Player Driven

GTA 6 is leaking all over the internet, Wolverine is getting dragged before anyone has even played it, and D23 may have quietly shown just how serious Disney is getting about games.

This week on Player Driven Live, Greg Posner and Colan Neese are joined by Justin Ruiss from BWG Global to break down:

• The GTA 6 leaks, the ethics of covering them, and why leaks may become an even bigger problem for game studios
• Why Disney appears to be leaning harder into gaming after years of keeping the industry at arm’s length
• Kingdom Hearts, Dreamlight Valley, and the power of Disney’s IP flywheel
• Why licensing games to the right studios may be one of Disney’s smartest strategies
• The backlash around Marvel’s Wolverine and whether Insomniac really needs to reinvent its formula
• Why not every game needs to be open world
• Whether Netflix should stop trying to build gaming internally and borrow a page from Disney’s playbook
• What we’re playing right now, including Saros, Marathon, Fortnite, Madden and more

Plus, things inevitably get a little off the rails when Disney World vs. Disneyland enters the conversation.

Guest: Justin Ruiss, BWG Global

Hosts: Greg Posner and Colan Neese

Player Driven covers the business, strategy and people behind games, from live ops and community to player experience, monetization and the industry stories shaping what comes next.

If George Clooney walks into a coffee shop, everyone looks up. If Banksy walks in without the mask, nobody does, and the work outside is worth millions.That's 

Nathan Lindberg's description of the gaming creator economy, and he's spent twenty years inside it. GamePro through the print-to-digital collapse. Curse, before it became CurseForge. Seven years at Twitch convincing people that watching someone else play was a real business. Epic, building the NFL zone inside Fortnite. Now VP of Global Brand Partnerships at Overwolf.

His argument is that the creator economy we photograph is the smaller one. Sixty-six games account for more than eighty percent of all the time people spend playing, most of them are a decade old, and what keeps them there isn't the publisher's roadmap. It's thousands of people whose names nobody knows, building mods, add-ons, wikis and private servers on top of games they didn't make.

We get into what the ladder from first dollar to first million actually looks like, why advertising stopped being a toll, and the single sentence that finally moved publishers after years of losing the argument.

In this episode

00:00  Intro
02:19  Nathan Lindberg
02:34  GamePro, Curse, Twitch: what changes and what never does
10:24  Triple-A, indie, and where a creator lands after building something good
11:15  George Clooney walks into a coffee shop. So does Banksy.
13:59  The ladder from first dollar to first million
15:37  Rev share, and the tax problem nobody warns you about
18:21  Do CurseForge, Tebex and the ads actually connect?
20:09  The one number every team is judged on
26:06  The case for advertising, made by the ad guy
31:26  The generational split on ad tolerance
33:14  "What am I getting in return?"
36:49  66 games hold 80% of all playtime
38:07  The wiki maintainers nobody credits, and why tools outlive personalities
40:47  "Like allowing someone to take a highlighter to a Rembrandt"
44:11  PUBG, Hytale, and why indie studios said yes first
45:26  Why "good for the community" never gets past the CFO
47:27  Spotting Arc Raiders before anyone was talking about it
50:24  What GTA 6's creator economy could unlock
54:05  Wrap, and if not now, when?

Numbers Worth Keeping
66 games account for more than 80% of all time spent in games. Overwolf shares 50 to 70% of revenue with creators, sometimes up to 80%, and its in-app ads carry an on-screen line saying 70% goes to the creator. The largest apps on the platform have sold for over €40 million. Every department in the company is measured against one metric: creator payouts.

Guest
Nathan Lindberg is VP of Global Brand Partnerships at Overwolf, the tools and services company behind CurseForge and Tebex.

Mentioned: Hytale, the Krafton partnership bringing mods to PUBG, Gamer Grid, Arc Raiders, and the proverb Nathan took from his time at Curse: if you want to go fast, go alone, if you want to go far, go together.

If the CFO conversation is one you keep losing, we built a free Academy program about exactly that. Three short packs on why safety and community arguments die in front of finance, how to read what a public company actually spends, and how to build the one-page case. academy.playerdriven.io

New episodes every Tuesday. Get The Operator's Briefing at playerdriven.io/level-up, or come argue with us in Discord.

Three of the biggest names in games reported inside a single week and the headline numbers pointed three different directions. Nintendo's profit nearly doubled. Roblox missed on revenue while its player count rose. Take-Two was hours from reporting a loss.

Underneath all of it sat the same question, and it's the one worth asking about your own game: is the pool of players getting bigger, or are you just getting better at extracting from the pool you already have?

Greg Posner and Colan Neese are joined by Simeon McMillan, founder of the media and tech stocks newsletter Accrued Interest, who came up through TV, radio and cable ad sales before he started writing about the companies. Plus the debut of Bull or Bear, where we assign the side and make you argue it whether you believe it or not.

In this episode
00:00 Cold open and intros
03:05 Rockstar announces a trailer, and premieres it on Netflix
09:27 Greg thinks it's a stunt. Colan doesn't.
12:26 The black hole: why games launching before GTA are already losing share
14:51 Bull or Bear, round one: can GTA 6 hit investor expectations?
18:35 13% attention share against a 2% field
22:16 How to actually read an earnings call, and why EPS is the wrong line
27:51 Nintendo: profit doubled, forecast unchanged, and the tariff asterisk
29:05 The number nobody leads with: 130 million players, flat for three years
37:02 Ocarina of Time, the Zelda film, and Nintendo's two-ponds problem
43:22 How Switch became the value machine by standing still
49:13 Bull or Bear, round two: has Switch 2 already proven itself?
52:35 House notes
53:42 Roblox: what trust and safety actually costs a platform
55:11 Trapped in kid land, and the ad ceiling Roblox can't move
01:00:50 Where to find everyone

Numbers worth keeping
GTA 6 at roughly 13% demand share against a field where most fall titles sit near 2%. Nintendo's total player relationships flat near 130 million for about three years. Roblox averaging around a minute and a half per experience.

Demand-share figures are Colan's own MindGame data at Screen Engine/ASI.

Guests
Simeon McMillan writes Accrued Interest at accruedint.com, also on Substack.
Colan Neese is SVP of Gaming at Screen Engine/ASI and writes Patch Notes on LinkedIn and Substack.

Correction: Greg refers to Roblox reporting "yesterday." Roblox reported its Q2 2026 results on July 30, a week before this conversation.

Player Driven Live runs every Thursday. Get the week's argument in The Operator's Briefing at playerdriven.io/level-up, or argue it out with us in Discord.

Most anti-cheat scans your game. Anybrain watches how you move. Andre Pimenta, CEO and cofounder of Anybrain, joins Player Driven to explain why your mouse and keyboard are a fingerprint, how AI just made cheating easy for everyone, why consoles are no longer safe, and why the real product isn't detection, it's rebuilding player trust.

Episode summary (longer, for YouTube / site)

Cheating touches every player, and almost nobody covers it well. In this episode Greg sits down with Andre Pimenta, CEO and cofounder of Anybrain, a company that takes a completely different approach to anti-cheat. Instead of scanning your game's memory, Anybrain reads your inputs, your mouse, keyboard, and controller, because the way you play is effectively a signature that a human can't fake.

Andre traces the unlikely path from his PhD on detecting mental fatigue, through workplace wellness and esports performance coaching, to catching aimbots, bots, smurfing, and boosting. Then the conversation gets to the part every operator needs to hear: AI has collapsed the barrier to cheating. You used to hunt a forum or GitHub for a script. Now an LLM writes it and computer vision lines up the shot, and new input-injection devices bring the same techniques to consoles that everyone assumed were safe.

But the through-line is trust. Most players genuinely can't tell if they were beaten by a cheater or by someone better, and that doubt is what erodes a game. Andre makes the case for transparency (publishing ban numbers, like Crytek did on Hunt: Showdown), explains how humans stay in the loop on every ban, and shares one of the most surprising uses of the tech: flagging a likely adult on a kids' server from behavior alone, without ever revealing an identity or an exact age.

What you'll learn

• Why behavioral anti-cheat reads your inputs, not your game's memory, and why humans aren't random
• How AI (LLMs plus computer vision) lowered the skill floor for cheating, and why volume is rising
• Why "you can't cheat on console" is no longer true
• Why the real damage from cheating is the doubt, not the loss
• How transparency and published ban numbers rebuild community trust
• How Anybrain estimates a player's age band from behavior to help keep kids' servers safe, without revealing identity
• Why cheaters are still bad players (you can automate aim, not game sense)

Chapters / timestamps

• 1:30 The most impossible cheat patterns you'll ever see
• 4:19 From a burnout-detection PhD to anti-cheat
• 9:39 How a cheater looks in the data
• 14:18 Beyond aimbots: bots, parallel economies, smurfing, boosting
• 18:48 The cat-and-mouse game, and why you can't fake a signature
• 20:08 AI erased the barrier to cheating
• 21:18 Consoles aren't safe anymore
• 23:55 Fireball round
• 26:42 Why you can't tell a cheater from a good player
• 31:32 Crytek, Hunt: Showdown, and the case for transparency
• 34:51 Where the humans fit in (appeals and evidence)
• 37:36 Age verification with no ID
• 41:56 Where to find Anybrain, and one thing operators should understand

(Times are on the raw-recording timeline. They'll shift by a few seconds once your edit cuts land, re-stamp against the final export.)

Notable quotes

• "As humans, we are not random. We have our own way of playing, and the random is possible to detect, because the way we play games is not random. We have our own signature."
• "In the past, you needed to look for a forum or a GitHub to get your script. Nowadays, you can use an LLM that will help you create a program."
• "Most people have no idea if they were killed by someone good or a cheater. At the end, it's about trust that we need to build."

About the guest

Andre Pimenta is the CEO and cofounder of Anybrain, which he cofounded almost eleven years ago out of his PhD on using AI to analyze human-computer interaction. Anybrain's behavioral platform monitors millions of players and works with studios including Crytek (Hunt: Showdown) and Embark. Andre is based in Portugal.

Links

• Anybrain: https://www.anybrain.gg/
• Andre Pimenta on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/andrepimentaribeiro/
• Full episode: [full episode link]
• Get The Operator's Briefing (weekly, Tuesdays): https://playerdriven.io/level-up
• Join the Player Driven Discord: https://discord.gg/GC5PkbKFH

Call to action

If you design, run, or rebuild live games, this is the conversation to send your trust and safety and community team. Subscribe, drop your take in the comments, and join the operators talking it through in our Discord.

Mats Steen spent most of his short life indoors in Oslo. To his parents he looked like a young man with no one. When he died, hundreds of people reached out to say they had known him for years, inside World of Warcraft, as a character named Ibelin. His parents had no idea.

That story sits at the center of this episode, and so does the question underneath it: how much of what games actually do is invisible to the people measuring them?

Recorded on a rooftop in New York at Games for Change 2026, this episode brings together three people running the organization. Susanna Pollack on twenty-plus years of arguing that games carry purpose beyond entertainment. Then Dr. Rachel Kowert and Arana Shapiro on brand-new research that says the panic about kids and gaming is not coming from the evidence.

Guests

• Susanna Pollack, President, Games for Change
• Dr. Rachel Kowert, Research Director, Games for Change
• Arana Shapiro, Chief Program/Operating Officer, Games for Change

Interviews by Lewis Ward.

Chapters

00:00:00  Cold open: the story of Mats Steen
00:00:42  Games for Change 2026
00:04:38  Susanna Pollack, and this year's awards
00:06:30  What Games for Change actually is
00:09:05  Rebuilding the festival: workshops and the Playtest Lab
00:12:23  The argument the industry keeps failing to make
00:14:37  Games are one of the few places failing is fine
00:15:41  The education spine, and kids in 92 countries
00:18:25  Raising Good Gamers: the 2019 origin
00:22:11  Going global, and working with the UN
00:27:54  What's coming next
00:28:57  Dr. Rachel Kowert and Arana Shapiro
00:30:00  The white paper, and 200,000 articles
00:31:43  Why bad news about games travels further
00:32:52  Stop counting hours, start asking why
00:33:55  Most media is passive. Games are not.
00:35:17  SPACE: the five moves
00:36:25  60% of kids want their parents to play
00:36:57  What Raising Good Gamers ships
00:41:53  Self-determination theory and the Proteus effect
00:43:41  Academy, Intel, and the Discord

What you'll take away

• There is more positive coverage of games than negative. The negative just gets shared further, which leaves parents inside what Dr. Kowert calls a biased information ecosystem.
• A game does not need to be designed for impact to have it. Joy, stress relief, connection, and a space where age, gender and location stop deciding anything.
• Games are one of very few activities where failing is acceptable and repeatable. That is how mastering a system quietly builds resilience.
• The parental concerns have not changed in fifty years. What changes is the question: not how many hours, but what purpose the play is serving.
• SPACE, the framework: Start with curiosity. Play together. Adjust for context. Cultivate digital citizenship. Establish boundaries together.
• 60% of kids want their parents to play with them. What stops most parents is assuming they'll be bad at it.

Mentioned in this episode

• Raising Good Gamers, and the white paper by Dr. Rachel Kowert. Free, along with a conversation guide and a family gaming code of conduct template. Workshops rolling out through the PTA, Boys and Girls Club, and libraries.
• The Remarkable Life of Ibelin, the Netflix documentary about Mats Steen. A feature film is in development.
• The Games for Change Student Challenge, 10+ years, participants from 92 countries.
• 2026 award winners: South of Midnight (Compulsion Games), the Vanguard Award to Jenn Panattoni, and the Giving Award to SpecialEffect for their adaptive controller work.
• The Proteus effect, first described by Nick Yee, who joined us back in February.
• Katie Salen, professor of informatics at UC Irvine, co-creator of Raising Good Gamers.

Disclosure: the FTI Consulting media analysis underpinning the white paper was commissioned by Tencent.

Where to go next

• Academy — free, built in short packs you can finish on a commute. academy.playerdriven.io
• Intel — our prediction game. Call what the industry does next and see if you were right. intel.playerdriven.io
• Discord — where this conversation actually continues.
• The Operator's Briefing — Tuesdays, if you'd rather it come to you.

Lewis Ward and Greg Posner open Games for Change 2026 with three interviews
on the calendar, a Player Driven happy hour that night, and no idea yet how
any of it goes.

A new Raising Good Gamers white paper lands at the show this week: a meta-
analysis of roughly 200,000 studies on what parents actually need to know
about games and kids, positives included. Lewis breaks down what's in it,
who funded the research behind it, and why Tencent has a rational commercial
interest in closing the gap between what parents fear and what players
actually do.

Greg makes the trust and safety case from the Player Driven side. The tooling
is moving upstream, from moderating conversations after they happen to
designing the conditions where they never start.

Then Lewis makes the point nobody at the conference wants to hear. He went
last year. He played the games on the floor. They weren't fun. "Show me the
game where it's both: it has a huge and growing base over several years, and
it's doing what Games for Change is trying to do."

Recorded remote the day before the show opens at the Glasshouse in Manhattan.

00:00 Day one, and we're winging it
00:39 Where education and games actually meet
03:12 The interview slate
05:30 Moderation is moving to the design layer
07:58 Sitting down with the president of Games for Change
10:33 Why Tencent is paying for this
13:11 The Player Driven happy hour
15:24 August is a broken month
17:06 What we're building at playerdriven.io
19:22 The audience was on Reddit, arguing
21:23 The games still aren't fun
23:31 Where to find Lewis

Mentioned: Raising Good Gamers, Dr. Rachel Coward, Arana Shapiro, Susanna
Pollack, SYBO, Tencent's health and wellbeing track, Lewis Ward's Design Desk
column.

The Operator's Briefing, one email on Tuesdays: playerdriven.io
Join the Discord: [drop invite]

Xbox just laid off thousands, spun off four studios, and cancelled games it had defended a day earlier. Greg Posner and games-industry analyst Colan Neese take apart Microsoft's restructuring memo and land on an uncomfortable read: this wasn't a bad week, it was the bill coming due for a decade of running gaming as a lifestyle business.

They dig into the losses (64 cents gone on every dollar spent), the decision to starve Minecraft to prop up everything else, the Game Pass numbers that never made the memo, and the blame pie: how much lands on Phil Spencer, and how much on CEO Satya Nadella. Then they split hard on the future. Colan makes the case that the fix is an ad-funded, one-to-one discovery engine. Greg goes down swinging for a different read of why players won't leave the games they already know.

Two live games along the way: ranking Microsoft's biggest IP by revenue (and where the AI got it wrong), and an invest-or-sell round on Xbox's dormant franchises.

In this episode
(0:00) Cold open, and the week that broke Xbox
(9:00) The layoffs and studio spin-offs: Avowed cancelled, a new Fallout greenlit
(11:54) The memo: losing 64 cents on every dollar, and starving Minecraft
(18:15) Phil Spencer, the "wayward son with a credit card"
(19:07) Restructuring, and the Game Pass numbers that never got named
(23:49) Colan's "script for Asha Sharma," and why Xbox is a distant fifth platform
(29:24) The pitch: ad rev-share, the way YouTube pays creators
(32:00) Game: rank Microsoft's biggest IP by revenue
(37:35) Game: invest or sell Xbox's dormant franchises
(44:49) The blame pie: how much is on Satya Nadella
(49:56) The debate: is discovery broken, or are players just comfortable?
(1:09:00) Games for Change NYC, and what's next

Quotables
Colan Neese: "You lost 64 cents on a dollar, and you took from the profitable engine that was Minecraft."
Colan Neese: "Ads are just content. It's just a different kind of content."

Links and mentions

Player Driven: https://playerdriven.io
The Operator's Briefing, our weekly newsletter: https://playerdriven.io/level-up
Join the community on Discord: https://discord.gg/GC5PkbKFH
Games for Change, NYC, July 21

About
Player Driven Live breaks down the business behind the games every week, for the people who build, run, and rebuild them. Hosted by Greg Posner with analyst Colan Neese. If this is your kind of conversation, subscribe, and come argue with us in the Discord.

Episode description (full):
A trade group that speaks for nearly every major game publisher told California lawmakers that running a private or community server is piracy. The catch: you can download a Minecraft server from Minecraft's own website, for free. So what did the ESA actually mean?

We brought back Jonathan Yarbor, co-founder of game-server host Nodecraft, to cut through the outrage with the actual law and economics. We break down the difference between a bootleg server that steals an MMO's revenue and the licensed community and private servers most players actually use, why AAA studios walked away from private servers in the first place (hint: 10 to 25 cents per player, per month), and the four-word fix Jonathan thinks changes everything: license, don't litigate.

We also get into City of Heroes coming back from the dead, why Minecraft's real magic was never the game itself, and the legal-plus-technical-plus-revenue "trifecta" that's finally making publishers say yes. Context: the ESA's comments came while opposing California's AB 1921, the Protect Our Games Act, which failed committee on June 29 but was granted reconsideration, and the Stop Killing Games campaign says it's taking the fight national.

Short description (for feeds/Shorts):
The ESA called private servers piracy. Nodecraft's Jonathan explains what it actually meant, why studios killed private servers, and why "license, don't litigate" beats suing your own fans.

Chapters

• 00:00 Cold open: "Running a private server is piracy?"
• 00:35 Meet Jonathan and Nodecraft, and why this got muddied
• 02:30 Bootleg vs community vs private: the terminology the ESA fumbled
• 04:10 Your town's Minecraft server is fine (and legal)
• 07:20 Why AAA studios really killed private servers: follow the money
• 10:00 The 10-25¢ per player problem and the live-service runway
• 11:40 License, don't litigate: what the mod lawsuits actually show
• 13:30 Rockstar, FiveM, and licensing IP like it's Roblox
• 19:00 Games don't have to die: City of Heroes, Project 1999, Black Mesa
• 22:30 The trifecta: legal + technical + revenue, and Nodecraft Studio
• 28:00 Trust & safety, tooling, and why publishers are leaning back in
• 34:00 Minecraft was never built as a model game: forever fans
• 37:00 Where to find Jonathan and Nodecraft

Mentioned in this episode

• Nodecraft — game-server hosting: nodecraft.com
• AB 1921, the Protect Our Games Act — California's Stop Killing Games-backed bill (Assemblymember Chris Ward)
• The ESA (Entertainment Software Association) and its private-servers clarification

Web games went from the thing you played to kill time in study hall to a platform pulling 100 million monthly active users. So why are so many developers still thinking about it like it's 2008?

In this episode, Greg sits down with Stein, COO of Poki, the world's largest web gaming platform, to dig into the 2026 State of Web Gaming Report. Poki went from 10 million to 100 million players in six years, runs about a billion gameplays a month, and is the market leader in over 100 countries — and yet it's arguably the biggest gaming platform nobody's talking about.

The conversation gets into the gap the report exposes: developers still tend to see web as a nostalgia or legacy channel, while players are rating these games high quality, coming back daily, and treating web as a genuine discovery engine. Stein and Greg unpack what actually makes a web game sticky, why zero-install friction changes everything about how games get made, and how "competing for attention" now means competing with Netflix, TikTok, and YouTube rather than other games.

It's a good one for anyone in player support, community, live ops, or game dev who wants a clearer picture of where casual and accessible gaming is actually heading.

What we get into:

• Why web games aren't "casual" anymore, and the data that pushes back on the not-sticky myth (37% of players returning daily, 86% weekly)
• The perception gap between what developers think web is and what players actually experience
• How players hop through four to five games a session, and why curation beats open upload
• Web as the top of the funnel: discovery, IP and franchise fandom, and players who own consoles and spend real money
• The attention economy reality, with players multitasking across music, social, and shows while they play
• Why rising console and hardware prices are quietly making web the most accessible platform there is
• The "it's easy to publish but I'm not sure it's worth it" hesitation, and Stein's pitch to the cautious 36%
• HTML5, fast update cycles, and how a trending meme can be live in a game an hour later
• Why content updates, not gimmicks, are what keep players coming back
• Curation as player safety, and why an AI-slop free-for-all isn't the answer

About Poki: Poki is a browser-based gaming platform built on the idea that the easier you make play to access, the more people get to enjoy it. No downloads, no installs, no account required — just click and play. They work with a global community of developers to curate and release new games daily.

Find the report: Head to poki.com/blog to read the 2026 State of Web Gaming Report.

The system that decides whether you have a good night in multiplayer almost
never gets explained by the people who actually build it. Today it does.

Call of Duty just walked back the biggest matchmaking change in its history.
Activision recently published internal white papers explaining parts of how
their system actually works, which is rare for an industry that usually treats
this stuff as proprietary. Lewis Ward and Greg Posner sit down with Charlie
Olson, the engineer who helped architect Call of Duty's matchmaking rating
system back in 2015, to walk through what the white papers actually said,
what they left out, and what's broken about how the industry thinks about
multiplayer matchmaking.

"Matchmaking is part of the UX. It's not a technical problem. This is a
design problem." — Charlie Olson


👤 About Charlie

Charlie Olson is the co-founder and CEO of Invokation Games, a matchmaking-
as-a-service company powering ranked play and skill rating systems across
multiple multiplayer titles. He helped architect the matchmaking rating
system used in Call of Duty starting in 2015 with Call of Duty: Online for
Tencent, and the version he helped build is still running, essentially
unchanged, in every mainline release since. He spent roughly ten years at
Raven Software before leaving Activision in 2020 to launch Invokation.


📋 What You'll Learn

- What MMR and SBMM actually are, and the difference most people miss
- Where matchmaking fits inside the larger fabric of a multiplayer game
- What changed at Modern Warfare 2019, and why players felt it
- Why removing skill-based matchmaking makes games sweatier, not casual
- The math behind blowouts, retention, and the cascade effect on a player base
- Percentile-based versus MMR-based matchmaking, and the one thing Charlie
  would change about Call of Duty
- Why Elo breaks down when used for matchmaking at scale
- What ranked play participation actually looks like across COD titles, and
  what that tells you about your audience
- What Invokation Games is building, and what studios get wrong about
  matchmaking as a buy-vs-build decision


⏱️ Chapters

00:00 Intro: why matchmaking is the argument of 2026
01:15 Charlie's background, from medical imaging to Call of Duty
04:00 What MMR and SBMM actually are
05:00 The three-loop framework: where matchmaking fits inside a game
10:00 Modern Warfare 2019 and the move to centralized matchmaking
11:00 Inside the 2024 Activision white papers
15:00 How team balancing actually works and where it breaks
21:00 Why XP is not tied to skill, and why Charlie thinks it should be
23:00 Favorite games: Street Fighter 6, Bloodborne, and the old Sierra adventures
24:00 Blowouts, player fun, and the deprioritization-of-skill test
31:00 The cascade effect: why removing SBMM kills the player base
36:00 Marvel Rivals and engagement-optimized matchmaking
40:00 Percentile matchmaking vs. MMR-based matchmaking
45:00 The one thing Charlie would change about Call of Duty
48:00 Why Elo breaks down when used for skill-based matchmaking
53:00 Ranked play, visible MMR, and the World War II Elo system
57:00 Who actually plays ranked, and what the participation rate reveals
63:00 The compression at the top: why Iridescent isn't what it looks like
68:00 What Invokation Games is building

🔗 Links and References

- Invokation Games: https://invokation.games
- Activision's 2024 matchmaking white papers (Modern Warfare 3 study)
- Activision's 2024 ranked play white paper
- Microsoft TrueSkill (referenced)
- Engagement-optimized matchmaking research (Marvel Rivals discussion)

🎯 About Player Driven

Player Driven is the learning community for people who keep games running.
Stories, strategy, and craft from the operational layer of the gaming
industry: player support, community, live ops, trust & safety, design,
and the practitioners doing the work.


💬 Connect With Us

Discord:    https://discord.gg/Zxn22NG93
LinkedIn:   https://linkedin.com/company/player-driven
Website:    https://playerdriven.io

If this episode landed, share it with one person on your team who deals
with the downstream of multiplayer matchmaking. That's how we grow.


#CallOfDuty #SBMM #Matchmaking #GameDev #LiveOps #Multiplayer #FPS