Friday, 1 May 2026

Previously: Wednesday's 22 April edition covered the $7 Game Pass Ultimate cut and the decision to pull future Call of Duty titles from day one of the service.

Microsoft reported Q3 FY26 results on Wednesday. Group revenue was $82.9 billion, up 18%. Gaming revenue was $5.34 billion, down 7%. Xbox content and services revenue fell 5%. Xbox hardware revenue fell 33%, the second consecutive quarter of a 30%+ decline. Satya Nadella told investors Xbox set new records for monthly active users and game streaming hours in the quarter. The "We Are Xbox" memo, co-signed by Asha Sharma and Matt Booty on 23 April, names daily active players as the platform's new north star and explicitly positions Roblox-scale experiences as part of the competitive set. In her first sit-down interview, with Stephen Totilo at Game File on 24 April, Sharma declined to give a timeline on the exclusivity question raised in the same memo, saying she wants to make "the right decision, not the fastest decision."

Sources: Microsoft Q3 FY26 earnings release, "We Are Xbox" memo, Game File, GameSpot, Pure Xbox

Xbox is now growing on engagement and shrinking on revenue. That is the exact pattern Roblox and Fortnite produced for years before anyone figured out how to convert it. The difference is that Xbox is competing for the same consumer dollar as PlayStation, and PlayStation is still selling consoles into the same market. Forza Horizon 5, on figures widely reported across trade press, generated more than $300 million on PS5 alone. A platform whose biggest first-party releases can now generate hundreds of millions on rival hardware cannot reboot a console brand without taking those revenues off the table. Sharma has 60 days under her belt and a decision to make that the previous twelve years avoided.

Capcom revised its full-year forecast upward on Monday. Net sales are now projected at ¥195.3 billion (~$1.22 billion), 2.8% above prior guidance and 15.2% above last year. Net profit is up 6.9% to ¥54.5 billion. The driver is Resident Evil Requiem, which Capcom's official IR confirmed at 6 million units in mid-March and which director Koshi Nakanishi has since indicated has cleared 7 million as of late April. Capcom flagged catalogue lift in the same forecast revision, with sales growing across older titles in the back catalogue alongside the new release.

This is the second Capcom blockbuster of the year. Pragmata, a brand-new IP, sold 1 million copies in its first two days earlier this month. Onimusha: Way of the Sword is still to come.

Sources: Capcom Investor Relations, This Week in Videogames, Shacknews, VGC

Georg Zoeller's much-circulated and excellent blog post "The Video Game Industries Very Dark Night" got a lot of airtime this past week, arguing that "the AAA model looks dead, buried and not coming back" and that the industry as a whole is "uninvestable" without a credible growth narrative. Capcom is the counter-evidence. A premium, single-player, franchise-led release strategy, executed by a publisher that controls its own IP and matches its release cadence to its development capacity, is producing record revenue, record margin, and a back catalogue that gets repriced upward every time a new release lands. The value between ownership and a service economy is very real. Price it in.

Roblox reported Q1 2026 results on Thursday. Revenue was $1.44 billion, up 39% year-on-year. Bookings were $1.73 billion, up 43%. Daily active users hit 132 million, up 35%. Hours engaged reached 31 billion, up 43%. Monthly unique payers grew 52% to 31 million. The company revised full-year top-line guidance downward to absorb the friction from new age-check and communication safety measures, while management indicated DAU stabilisation and resumed growth from Q3.

Two days earlier, Starbreeze announced a second PAYDAY game on Roblox, this one developed by Gamefam (the Roblox specialist behind Sonic Speed Simulator and a 50+ game portfolio with 37 billion lifetime sessions). The first PAYDAY experience on the platform, Notoriety, has 400 million visits and a 92% approval rating. Starbreeze described Roblox as a key channel for connecting with the existing PAYDAY fanbase and building new fans inside Gen Z and Alpha audiences who don't otherwise engage with the franchise's PC and console releases.

Sources: Roblox Q1 2026 earnings, Game Developer, Starbreeze, MarketScreener, PC Gamer

The revenue argument against Roblox has been made and is well understood. The platform takes a meaningful cut, the average creator payout is small, and the safety measures are now putting top-of-funnel friction on the user-acquisition story. None of that changes the structural point. In a content environment where anything that ships gets copied within weeks (a dozen Peak clones inside two months on Steam was the most recent example), the asset that actually compounds is trust.

Trust is built through repeated low-stakes contact with an audience inside spaces they already inhabit. Roblox is the largest of those spaces under one roof, and the development cost-to-reach ratio compares favourably to running a Steam launch and hoping the trailer carries the trend. Aaron Loeb, formerly of Scopely and EA and now founding president of LEGO Digital Play, made the same argument on Deconstructor of Fun last summer in his first interview after taking the role: "What great brands do is build trust with their consumers. The companies that have tried to just move fast and make as much money as they can as quickly as they can, they break those promises all the time. And in a world where trust is going to become more and more important, they are going to be in real trouble."

For franchise architects modelling release strategy in 2026: Roblox is no longer a discoverability sideshow. It is a place to cultivate the audience before launch rather than buy them after. PAYDAY's two-experience strategy is the live test. Watch what happens to PAYDAY's sell-through on the next mainline release if the Roblox audience does the work trailers like Battlefield 1 used to do.

Talking of Battlefield, Christopher McQuarrie is set to write, direct and produce a feature adaptation of EA's Battlefield. Michael B. Jordan, fresh off his Oscar win for Sinners, is attached to produce through Outlier Society and is in conversations to star. The Hollywood Reporter said the package was pitched to studios and streamers including Apple and Sony on Thursday 24 April. The Wrap reported five studios are now in active bidding. EA is producing.

The signal underneath the package is that Battlefield 6 sold enough in 2025 to make this credible, with the franchise overtaking Call of Duty in annual sales rankings for the first time. The McQuarrie attachment imports the Mission: Impossible tactical-realism playbook directly. EA's release window is currently being modelled at late 2027 or 2028.

The transmedia question for franchise architects is not whether the film gets made but how the rights deal is structured. Call of Duty's adaptation is at Paramount with Peter Berg and Taylor Sheridan. Battlefield's competitive bidding is reaching the territory of a Mario-style co-production, where Nintendo co-financed the Universal feature on a 50/50 basis and retained the IP rights. The deal that gets signed will reset the going rate for every shooter franchise behind it, and what separates the winning bid from the losing four is the same thing that has separated successful adaptations from the rest for fifteen years.

Sources: The Hollywood Reporter, Deadline, The Wrap, TechSpot

Related: Dmitri M. Johnson and Mike Goldberg of Story Kitchen on why the studios that respect the source material win the adaptation game and the ones that don't keep losing it (Purpose Made Podcast).

The conversion problem in the four stories above sits on top of something deeper, and I've spent a chunk of this week working through what that deeper thing is. The exercise was meant to inform a second IP I'm developing. What it produced was a wider read on where audience appetite is actually sitting in 2026, across games, film, TV and books.

Audiences in 2026 are hyper-connected and structurally alone. They can buy attention, validation, and time. They cannot buy history, trust, or belonging. The communities they live in neither support them nor hold them responsible. That is the cultural condition every successful 2026 IP is responding to, and it is also the reason conversion has become the harder half of the equation. Attention is cheap to rent and difficult to own. What audiences are actually paying for is a relationship that feels like it belongs to them.

The single structural shift sitting underneath the cultural condition that I'd flag now, is this: temperature has replaced genre as the primary navigational axis. Audiences in 2026 are not navigating by what kind of story it is. They are navigating by how it makes them feel. Dread or specific-warmth. The middle is empty. An IP that tries to sit in tonal centrism finds no audience because no audience is looking there. Meanwhile, the 2026 audience is the most digitally connected population in human history and the loneliest.

Two structural overlays sit underneath everything else, and they govern how this audience can actually be reached. Audiences in 2026 are hyper-aware of being managed. They reject spectacle that feels inauthentic, communal triumph without specificity, and warmth that has not been earned. The studios that win the next decade will be the ones that stop performing for the audience and start showing up alongside it.

If you'd like a more detailed read of the full eight-pattern set, the platform-as-temperament overlay, the velocity-versus-appetite distinction, and what it implies for original IP development, useful for your own greenlight process and/or development conversations, drop me a note at the links shared below and I'll share the full piece.

Have a good Friday and a great weekend. Ours will mostly revolve around childcare, trying out the much hyped Saros, and hoping Aston Villa play their reserves to aid the mighty yet injury-depleted Tottenham Hotspur in our quest to avoid relegation.

Until next time.

Pete

The Daily Digest by Purpose Made. Entertainment intelligence for the people shaping the future of franchises. Written by Pete Bell, founder of Purpose Made and host of the Purpose Made Podcast.