400 Episodes. 8 Years. Thank You.

​Mishka's letter of gratitude on behalf of our present (Jen, Eric, Phil, Adam, Josh, Laura) and past TWIG hosts (Ethan Levy, Eric Seufert, and Joseph Kim)

On July 17th, 2018, Joseph Kim and I recorded the first episode of This Week in Games (TWIG). It was unlistenable. And yet we continued recording TWIGs. This weekly ritual of public humiliation caused Eric Kress to join by episode 12. He says he did it to stop the two of us from embarrassing ourselves in public.

This week we shipped number 400.

Somewhere between those two points, close to 10,000 of you started showing up every week as listeners, watchers, and readers of this newsletter. Operators, founders, investors, and even some students trying to get their first job in this industry.

None of us expected a weekly ramble about the nichest corner of entertainment to last eight years. You are the reason it did.

Eight years is a long time in this business

We started when Supercell was untouchable and saying anything critical about them got you branded a hater. We watched IDFA blow a hole in the entire mobile marketing stack. We watched hypercasual rise, peak, and get absorbed into hybrid. We lived through lockdown hypergrowth and the hiring binge that followed it, then spent three years watching that same headcount get unwound. We covered Web3 arriving with more money and more grifters than sense and leaving faster than it came. We covered the nonsense of the metaverse, then the streaming wars, then the failed business models of Apple Arcade, Google Stadia, Netflix Games and Game Pass. Now we cover AI, which is currently doing a very good impression of all of the above at once.

Every one of those cycles produced people who were certain they knew how it ended. Most of them were wrong. Including us, plenty of times. And that’s what I love about the show. We get things wrong on air constantly. Correcting it in public is the price. And I'm proud that we pay this price at the beginning of nearly every weekly episode.

No, this is not 1983 nor the Great Flood

Which brings me to the story that opened our 400th episode. Polygon ran a piece headlined "Worst crash we've seen since the 1980s, says top gaming exec." Predictably, it traveled uncontested. Most people read the headline and nothing else, and the industry's sentiment got another kick in the teeth.

And yet, the headline was misleading. Epic’s Tim Sweeney was talking about AAA. Polygon turned AAA into the whole industry. Those are not the same thing, and the gap between them is where most of the actual growth comes from today.

The underlying industry trends are real:

• July was the weakest month for hardware spending since the COVID supply crunch.
• RAM prices are up because AI data centers can outbid all of entertainment for components, so console pricing is going the wrong direction and the cycle stretches.
• AAA budgets have run to hundreds of millions, which pushes publishers toward safe bets and sequels. It is a genuine structural problem.

Yet none of that translates into a crash. In 1983, the market fell roughly 97%. Today we are growing at around 3% when adjusted for inflation. Even when talking about layoffs, the global game industry has held at roughly 750,000 employees from 2022 through 2026.

Examine the graph above. Employment in North America is down 12%, and Europe is up 6%. That is a composition shift and a painful one if you are sitting in a traditional AAA studio in Seattle or Guildford. It is an extinction event for those studios. And at the same time, it’s new hires joining in Turkiye, Vietnam, Poland, Spain, and China.

This is the bust half of a boom-and-bust cycle we have been through before. In 2000 and in 2008. The tourist capital leaves. The grifters move to the next shiny thing (AI). The industry consolidates toward the big.

Anyone who joined in the last fifteen years only knows double-digit growth, so sub-3% feels like collapse. But it isn't. It's just what normal looks like when you've only seen double-digit growth. People are still spending on interactive. And interactive still beats passive.

Our advice, should you accept it: Buckle in. Don't panic.

The best part is always YOU

What I love about TWIG isn't the episode download numbers nor the episodes that go viral due to something we said. The absolute best part is meeting you in real life.

It's a woman at GDC telling us she got her first job in games because of the show, and Kress standing next to Jen getting visibly emotional about it (spoiler alert: he’s a kind man outside one hour of TWIG every week).

It's the arguments in hotel bars with people who think we were dead wrong about Netflix or Roblox or the state of UA. It's the messages from people who used an episode to win an internal argument at their studio. And messages from people in the know correcting what we said.

The human connection is the whole thing. Everything else is just an online watercooler talk turned into a podcast.

My only ask of you is to keep it coming. Tell us what we're missing, what we circle too often, and where we're flat-out wrong. Find us in the DoF Slack, on LinkedIn, or in person at the next event.

400 down. Thank you for every one of them.

On behalf of present, past, and future co-hosts

-Mishka

TWIG #400: Is the Game Industry Actually Crashing, OpenAI's Astra and 8 Years of Hot Takes

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400 episodes in, and yes, we swear more than anyone will admit.

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

• Why the "worst crash since the 1980s" headline doesn't hold up
• AAA budgets ballooning past 400 million and the indie boom it's fueling
• OpenAI's Astra model and how mobile teams are actually using it
• How TWIG started and how the cast came together over 8 years
• The calls the hosts got right, from Ubisoft to Roblox
• The calls they got embarrassingly wrong, from Call of Duty Mobile to Blizzard leadership
• Who swears the most and who never does
• Eight years of TWIG's biggest arguments and running jokes
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🧩 On the Latest Deconstructions:

Century Games’ Just Desserts looks awfully familiar if you’ve played Gossip Harbor. But how closely does it follow the formula, and where does it differ? With another Merge 2 title already under its belt, Century’s latest entry is worth a closer look.

​Yael Halevi puts the two games side by side, examining everything from board mechanics and energy pricing to LiveOps and soap-opera drama. This piece breaks down how small design choices keep the next goal within reach, turn energy refills into a spending habit, and give players a reason to care about the characters behind their orders.

It’s a close look at what Just Desserts borrows and why the formula works so well in the first place.