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Welcome to This Week in Games, by Deconstructor of Fun's Editor, Aylin.

Think of it as your Friday kahve with the sharpest gaming minds in the room.
Ground in Athens, brewed in Istanbul, and enjoyed around the world - without sugar.

Xbox Just Got $150 More Expensive. Sony Did Not Move. The Consumer Math Has Never Been Clearer.

The Xbox Series X now costs $800. The PS5 costs $600. GTA 6 launches in November. You can figure out the rest.

​As of August 1st, the Xbox Series X costs $799.99 in the US and €799.99 in Europe, up from $649.99. The Xbox Series S jumped from $399.99 to $499.99, which means the entry-level Xbox now costs exactly what the flagship Xbox cost at launch in 2020. Microsoft blames AI data centers for the memory shortage driving up component costs, which is true, but Sony managed to keep the PS5 at $599.99 after its own price adjustment earlier this year. The gap between the two main consoles is now $150 in the US and €150 in Europe, in Sony's favour.

The timing could not be worse for Microsoft. GTA 6 launches November 19th and is pre-ordering at roughly 8 to 1 on PS5 versus Xbox. That ratio was already a problem before the price gap widened. Now it is a different conversation entirely. A family buying a console for Christmas has a clear, obvious answer, and it is not the one that costs $200 more than it did 15 months ago.

Sony has confirmed it has enough memory secured to meet PS5 sales targets through March 2027 with no further price increases planned. Eric Kress's read is that Microsoft may be exiting the hardware business altogether after this cycle, because there is no path to winning the console war at these price levels. Whether that's right or not, the holiday quarter is going to be a very lonely one for Xbox.

​The full breakdown of what the RAM crisis means for the future of console hardware​

Capcom Had a Brilliant Quarter. Mostly Because of Games From 2017.

81% profit jump. 89% of units sold were catalog titles. The five best-selling games averaged seven years old. Pragmata still managed to impress.

​Capcom reported a Q1 net sales increase of 54.7% year on year, with operating profit up 66.9% and ordinary profit up 81.1%. Total unit sales hit 23.81 million versus 14.16 million a year ago. New IP performed well too: Pragmata launched in April, sold a million copies in two days, two million in 16 days, and now sits above 2.5 million total.

But the real story is what those 23.81 million units were. Catalog sales came in at 21.26 million, which is 89.3% of the total. The top sellers were Resident Evil 4 from 2023, Resident Evil 2 from 2019, Devil May Cry 5 from 2019, Resident Evil 3 from 2020, and Resident Evil 7 from 2017. Street Fighter 6 hit 6.7 million lifetime units in three years. Devil May Cry 5 crossed 14 million lifetime. Players are not tired of these games. They just keep buying them over and over again.

This is the Capcom playbook in action: a small number of beloved franchises, kept alive with remasters, ports, and multiplatform releases, generating revenue that dwarfs whatever the new release slate brings in any given quarter. It is the same thing EA does with FIFA and Madden, what Take-Two does with GTA and NBA 2K, and what Activision did with Call of Duty before the Microsoft acquisition.

Compare this fewer bets, bigger games, longer tails strategy to Ubisoft or the old Microsoft studio model, and the difference in outcomes is obvious. Capcom is also leaning into media crossovers: a Street Fighter film is coming October 16th, a Devil May Cry Netflix season, and the Capcom Pro Tour are all in the investor deck alongside the Q1 results.

​The full conversation on why catalog strategy is the only reliable model in a mature market​

Roblox Just Had Its Worst Day Ever on the Stock Market. Here Is What Happened.

Stock down 29%. Bookings guidance cut for the first time ever. Full year outlook pulled. And an algorithm change that made total sense in theory and hurt immediately in practice.

​Roblox reported Q2 revenue of $1.47 billion, up 36% year on year, which sounds great until you read the rest. Bookings, the number investors actually care about, came in at $1.56 billion, up only 8% and at the low end of guidance. The company then guided Q3 bookings down as much as 18%, pulled its full-year outlook entirely, and watched the stock drop 29% in a single session, erasing roughly $10 billion in market value.

What happened? Roblox changed its recommendation algorithm in April. The old system optimized on seven-day engagement. The new one measures retention across a 28-day window. The stated goal was to stop highly-clickable, but low-retention games from displacing games players actually stay with. A reasonable goal. But Roblox's bookings are directly wired to the discovery system, so when the algorithm shifted traffic away from the "highly monetizing viral games" toward more retentive ones, spending fell immediately and visibly on an earnings call.

The age verification story adds another layer. Monthly active payers grew 15% year on year to 27 million, but average bookings per daily active user in the US posted its first ever year-on-year decline. Safety measures and age checks are good for the platform's long-term health and its relationship with regulators. They are not good for short-term monetization of a user base that skews young. Roblox is trying to build a better platform and paying for it in real time on every quarterly call.

The deeper problem is that founder and CEO David Baszucki seems to be now making these calls alone. The two most pragmatic voices in the room, CPO Manuel Bronstein and CFO Michael Guthrie, are both gone. The HD gaming pivot, the algorithm change, the age gating, all happening simultaneously with no check on the founder's vision. For a publicly traded company, that is a concerning setup regardless of how right the long-term direction might be.

​The full debate on whether Roblox is making the right long-term moves and the wrong short-term calls​

Castle Crushers Hit $100 Million Run Rate

Simple physics. Castle sieges. Hybrid casual done properly. And a game that keeps extending bathroom breaks across the Katkoff household.

​Castle Crushers from Voodoo has scaled to a $100 million annual run rate. The concept is simple: two castles face each other, each manned by units you fire in a slingshot arc at the enemy structure. You upgrade your castle, unlock new units, equip passive abilities, and try to collapse the other side before it collapses yours. Physics, chance, and unit combinations give it endless replayability.

What makes it worth covering is how well it executes the hybrid casual model. The monetization splits roughly 50-80% in-app advertising with the rest from IAP, meaning ads fund the core loop while IAP powers progression. Ad placements are built around natural relief moments: an ad chest after a win, a revive ad when you lose, a support ad mid-match. Session lengths average over 30 minutes. Day 7 retention sits in the 15-20% range, Day 30 around 8-10%. For a game with CPIs of a few dollars, the ROAS window closes in months, not years.

The design is honest about what it is, which is rare. The slingshot mechanic is immediately legible, the visual style is casual enough to keep CPIs low while being charming enough to keep players coming back, and the live ops calendar sustains long-term retention without requiring expensive content drops.

Mishka's one real critique is the end-game, where progression stalls once you have a favourite unit combination and no cooldown forces you to explore the roster. His suggestion: add cooldowns, introduce factions, and build a proper PvP mode with matchmaking, guilds, and leagues underneath that matter. Right now it plays opponents that are almost certainly bots, which works fine for casual players but limits the ceiling for anyone who wants a real competitive layer. Those are the same players who'd retain for a year and pay.

​The full breakdown of Castle Crushers and the hybrid casual model ​

​And that's a wrap! Plenty more was discussed on this week's TWIG episode, including things that didn't make this list, so if you want the full picture, ​go give it a watch. ☕️

See you next Friday!

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Watch the full This Week in Games episode where Eric Kress, Jen Donahoe, Phillip Black and Mishka Katkoff break down:

• Xbox price hikes of 30 to 50% across Europe
• The RAM crunch that could break the next console cycle
• Capcom's back catalog driving 90% of unit sales
• Roblox stock crashing 30% after earnings
• Roblox platform health vs fiduciary duty
• Japan slowly opening up to foreign capital
• Merge-2 climbing to 20% of the US puzzle market
• Whether Merge is innovation or reskinned mechanics
• China flooding UA channels and taking Western share

🎙️ More From the Podcasts:

The $12B+ Mobile Ad Market: Sensor Tower's First-Ever Deep Dive

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 APPLE / 🎧 SPOTIFY / ▶️ YOUTUBE​​

​Josh Chandley spent half an hour with Sensor Tower’s Lead Analyst, Sam Aune, working through the charts. Five surprising numbers came out of it. Some are buried in the body copy. Some you only get by dividing two of Sensor Tower's own figures together. Most importantly, none of them are on the summary slide. They break down:

• How the estimates were built
• Why $12 billion is a conservative floor
• Why puzzle pulls more than half of all gaming ad revenue
• How AppLovin keeps eating share while smaller networks shrink
• The non-gaming advertisers flooding into gaming inventory W
• hy AP-focused hybrids out-earn ad-first hybrids by 4x