Three big stories from a dramatic week in games, 08/05/2025
GTA 6 pushed back to May, Apple suffers big defeat in court and an eye-watering Xbox price hike dominate the news
We run the rule over three massive stories from the past week in video games
UK consumer games market slides by 1.8% to £7.63bn, says Ukie
Bahamut and the Waqwaq Tree offers an intriguing game of the week choice
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The big read - Three big stories from a dramatic week in games
Tiny violins: What’s the problem with writing a weekly newsletter? Sometimes, a lot can happen in a week.
Not much going on: In the seven days since I last put pen to VGIM paper, Grand Theft Auto 6 got delayed (and had a new trailer released), a searing US court order dealt significant damage to Apple’s App Store hegemony and Xbox consoles jumped in price by over 20% as a result of “market conditions” (coughs, tariffs, coughs). And that’s not even mentioning all the other stuff I had to shove into the news in brief to keep this newsletter manageable.
Triumvirate of reads: So rather than follow the usual format for the Big Read, I’ve decided to split the usual long read into three smaller ones to keep you across a very busy week in the games biz.
Grand Theft Auto 6 Delayed
In case you’ve been hiding under a rock: We have to kick off the newsletter with the news that Rockstar is not releasing Grand Theft Auto 6 this year. The Edinburgh-based funsters announced that the game will not come out until 26th May 2026. It cited the Goldilocks defence of waiting until it is just ready to serve it up to players, resulting in a hefty knock to the share price of its Daddy Bear (aka Take-Two Interactive).
Percentage pain: On the face of it, the delay is bad news for the games business. The company’s decision to kick a $3bn release out of 2025 and into 2026 will knock the best part of a couple of percentage points of growth off the roughly $180bn global games software market. The news will also have resulted in frowny faces at Sony and Microsoft, with both companies wondering which big game will sell their spenny consoles in the festive period (more on that soon).
Delayed with gratification: But for the industry at large, the delay has been met with a sigh of relief. GTA 6’s whopping size and uncertain release date had led to a worldwide game of silly buggers at video games publishers, with companies holding out on their 2025 release plans to try to avoid being mullered by Rockstar’s release. Its delay is therefore welcome news to everyone else.
Sucks to be them: “GTA 6 would have been an engagement and attention whirlpool, having a negative impact on other developers' games,” said Rhys Elliot, Head of Market Analysis at Alinea Analytics. “GTA 6's delay will actually create more opportunities for other games, as Grand Theft Auto ALWAYS sucks all the air (and attention) out of the room.”
Selling Switches: Nintendo will also be chuffed by the news of the delay. You’d be right to say that there isn’t too much in common between Mario Kart and mowing down pedestrians in a fictional version of Miami. But GTA 6 is undoubtedly a system seller. If it isn’t in the market to sell consoles this Christmas, people have enough cash to buy a different one. Therefore, Nintendo has a free window to sell Switch 2s - giving the company’s executives room for some very early festive cheer.
Giant toad update: The delay is also, perhaps a touch counter-intuitively, helpful for anyone releasing a game in 2026. To steal Tim Shipman’s lovingly lampooned quote about former British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, GTA 6 “now squats like a giant toad” across May 2026. This gives developers and publishers time to adjust their plans or, if they’re feeling brave, try to create a ‘Barbenheimer’ moment by launching something that complements the game when it releases (something that Devolver Digital is clearly thinking of doing).
Trailing the release: It even feels like the pause is a good thing for Rockstar. It gives the team more time to work on the game, avoiding the kind of crunch that marred the end of the development of Red Dead Redemption 2. It allows it to continue to dial up the hype, as shown by the 70 m+ views generated by the trailer it chose to release this week. And by declaring a precise date for the year, it guarantees that the industry will adapt to its timetable for the rest of the year - giving it a clear run to make Scrooge McDuck style megabucks when it does finally release.
Apple suffers digital competition defeat in America
Meanwhile in Oakland: But while we wait to see what’s happening in Vice City next year, a court in California delivered a ruling in the legal ding-dong between Apple and Epic Games that’s changing the rules of the mobile games economy now.
Wilful disobedience: Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers, a US District judge in Oakland, stated in an 80-page ruling that Apple was in ‘wilful violation’ of a 2021 court order which told the company to make its App Store more competitive. She found that the company had imposed a 27% charge on off-platform purchases, despite being told to open up to external payments to counter the “anti-competitive” effect of its 30% store fee. She also said Apple had imposed “new barriers and new impediments” to businesses trying to show customers ways to pay outside the App Store. This included putting up splash screens and pop-up messages warning customers of impending doom if they went to a third-party provider.
Contemptuous: As a result of Apple’s behaviour, Rogers imposed an immediate injunction on the business to stop its “anticompetitive” practices in the US. She also referred the company and Alex Roman, its VP of Finance, to federal prosecutors who will investigate whether their behaviour throughout the case could constitute criminal contempt. Whoops.
America (rule change) first: It’s fair to say things have gone badly for Apple. While the company said it strongly disagreed with the decision, the ruling has already affected App Store rules in America. The Verge reported that the company had rewritten its App Store policies to allow apps in the US to use external payment providers or point to platforms outside Apple’s store to comply with the injunction.
Ripple effect: And while Apple is doing its best to get the ruling overturned, it finds itself in a hard place. Judge Rogers’s ruling will give a boost to those who have argued that Apple has tried to undermine new competition rules, lowering trust in the company. The speed with which it complied with the injunction shows that it can now easily follow similar competition rules elsewhere, weakening any remaining arguments that these rules are technically tough to comply with. And while international regulators have been tiptoeing around Big Tech lest they infuriate the country’s quick-to-anger President, a US court going in two-footed on digital competition will embolden the likes of the European Commission - which is already thwacking Apple over competition matters - to go even harder on the matter.
Peace in our time: Epic Games is making the most of Apple’s defeat. Alongside wheeling out a new web store product to take advantage of the rule changes and announcing that Fortnite will return to iOS in America, Tim Sweeney has offered Apple a ‘peace proposal’ to end the fussin’ and a feudin’.
Victory at hand?: In return for applying the new US App Store terms globally and allowing Fortnite back onto the platform, Sweeney said that Epic Games would drop its lawsuits against Apple across the world. This would likely stem regulatory pressure on the Cupertino giant, but at the cost of handing a big victory to Sweeney’s band of well-funded freedom fighters.
Fat chance: It is exceedingly unlikely that Apple agrees to Sweeney’s proposal while it appeals in the courts. But if it doesn’t get the outcome it hopes for there and if The Donald doesn’t come swinging in to save Big Tech’s bacon, Epic’s peace proposal may be a way to stop a scarring defeat in a US court from turning into a worldwide punishment beating.
Microsoft whacks up the cost of its consoles (and games)
The price is wrong: And finally on the games and geopolitical front, Microsoft announced that it was whacking up the cost of its Xbox consoles at the start of May as the impact of Trump’s tariffs continued to feed through the global games ecosystem.
Gruel for everyone: The company raised the cost of the Series S by 27% in the US to reach $379.99, with the Series X increasing in price by 22% to $729.99. To cushion the blow to US consumers, Microsoft kindly extended the joy of price rises to players around the world: raising the cost of its Series S console by £50 in the UK, €80 in Europe and $50 in Australia. And as if that wasn’t fun enough, it also bumped up the cost of its first-party games by 14% from $70 to $80. Hooray.
Carefully crafted press statement: Microsoft issued a short statement saying that it understood that price increases were “challenging” for players, but that it had to make the move due to “market conditions and the rising cost of development.” A classic example of a statement that says something without telling you anything.
Paying the toll: But if you’re willing to indulge in some not entirely baseless speculation, there are a couple of likely reasons for the price increase. The first is that Trump’s tariffs have just made the global console business a heck of a lot harder. Imposing a 145% levy on goods coming into the US means that any Xbox shipped into the country (read: all Xboxes) has suddenly become a lot more expensive. And even though US consumers are footing more of the bill, flushing the price increase through the rest of the world stops American players from eating the full cost of the tariffs - preventing a truly eye-watering increase in the process.
Creeping up on us: However, we’re also experiencing what Steve Burke of GamersNexus described as ‘price creep’ on this week’s episode of the Better Offline podcast. Nintendo’s announcement that the Switch 2 would cost $445 was above what most industry boffins predicted at the start of the year. Given that Nintendo’s devices have historically been seen as the ‘affordable’ console, the Switch 2 has given Microsoft and Sony an excuse to increase the price of their hardware to maintain their ‘premium’ position.
Ninten-do that: Something similar has happened with game prices too. Nintendo’s decision to sell the digital version of Mario Kart World for $80 has opened the door to other publishers to do the same. And while most companies were already thinking about doing something similar - hence the ‘GTA 6 will cost $100’ chatter from earlier this year - Nintendo has handed everyone a good reason to make the move. Microsoft has taken advantage of it, and others will likely follow suit shortly.
Hardware choices: So, will consumers suck up the price increases? It is hard to say. On the hardware front, I think players will suck it up in the end. The Xbox price increase is steep, but prices are increasing everywhere. Big releases like GTA 6 will tempt people to buy, as alluded to earlier. There is also just enough flexibility in the market in terms of cheaper, mid-tier and premium devices in both the console and PC sector to give players flexibility to suck up the extra cost somewhere.
Blue Prince for success: However, increasing software prices might prove harder to justify. Prestige releases will be able to attract players at $80, as Mario Kart World is currently showing ahead of the Switch 2 launch. But as Jason Schreier points out in his Bloomberg newsletter, the three highest-rated games of 2025 - Blue Prince, Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 and Split Fiction - all cost between $30-$50 at launch. Triple-A developers who do not deliver ‘system-selling’ quality in their releases may well find that consumers baulk at an $80 price tag, turning the software price hike into potentially risky business for the industry at large.
News in brief
UK games market slows: The UK consumer market for games decreased by 1.8% to £7.63bn, according to new figures from UK trade body Ukie. While games software revenue squeaked up by 0.58% to £5.14bn due to hefty growth in mobile game revenue, a 5.1% decline in the hardware market to £2.1bn and a 13% drop in game culture spend to £385m dragged the market down. Ukie blamed fewer big game releases, a sagging console market and a lack of box office hits for the decline.
Copyright combustion continues: The UK government is considering moving away from its ‘preferred’, but abundantly stupid, suggestion that copyright holders should have to ‘opt-out’ of having their assets mercilessly scraped by LLMs. The Guardian broke the news at the weekend, after it had previously revealed that the Government was amending its data bill to deliver an economic impact assessment on how changes to copyright rules could impact creative businesses. Tommy Thompson at AI and Games once again has a good games relevant summary of the latest developments, which is linked above.
Gears of phwoar: Xbox’s flagship Gears of War franchise is making its first appearance on PlayStation consoles. Gears of War: Reloaded, a remaster of the first game in the series which is relaunching two decades after the original arrived (put us all in the cold hard ground), will arrive at the same time as the Xbox and PC version this Summer. Microsoft’s plans to deploy its games content across as many platforms as possible continues apace, then.
Bungie jumped: Destiny creator Bungie has landed itself in a legal jam seemingly as a result of being unable to get access to its own historic game content. The company has attempted to dismiss a lawsuit by a gentleman called Matthew Kelsey Martineau, who alleged that two storylines in the game - The Red War and Curse of Osiris - nicked a load of ideas he flushed out on his website back in 2013 and 2014. But because Bungie has ‘vaulted’ the game content that he says plagiarised his work, it has only been able to contest the claim by submitting game footage, wiki entries and a signed affidavit from the game director. And after a judge in Louisiana deemed this to be unacceptable for side-by-side comparison, its motion to dismiss has been rejected and the case continues. Awkward.
Vox Unpopuli: Finally, Vox has been criticised by The National Writers Union (NWU) for selling Polygon, one of the biggest consumer games media sites in the world, to Valnet - a media site accused by The Wrap of forcing staff to write in ‘sweatshop conditions’. The NWU described the sale as a ‘tragedy for entertainment journalism’, lamenting the layoffs that have already hit a site that it described as a “bastion” of ethical writing.
Moving on
Josh Logue has joined ESA Canada as its new Director, Policy & Government Relations…Ben Board has a new role at Epic Games, becoming its Head of Unreal Engine Games Business in Western Europe…Imogen Mellor has been promoted to Social Lead at YRS TRULY…Ben Gunstone is now CEO at Stainless Games…Christine Brownell is LEGO’s new Senior Design Director - Games…And Mathieu Pasteran has become VP of Marketing at Scopely…
Jobs ahoy
Well, we have ourselves some plum law and policy jobs going this week…Sony Interactive Entertainment is hiring a Senior Counsel, Litigation - EMEA, as well as a competition counsel, a direct to consumer expert, a paralegal and more…Epic Games is beefing up its UK policy team with a Public Policy Director (Competition)…Discord’s had a Senior Regulatory Counsel role open for a couple of weeks now…Supercell is still looking for a Fair Play Manager…And lastly, on a slightly different note, War Child has a Gaming Partnerships Manager role up for grabs…
Events and conferences
A.MAZE, Berlin - 14th-17th May
Digital Dragons, Kraków - 18th-20th May
Nordic Game, Malmö - 20th-23rd May
Unreal Fest, Orlando - 2nd-5th June
Summer Game Fest, Los Angeles - 6th June
Games of the week
Bahamut and the Waqwaq Tree - 2D action game from Riyadh indie studio Starvania arrives on Steam and console this week.
Revenge of the Savage Planet - Satirical sci-fi action game drops across platforms with Dave the Diver (!) content from launch.
Metal Eden - Sci-fi FPS from the developer behind Ruiner gives you an opportunity to live out your super-powered android shooty dreams.
Before you go…
Sometimes, the UK’s Advertising Standards Authority has to make a tough decision about whether to uphold a complaint about the content of an advert contained within a video game.
And sometimes, it has to decide whether a children’s game should serve up an advert containing the words c*** and c***iest.
Have a read of the judgement here. And I’ll see you next Thursday.