Nobody waited for permission this week.

by Purpose Made

Friday, 12 June 2026

Know someone who'd find this useful? Share this edition.

Paramount Skydance announced Paramount Games Studio on 5 June, consolidating Skydance Interactive and Skydance New Media into a single first-party division.

Tony Driscoll becomes President while remaining EVP of Corporate Strategy and Development, the role in which he leads integration planning for the roughly $110 billion Warner Bros. Discovery acquisition, still in front of regulators with a close targeted for the end of September.

Amy Hennig moves from co-president of Skydance New Media to studio creative director; her co-president Julian Beak leaves. Marvel 1943: Rise of Hydra and the untitled Star Wars project continue under the new banner.

Paramount's games business has historically been a licensing operation; last summer's Skydance merger brought studios in-house, but no unified first-party division until now.

Licensing was the rational model Hollywood settled on after Disney cancelled Infinity in 2016, took a $147 million charge, shut Avalanche Software and retreated to renting its IP out. Warner Bros. bought the discarded studio the following year, and that studio went on to make Hogwarts Legacy, the best-selling game in the U.S. in 2023. Paramount is now paying roughly $110 billion for the company that made the opposite call.

The detail that matters is Driscoll's two jobs. The man building the games division is also the man deciding where Warner Bros. Discovery's assets land. That makes Paramount Games Studio look like the receiving structure for WB Games, built while the acquisition is still waiting on regulators.

How much it receives is harder to see than it should be: WBD does not currently report games as a standalone segment, so nobody outside the building can cleanly see what the games business earns.

The best public marker is a single title. Hogwarts Legacy cleared $1.3 billion on Zaslav's own telling, from one release of one franchise in a portfolio that also holds Mortal Kombat and the DC catalogue.

Pre-building carries real risk: Netflix walked away in February on price discipline, calling the deal "no longer financially attractive" at the level required to match, and if regulators block the transaction, the reverse termination protections compensate WBD shareholders, not Paramount’s internal build-out.

And the org chart is the easy part: the new division is two Skydance teams that have yet to ship a major title together, preparing to receive studios with deeper benches and longer histories than its own, and deals like this are won or lost on what the receiving structure manages to keep in the first year after close. This read is wrong if Paramount divests WB Games after the close or folds it back into licensing.

Nothing announced points that way. You don't put your strategy chief in charge of something you plan to sell.

Sources: Variety, The Hollywood Reporter, Paramount Skydance

If you license Paramount IP for games today, model the premium tier of those rights coming home at renewal and the long tail staying licensed on worse terms. And if you are valuing the WBD transaction, price WB Games as the operating core of Paramount's stated fourth pillar, not the line item it has been in WBD's accounts.

Enjoying The Daily Digest? Refer a colleague and unlock exclusive content.

Previously: March's editions covered the $55 billion take-private by PIF, Silver Lake and Affinity Partners and the consortium's debt raise.

EA announced three President-level appointments to staff on 9 June: David Tinson becomes President, Chief Experiences Officer; Cam Weber becomes President, Chief Studios Officer, overseeing the franchise portfolio; and Laura Miele becomes President, Enterprise Development, chartered to pursue growth opportunities beyond EA's core business alongside CEO Andrew Wilson.

The restructure lands roughly three weeks before the close EA has guided for the quarter ending this month, and a month after the company reported record FY26 net bookings of $8.026 billion.

Pre-close restructures are standard practice, and they usually mean cuts, the kind that show the firm in its best light for the sale. This one adds instead: three presidencies on top of previously announced redundancies, and one role that only makes sense in relation to the buyer’s thesis.

Enterprise Development is the org-chart expression of what the consortium said it was buying: networks across gaming, entertainment and sports, and the chance to blend them. Miele set out the thesis on stage at last month's Milken Institute Global Conference, describing a future for entertainment and gaming that is "no longer confined to one space. It's immersive, interconnected, and increasingly interactive." EA is shaping itself to that thesis before anyone is in a position to direct it.

I spent years inside EA, and the company's own history reads as a sequence of redefinitions, packaged goods to digital being the last great one. The people still there see this moment the same way. Games as a category is now too narrow for what these companies actually make; entertainment experiences expressed through the medium of video games is closer to the truth, and Miele's new title says the incoming owners agree.

This read is wrong if Enterprise Development produces nothing beyond the core slate in the first year of private ownership and the presidency resolves into a title.

Sources: Electronic Arts, SEC filings, Milken Institute

Expect EA's first private-era announcements to land outside traditional games: sports, location-based entertainment, media ventures in markets adjacent to the consortium's portfolios. Model the new owners' return case on entertainment expansion, not the existing release slate.

The Senate Judiciary Committee took up the NO FAKES Act on 11 June, the first time any version of the bill has reached a committee vote in its three-year history.

S.4591 would create a federal property right in every American's voice and visual likeness, with penalties reaching $750,000 per work for platforms that distribute unauthorised AI-generated replicas. Disney, SAG-AFTRA, the RIAA, WME and CAA back it, and the White House's National AI Framework recommends it. The organised opposition is a single trade body: the ESA, whose president Stan Pierre-Louis wrote to the committee on 9 June warning that the draft poses "a real threat to existing games" and to future development in the United States.

The split is between media that controls its output and media that hands its audience the tools. A film studio clears every face that appears in its frames; it can comply with a likeness right by doing what it already does. A game ships tools. Avatar creators, character editors and user-generated platforms produce likenesses at industrial scale, made by players, after the product leaves the building. A $750,000-per-work exposure attached to that volume is a different order of liability for a games platform than for a studio that controls every frame. That asymmetry, not opposition to performer protection, is why games stand alone against a bill the rest of entertainment calls consensus. If the committee adopts the ESA's amendments and carves out expressive in-game uses, the asymmetry closes and games rejoin that consensus.

Whichever way the drafting lands, the direction is set: likeness is becoming a federally licensable asset class. For rights holders, a performer's digital replica becomes something you license the way you license a character. For anyone building digital replicas, it is a clearance cost that did not exist at your last greenlight.

Sources: Legis1, Game Developer, Entertainment Software Association

Treat digital replica clearance as a permanent line in every game, film and interactive entertainment budget from this point on. If you hold performer relationships, start pricing replica rights before the market prices them for you.

Every story this week is the same question in different clothes: what are you, and who gets to decide? Paramount answered before the regulators did. EA answered before its new owners arrived. This evening I'm putting the question to someone who has watched the industry answer it for four decades: Richard Browne, whose career runs from answering phones at Domark, where the Collyer brothers' Championship Manager cassette landed on his desk, through Psygnosis, Sony, THQ and Tencent.

We'll get into the version of it he's been pressing publicly this week: is Xbox a platform or a publisher? The numbers are being used interchangeably, and it's hard to be both.

Have a good weekend.

Which story matters most to you? Hit reply. I read every response.

The Daily Digest by Purpose Made.

Entertainment intelligence for the people shaping the future of franchises.

Purpose Made | Purpose Made Podcast

Was this forwarded to you? Subscribe, it's free.