbots that read the screen and never touch the game. Guy argues that client-side anti-cheat can only look for tampering, so those tools cannot see an AI aimbot, and that the answer is to watch what players actually do. He compares server-side detection to a prosecutor with a recording rather than a cop stopping a crime.

The conversation also covers the risk of kernel-level anti-cheat, why even 1% of cheaters can ruin a match (Guy's figure), how detection handles aim snaps, wall hacks and "closet cheaters," a false positive that exposed a studio's data bug, and what a small team can do first. Guy is clear that client-side and server-side defenses work together. Numbers in this episode are Guy's own and have not been independently verified.

What you will hear:
- Why cheating in multiplayer differs from cheating in a single-player game
- Why a client-side tool cannot see an AI aimbot
- The cop and prosecutor way of thinking about anti-cheat
- The security risk of kernel-level anti-cheat
- Why a flagged NPC pointed to a bug in the studio's data
- Where a small studio can start

Chapters:
0:00 Cold open and intro
0:35 What Guy plays and where he started
2:10 How cheating evolved, from INI files to multiplayer
6:20 Why cheating matters: churn, the cheat economy and kernel mode
11:01 Which games have cheaters
12:19 Client-side versus server-side anti-cheat
13:37 AI aimbots and why client-side cannot see them
15:05 Server-side detection: the prosecutor view
18:18 What if a player is just really good?
21:46 Closet cheaters and the limits of detection
23:45 Why this was not built sooner
25:37 What a studio needs to get started
26:15 The "primal seven" player actions
29:23 Griefing and game observability
30:25 Feedback, false positives and the NPC aimbot
32:14 What small studios can do first
37:43 A layered defense
38:26 Wrap

Guest: Guy Kroupp, founder, GetGud (getgud.io)

Full episode page and recap: https://playerdriven.io/podcast/is-the-anti-cheat-arms-race-over-guy-kroupp-getgud
Join the Player Driven Discord: https://discord.gg/GC5PkbKFH

Disclosure: Guy is the founder of a company that sells anti-cheat tools. No sponsorship or payment was involved in this episode.

Everyone is calling themselves a publisher. Midwest Games founder Ben Kvalo explains what the word actually covers, why marketing is only part of it, and why nuance still beats the prompt.
Ben also talks through two months on the road, why the US games industry needs more hubs, and how MDEV is being built to last.
Chapters below.

0:00 Welcome back, Ben Kvalo
0:33 Two months of travel and what Midwest Games is building
3:15 New York Games Week and what the New York ecosystem lacks
6:16 If games stay in four cities, the US falls behind
8:53 Lower cost is not lower quality
9:28 What is a publisher, really?
9:56 40 disciplines: publisher or marketing agency?
11:12 Full-service publisher vs fractional publishing
12:06 You no longer need a big-box publisher to get help
12:48 Can AI make you an expert? The fractional CMO trap
14:26 Why people overgeneralize how easy things are
15:46 Nuance beats the prompt: AI, engineers and vibe coding
17:01 Expertise, doing it recently and pulling all five levers
18:09 One-hit wonders and why IP takes decades
19:53 What Ben would do differently four years in
23:59 Earning your lessons the hard way
25:55 The week before the money runs out
26:57 Find the people who stick with you
30:58 Support systems and getting feedback early
33:11 Why MDEV feels like true community
36:35 Keeping a volunteer nonprofit sustainable
38:08 MDEV keynotes: Jesse Schell and a Friday kickoff
41:30 You do not have to live in Wisconsin to join
43:06 Where to find MDEV, Ben and the Games Alliance
44:30 Madison cheese curds and the Capitol Square

Read the write-up: [RECAP URL]?utm_source=youtube&utm_medium=video&utm_campaign=2026-10-w3&utm_content=longform
MDEV: https://www.mdevconf.com
Wisconsin Games Alliance: https://wisconsingamesalliance.com

Ben Kvalo is the founder of Midwest Games, president of the Wisconsin Games Alliance and chair of MDEV, with earlier roles at 2K and Netflix.

A new conversation every Tuesday. The Operator's Briefing and the community are at https://playerdriven.io and the Discord is at https://discord.gg/zdwAqvgvfy

#GamePublishing #GameDev #MDEV

Xbox says it wants to be the number one entertainment company in the world. Not the biggest game company: the biggest entertainment company, across film, TV, products and live experiences. The same week, it launched a division to do it.

The panel's question is whether it has the IP to get there, after two years of cutting almost every bet that wasn't already a hit. Simon Pulman's answer was the line of the episode: "Nobody knows anything." Nobody predicted K-Pop Demon Hunters, or Sony would never have handed Netflix the rights. You don't find the next big franchise by only funding the last one.

Greg Posner is joined by Simon Pulman of Pryor Cashman, Justin Ruiss of BWG Global and Stephen Lenz.

IN THIS EPISODE
- Galactic Racer and Gears of War: E-Day both scored 87. Why the Steam numbers only tell half the story
- "You know what really works? Call of Duty": Activision as Xbox's shooter factory
- Who is the biggest entertainment company in the world right now? Greg says Disney. Justin says YouTube: "All of that IP lives rent free on YouTube."
- Xbox's dormant catalogue: Rare, Banjo, Viva Piñata, Perfect Dark
- Is Xbox just picking a fight with Sony it already lost once? And who is producing the Zelda movie?
- Who gets to stream GTA 6, the report and Xbox's correction, and the new cloud streaming caps
- A round of our favorite licensed games, from X-Men Legends to GoldenEye, and why licensed games are a graveyard of dead IP
- AI can now rebuild almost any game. Simon on why selling an AI copy gets you shut down, why the real fight is over the tools, and the indie developers being cloned in real time
- What's keeping us entertained, including Angel Down, this year's Pulitzer Prize winner for fiction

Two corrections after recording: Matthew Ball said Xbox's GTA 6 streaming rights are not exclusive; he did not rule the game out of the cloud. And the last mainline Gears of War was Gears 5 in 2019, not twenty years ago.

Never Entertained is live every Friday at 10:00 a.m. Eastern.

Watch the full episode: https://youtu.be/QOQOQ1XBc_I
Read the full write-up: https://playerdriven.io/live/never-entertained-whose-ip-is-it-anyway?utm_source=podcast&utm_medium=shownotes&utm_campaign=never-entertained-005
The Operator's Briefing, every Tuesday: https://playerdriven.io/newsletter?utm_source=podcast&utm_medium=shownotes&utm_campaign=never-entertained-005
Join the Discord: https://discord.gg/zdwAqvgvfy

There is a half of every online game that almost nobody thinks about. Matchmaking, inventory, entitlements, and the account services that decide whether you actually get in on launch night. By Mitchell Patterson's own estimate it is about five percent of a game's budget, and close to all of whether a player ever reaches the thing the other ninety-five percent paid for.

Mitchell is the founder and CEO of Wolfjaw Studios, which builds that layer for other people's games. He came to games from finance, he never wanted to make a game of his own, and he has an unusual business problem: his games do not fail, so almost nobody knows his studio exists.

In this episode:
• Why the reward for a flawless launch is a smaller contract
• Why the infrastructure vendors you can name are usually the ones attached to a public outage
• The first system a small multiplayer team should build, and why everything else hangs off it
• Why he refuses to advertise where any of his staff used to work
• What he learned the two weeks he paid payroll out of his personal bank account
• What he would tell a three person team to do on Monday morning

Chapters
00:00 The half of every online game nobody thinks about
00:03 Why a finance guy started the studio nobody wanted to build
00:08 Launch day, and why nobody can predict the curve
00:12 Hybrid on-prem and cloud, and why redundancy is the only security
00:13 Punished for being good: the five engineer contract
00:16 Selling work whose best outcome is that nobody notices
00:22 Identity is step one, and everything hangs off it
00:23 The TwitchCon origin story
00:25 The hill he dies on: past credits are not your credits
00:28 What cash flow actually teaches a founder
00:33 What a leader can honestly promise right now
00:35 The Among Us call
00:41 Where the back end goes after games
00:45 What a three person team should do Monday morning
00:47 Wolfjam, and where to find Wolfjaw

About the guest
Mitchell Patterson is the founder and CEO of Wolfjaw Studios, a backend and co-development studio in upstate New York. Wolfjaw builds matchmaking, inventory, identity, and live service infrastructure for other studios, with client relationships running seven years.

Player Driven is the learning network for the people who design, run, and rebuild live games. New conversation every Tuesday.

Get The Operator's Briefing each week: https://playerdriven.io/
Join the operators in Discord: https://discord.gg/GC5PkbKFH

A game takes four to five years to build. A vesting schedule takes four to
five years to finish. So the people who greenlit it have been paid and moved
on before anyone finds out whether it worked.

Colan Neese said that about forty minutes into this episode and it reframed
the whole hour. Microsoft moved Halo to Activision, cut 268 more roles and
set five studios loose. Bungie started giving back the Destiny content it
deleted six years ago. A game from 1996 made sixty million dollars at the box
office. Underneath all three is the same question nobody in the industry
likes asking out loud: when the person who decides is never in the room for
the outcome, who is actually on the hook?

Greg Posner is joined by Colan Neese of ScreenEngine ASI, Simon Pulman of
Pryor Cashman and Justin Ruiss of BWG Global.

IN THIS EPISODE
- Why fourteen years and four declining Halo games produced no consequence
- The opportunity cost problem: why Activision will always make another Call
  of Duty map instead of reviving Spyro
- Whether Halo's DNA was ever the campaign, and why the remake shipped
  without multiplayer
- Simon on the five divested studios: "imagine Adidas buys a t-shirt company"
- What a private equity buyer would actually own if they bought one
- Why subscription funding divorces a studio from cause and effect
- The engineering reason Bungie vaulted Destiny content in the first place
- The rule nobody states about video game adaptations, and why Resident Evil
  worked where a Dead Space film would not

A correction we made after recording: Ninja Theory was not sold. Microsoft
could not find a buyer, two deals fell through, and a proposed closure was
confirmed the same day we recorded.

Never Entertained is live every Friday at 10:00 a.m. Eastern.

Read the full write-up: https://playerdriven.io/live/never-entertained-nobody-is-on-the-hook
The Operator's Briefing, every Tuesday: https://playerdriven.io/newsletter
Join the Discord: https://discord.gg/zdwAqvgvfy
Colan Neese writes Patch Notes: https://patchnotesgaming.substack.com/

Microsoft is reportedly ending day-one first-party releases on Game Pass and capping cloud gaming hours. Most people read that as a subscription story. On this episode it turns into a much bigger one.

Greg Posner is joined by Simon Pulman, Justin Ruiss and Colan Neese for an hour that opens on Control Resonant shipping eight weeks before GTA 6 and closes on Blizzard reopening a twenty year old back catalogue. Four separate stories, one argument underneath all of them: almost every way this industry gets a player in front of a game is a cheque somebody else can stop writing.

In this episode:

Control Resonant landed at 84 on OpenCritic with a 6 and a 10 in the same week, and why the spread is more interesting than the average

Why review scores arrive too late in the funnel to move units, and what a strong score actually buys you

The release-date rule almost nobody follows: do not ship the same day as EA FC

What success even looks like for Remedy, and why that question cannot be answered without knowing the budget

Everyone's top three game trailers of all time, including one a panellist can still quote thirteen years later from a game he did not like

The leaked Game Pass changes, and why two million players on a free tier is not two million players

The case for advertising inside games, argued by the people who would get blamed for it

Blizzard, BlizzCon, and the millennial nostalgia wave landing inside a single month

Never Entertained is live every Friday at 10am ET.

Full written recap: https://playerdriven.io/live/never-entertained-why-players-come-back
The Operator's Briefing, every Tuesday: https://playerdriven.io/newsletter
Join the Discord: https://discord.gg/zdwAqvgvfy

The internet spent the week arguing about which game wins the holiday. We think that is the wrong question, and the right one is which brand still has your attention after the controller goes down.

This is the first episode of Never Entertained, a new show we do live every Friday at 10am ET. Four of us argue about the week in games, media and IP: Greg Posner on live games, Simon Pulman on IP and media, Justin Ruiss on advertising and the business, and Colan Neese on the news and the numbers.

Three arguments in this one. Nintendo is taking the shelf space Sony and Xbox are giving up, and doing it on purpose. A Wolverine game built for everybody landed for nobody, and the panel splits on whether that is a design problem or a culture one. And Netflix is reaching for cinemas while the person already paying for it every month cannot name a single thing on the service.

CHAPTERS
00:00 Intro
01:30 The internet is asking the wrong question
01:56 Meet the panel
03:04 Nintendo's foil box and the shelf everyone else left
06:21 Going outward versus going inward
07:38 What the new Zelda actually sells
10:32 Nintendo's real problem is the Switch 2 transition
12:57 Nostalgia as a purchase driver: the Costco napkin
14:27 "I don't know who Sony is aiming at"
18:29 The barbell: aggregators, IP, and the middle you die in
24:32 Sony's risk is becoming a machine, not a brand
25:01 Wolverine lands, and the discourse is not about the score
28:40 A culture where games must be for everybody
31:02 Discovery, mastery, and what a guidance line costs
34:24 Six-year dev cycles aimed at a moving culture
36:48 Everyone gets one strike
39:31 What Marvel actually cares about
42:38 "94% of the market hasn't played your game"
45:20 Netflix wants cinemas, and is reporting box office
47:02 Why Netflix's hand was forced
52:04 "A midlife crisis company"
55:14 You can license the show, you cannot own the creator
57:08 Last words
59:03 What we are working on, and where to find it

WATCH IT INSTEAD
https://youtu.be/bTgaleZwS5I

THE WRITTEN VERSION
The arguments laid out properly, with the quotes and the numbers attributed:
https://playerdriven.io/live/never-entertained-gta-6-vs-zelda-wrong-fight

IF YOU RUN A COMMUNITY
Community Driven is a three part series that gives you a method rather than a think piece. You start with the game rather than the channel, work out where your players already gather, and build a hunt map as you read. It hands you into a free Academy pack at the end.
Part one: https://playerdriven.io/blog/start-with-the-game-not-the-channel
The pack: https://academy.playerdriven.io/packs/find-where-your-players-gather

THE REST OF THE WEEK
Tuesdays: this podcast
Wednesdays: Design Desk with Lewis, on systems, player psychology and game design
Thursdays: live with Colan
Fridays: Never Entertained, live at 10am ET

MORE FROM PLAYER DRIVEN
The Operator's Briefing, every Tuesday: https://playerdriven.io
Join the Discord: https://discord.gg/GC5PkbKFH

Player Driven is the learning network for the people who design, run and rebuild live games.

GTA 6 is already the biggest launch Colan Neese's team has tracked since they started measuring in 2019, and it is on pace to pass Call of Duty: Modern Warfare's peak roughly two months before it ships. Here is the part nobody is pricing in. The marketing has not started. Everything the industry has reacted to so far was aimed at the industry. The campaign built for people who have never watched a games showcase in their lives begins at NFL kickoff.

Greg Posner and Colan Neese, SVP of gaming at Screen Engine/ASI, spend the hour on what that does to everyone else. Whether the number in the launch press release is one billion or two. Why every other fall release is losing oxygen rather than losing on quality, including a Call of Duty that Greg played and liked. And the thing Rockstar is quietly doing to protect the players it already has, which is the only defense on the table that does not require a marketing budget to run.

They also get into why Sony's Tokyo Game Show State of Play reads as a completely different show depending on which continent you are watching from, why consoles took hold in the West for reasons that turn out to be mostly about living room square footage, and how Guitar Hero used to turn songs into hits before games traded the needle drop for interchangeable orchestral filler.

Then they argue about Weezer.

(00:00) Show open
(00:45) Sony's State of Play, and who it was actually for
(09:47) Why your game does not travel: China, mobile, and the space a console needs
(17:15) The billion dollar question is already stale
(21:02) The bite GTA 6 takes out of the box office
(25:36) The marketing has not started yet
(27:58) Call of Duty is not losing on quality
(32:29) What Rockstar is doing to protect the players it already has
(39:20) Stage Tour, and the return of the rhythm game
(40:17) The ideal set list, and an argument about Weezer
(48:09) How games forgot to use a song
(51:20) Wrap

Full write-up and notes from this episode:
https://playerdriven.io/live/gta-6-has-not-started-marketing-yet

The Operator's Briefing, every Tuesday. One email: the best thing we published, the next thing we are doing, and one open argument.
https://playerdriven.io

Bring your own read to the room. Colan takes questions in the Discord, and genuinely wants the argument.
https://discord.gg/GC5PkbKFH

Colan Neese writes Patch Notes:
https://patchnotesgaming.substack.com

Make-A-Wish sorts every wish into four kinds: to go, to meet, to be, or to have. Travel is still the biggest category overall, but when a child anywhere in the world asks to have something, the number one request is gaming.

April Stallings runs charitable gaming fundraising for Make-A-Wish International, the arm of the organization covering 43 countries with more than 650,000 wishes granted. She joins Greg and Lewis to explain why kids in treatment wish for games (her word is "lifeline"), what a gaming wish actually looks like, and why even Make-A-Wish hears no from game studios more than yes.

In this conversation:

• Why gaming tops the "to have" category worldwide, and why the Nintendo Switch is the most-wished-for console
• The wish stories: a day at Mojang's Stockholm HQ, a Brawl Stars wish built around vision loss, and Arrowhead's dev team spending a day with a Helldivers superfan
• The research: measured wish outcomes in the high-90th percentile, now presented at pediatric oncology conferences
• How studios of any size can help: the giving program starts at $5,000, and codes, studio days, dev time, and introductions count too
• How New Blood Interactive became Make-A-Wish International's biggest gaming donor at $100,000
• The John Cena playbook: what 650+ wishes of preparation looks like up close
• Roll for Wishes, the TTRPG fundraising month running all of October
• Learn more or start the conversation: https://worldwish.org (the wish impact research is under Our Impact)

Find April Stallings on LinkedIn.

Player Driven is the learning network for the people who design, run, and rebuild live games.

• Get The Operator's Briefing, our weekly newsletter: https://playerdriven.io/
• Join the community on Discord: https://discord.gg/GC5PkbKFH