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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.

Roblox Is Under Congressional Investigation. And That Might Not Be Its Worst News This Week.

"Children on your platform are hurting. Congress will not look the other way." Plus a bot ban that revealed something nobody had priced in.

​The US Senate has opened a formal investigation into Roblox. Senators Josh Hawley and Dick Durbin sent a letter to CEO David Baszucki on August 12th ordering the company to preserve all records related to child safety and abuse, with documents due August 31st. The number they leaned on: 65,381 reports of suspected child exploitation in 2025, more than double 2024. Roblox says that reflects better detection, not a worse platform.

To be fair, the safety spend is real. Mandatory facial age estimation, six age bands, Roblox Kids and Select tiers, an open-source grooming detection model, rebuilt reporting.

They have taken business hits for it too: DAU came in at 132 million against a 144 million consensus, hours down nearly 10%, bookings guidance cut by roughly $900 million. The problem is that the grooming does not happen on Roblox. It starts there and moves to Discord, where the safety infrastructure is far thinner, and Discord is not mentioned anywhere in this investigation.

Furthermore, Roblox ran a bot ban this weekend, and the results were brutal. Murder Mystery 2, the platform's number one game by CCU, dropped from 1.1 million to 400,000. Average session length across the platform fell from 20 minutes to 4. More than half the players in Roblox's top games appear to have been bots.

​The full conversation on where Roblox goes from here.

Apple Just Rewrote Its EU Fees. Do the Math Before You Celebrate.

The Core Technology Fee is dead. Commissions dropped across the board. And web shops just got much harder to justify. Maybe.

​Apple overhauled its EU App Store terms, effective October 1st. The €0.50 per-install Core Technology Fee is gone, replaced by a flat 5% commission on apps distributed outside the App Store. New rates: 26% for standard in-app purchase, 20% for alternative payment processing in-app, 15% for link-outs, 5% for alternative marketplaces. One catch worth flagging, whichever configuration you choose locks you in for 12 months.

Take a good game doing $3 million a month. Prime D2C candidate. Do nothing and the drop from 30% to 26% nets you an extra $120,000 a month, about $1.4 million a year, for zero effort. Now run the link-out version: 15% to Apple, 3.5% to payment processing, and you keep 81.5% of whatever survives checkout. But at a realistic 70% conversion through the browser handoff, your $3 million becomes $1.7 million net. You just lost half a million a month for trying versus doing nothing.

For a link-out to beat Apple's own flow at these rates, you need over 90% conversion through the entire web checkout. The only version that works is targeting whales with saved credentials.

This is not a fee cut out of goodwill. It is a carefully built attack on direct-to-consumer providers. Epic has already called the terms junk fees.

​The full breakdown, including the math on every configuration.

Hybrid Casual Is a Ruse. Here Are the Numbers.

Castle Crushers is Voodoo's best performing game. It made $20 million this year. One hyper casual game made $154 million in six months.

​Castle Crushers, which Mishka raved about on the podcast, is a genuinely good game.

Slingshot mechanics, two castles firing units at each other, physics that make every shot feel different. You upgrade your castle, unlock units, hit structural weak points and watch things collapse. Constant rewards, daily quests, arena, battle pass. It is fun and it earns the credit it gets. It has also made at least $20 million year to date, which makes it the number one title in Voodoo's entire portfolio.

That is the part worth sitting with. Every few months a headline runs about hybrid casual revenue growing, and it is growing, but from a tiny base. Pixel Flow, the top hyper casual game, did $154 million in net revenue in H1 2026 alone.One game, bigger than all of Voodoo. Look at what Voodoo has tried since: Collect Em All, Mob Control, Sand Loop. The BeReal acquisition increasingly looks less like a social play and more like an escape hatch out of games and into ad tech where multiples are magnitudes higher.

As for Castle Crushers, the fixes are obvious. Add cooldowns so you use more than two of your eight units. Introduce factions and guilds. Add real matchmaking instead of bots, because the players who figure out they are not playing humans are exactly the ones who will stay and pay.

​The full breakdown and where the French studios land.

Webtoon Bought a Game Studio. This Is What Smart IP Strategy Looks Like.

160 million readers. Comics with billions of views. And a deal that only fully pays out if the games actually ship.

​Webtoon is acquiring a 60% stake in RI Games Holdings for around $100 million. Webtoon is a vertical-scrolling digital comics platform with 160 million readers globally, around 21 million monthly actives in tier one markets, which is more than Paramount+ and several times Monopoly Go. RI Games runs two studios, GrayGames and Offbeat. First game out is an action MMORPG based on Overgeared, published by Nexon, launching alongside an anime adaptation in October.

The IP behind it is enormous. Overgeared has 1.3 billion views, Doom Breaker 590 million, Omniscient Reader 3.05 billion. But the structure is the smart part, not the size. Two-thirds of the price only pays out at a second closing tied to a commercial launch milestone. If revenue targets are hit, the seller can put their remaining 40% to Webtoon. If not, Webtoon can sell part of its stake back. This is a staged bet with real downside protection.

The logic is sound too. Licensing means a flat fee while someone else takes the upside. Webtoon is funding the games, keeping the equity, and using its own platform for distribution. They own the audience, the IP and now the studio. The open question is whether the market exists for mid-sized games at all right now. But if anyone has an unfair advantage on discovery, it is a company with 160 million readers already invested in the story.

Jen went deep on Webtoon's marketing strategy in a podcast that dropped this week.

Watch the full episode for the deep dive

Share the full story with a friend: Blog, YouTube, Apple Podcast, Spotify​

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​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 Jen Donahoe, Phillip Black and Mishka Katkoff and Eric Kress break down:

• Roblox’s congressional investigation and growing child-safety pressure
• Roblox’s Discord problem
• What higher opt-in rates could mean for Meta and mobile UA
• Apple’s new EU App Store fee structure
• Webtoon buying up to 60% of RI Games Holdings
• Netflix Games closing Night School Studio and Moonlit
• Devolver Digital delisting after its stock fell roughly 97%
• Castle Crushers, Voodoo’s hybrid-casual formula and its path toward a $100M run rate
• What Voodoo’s evolution says about the French hyper-casual ecosystem
• Kingdom Hearts’ new animated series and Kingdom Hearts IV targeting late 2027
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🎙️ More From the Podcasts:

The Man Behind Most Gaming Deals | Affan Butt, Aream & Co.

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 APPLE / 🎧 SPOTIFY / ▶️ YOUTUBE​​

​Affan Butt has advised on 110+ gaming M&A deals worth $40 billion. He breaks down how game studios actually get sold, what acquirers pay for, and why earnouts wreck founders.

In this conversation, Mishka Katkoff and Affan Butt goes through a studio acquisition from the founder's side of the table. How M&A processes really start, what due diligence looks like, why inbound corp dev interest is not validation, how bidding wars backfire, and the way earnout structures quietly turn against the people who signed them.