Happy Friday, friend! Here's what you ought to know about this week in games:
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1. Blizzard announced four years of games in one night: three versions of WoW, Diablo 5 in 2029, and a StarCraft open-world shooter in 2030.
2. Roblox expands outside Roblox. Standalone games, browser play, offline mode, and a creator debit card could turn the platform into an engine rather than a destination.
3. FunPlus expanded from mobile to PC and is, low-key, crushing it. The company you know for chart-topping 4X strategy games just launched a polished Pokémon-style creature collector that hit 125,000+ concurrent players on Steam on day one.

For maximum insight and entertainment, watch the full TWIG podcast (Apple / Spotify)

Roblox Wants Out of the Roblox App.
That's a Bigger Deal Than It Sounds.

Standalone apps, browser play, offline mode, and a creator debit card. Is the platform becoming an engine?

​At RDC 2026, Roblox announced Roblox Everywhere, which will let creators ship their games as standalone apps across mobile, PC, and console while Roblox keeps running the tech and services underneath.

Browser play lands in Chrome by the end of 2026, no install required. Offline solo play is targeted for mid-2027. And Roblox Wallet will pay eligible US creators in real currency every business day, with a Roblox Card following in 2027. Creators have earned over $5 billion through DevEx since 2013, roughly $1.7 billion of that in the last twelve months.

The Wallet is the part with the clearest immediate value. Getting your money in a day instead of weeks means you can turn earnings back into growth much faster. The standalone app piece is the one worth arguing about. If your game ships as its own app store listing but still runs the Roblox engine behind a mandatory Roblox sign-in, what exactly have you gained? You have added a friction point at the front door while giving up the one thing the platform was actually good at, which is aggregating all the demand in one place. Not to mention the revenue shares. Is Roblox going to take roughly 75% of a game launched on another platform, as they do with games on their platform? So many questions...

A Roblox dev shipping a standalone app is now competing on user acquisition against teams who have been running free-to-play funnels for a decade, without the trust and safety requirements of a public company weighing them down. There is a real risk that these become zombie apps with a little organic traffic, while the actual distribution still runs through the Roblox app itself.

The other thing worth noting: the stock is up around 20% on this, after a 40% drop when the discovery algorithm shifted a few months back. The algorithm has since moved back. The top game on the platform this month is out-earning the next one by roughly 6x. LinkedIn mob has decided Roblox is back. Yet the platform is still down around 60% from its peak over the past year.

​The full breakdown of what Roblox Everywhere actually changes.

Blizzard's Four Years of Content and
Three Separate World of Warcrafts.

Diablo 5 in 2029. A StarCraft open-world shooter in 2030. WoW Forever launching November 4th. This was the best BlizzCon in years.

​BlizzCon returned after a three-year gap and Blizzard emptied the tank. World of Warcraft: Forever, a reimagined year-one version that sits alongside Modern and Classic rather than replacing either, launches November 4th with beta on September 17th. Three new zones, over 1,000 new quests, and a new playable race. The Last Titan expansion lands in 2027.

Diablo 5 was confirmed for 2029. A single-player open-world StarCraft shooter, led by former Far Cry lead Dan Hay, is targeting 2030. There is a Warcraft 3 expansion, the first in 23 years, out now. Heroes of the Storm got a new hero. Hearthstone got its first new class in six years. Diablo is getting a Netflix animated series.

Some context on why this all matters: Diablo 5 arriving in 2029 would be six years after Diablo 4, against the eleven-year gap before it. For a studio historically terrible at shipping on schedule, setting public dates this far out is a statement. So is going outside the genre comfort zone with a StarCraft shooter, which Blizzard has reportedly wanted to build for two decades.

The cynical read is also worth mentioning. This is the first full slate under Microsoft ownership, and announcing four years of content locks in four years of funding while the rest of Xbox is being restructured around it. If history is any guide, not all of these ships on time. And three concurrently operated World of Warcraft live services out of Irvine, the most expensive place in the world to develop, is a heavy lift. Each needs content, raids, classes, races, and they are not running on the same tech. The cannibalisation question is real: what is the actual addressable market for three flavours of the same MMO?

The counterargument is that WoW is still doing somewhere between $500 million and $1.5 billion a year, subscriber-driven, with a player base that refuses to leave. Building trenches around a forever franchise is not a bad use of the money. The game peaked at five to six million subs during Cataclysm and has been sitting closer to two to three since. If three SKUs get that back toward three or four, it works.

​The full conversation on Blizzard's slate and whether it can ship.

Mobile Publisher FunPlus Made a Beautiful Pokémon Game. And It Cracked the Steam Charts.

Aniimo hit over 125,000 concurrent players on Steam on day one. From the studio best known for 4X.

​Aniimo launched September 16th on PC, PS5 and Xbox, with mobile following on September 23rd. It is a free-to-play open world creature collector from Pawprint Studio, a new label backed by FunPlus, and it cleared 125,000 concurrent players on Steam within hours. For scale, that puts it above where Delta Force peaked on day three and within reach of Once Human's 230,000. It also launched straight into Game Pass across Cloud, Console and PC.

The mechanics are the interesting part. Twining lets you merge with a captured creature rather than commanding it, which changes your combat abilities and traversal: flying, burrowing, swimming. Dynamic weather and time of day affect which creatures spawn, so rain brings out water types and storms bring out thunder types. Branching evolutions mean the same base creature can go down different paths. These are obvious design ideas that Pokémon has never committed to, and someone finally did. Over 200 creatures at launch, four-player co-op, and a PvP mode called Egg Heist.

The thing worth sitting with is who made it. FunPlus is a 4X company. Their reputation is built on systems-heavy strategy games that are not exactly celebrated for their art direction. Shipping something this visually polished, cross-platform, free-to-play and on day one across five platforms is a genuine departure, and the fact that they pulled it off at all is the story. They also skipped Epic Games Store exclusivity, which the anime-adjacent category has been quietly getting locked into.

Reviews are mixed so far, and the real test is monetization. Free-to-play creature collectors live or die on the gacha layer, and a pay-to-progress structure is very easy to bolt onto a design like this. Mobile lands next week, which is where the scale actually is.

​The full first impressions are on this week's TWIG, with deeper coverage coming next week.​

See you next Friday!

TWIG #401: Blizzard Goes All In, Roblox Breaks Out of Its Own App and Aniimo Nails Launch Day

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Watch the full This Week in Games episode where Phillip Black, Eric Kress and Josh Chandley break down:

• Roblox unveils standalone apps and browser play at RDC
• BlizzCon brings Diablo V, a StarCraft shooter and three WoW SKUs
• Microsoft pressure behind Blizzard's bold timelines
• Kojima's jumps ship from PlayStation to Xbox
• Savvy Games Group to oversee EA and PIF assets
• The ad revenue debate around hybrid casual
• WoW Forever and Blizzard's subscription strategy
• Wardogs hits 2 million sales
• FunPlus's Aniimo passes 125K CCU on Steam launch day
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