Game Industry Weekly — May 2, 2026
Hey hey, game developers!
Gamescom Latam wraps up tomorrow in São Paulo, and the week gave me a lot to think about. Wednesday night the BIG Festival Awards took place at the event, and Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 walked away with Best Game and Best Audio, which at this point feels less like a surprise and more like another chapter in a story that's been building for almost a year. The game has crossed 8 million copies sold worldwide and is still collecting trophies from industry juries in different markets. When something connects that deeply, the industry keeps finding ways to say so.
Brazil's dev scene: the talent is there, the investment isn't
GamesIndustry.biz spent the week at Gamescom Latam and published a really solid read on where the Brazilian games scene actually stands. The quote that stuck with me came from Eliana Russi, who heads B2B at the event, when asked what the scene needs to reach the next level: "Show me the money. We have everything. I guarantee."
And the facts do back her up. Brazil has a legal framework for games, Abragames functions as a real trade body, the event generated $150 million in contracts over three days, and the show floor was full of interesting projects from Brazilian developers. One story from the coverage that stayed with me: Black Sailors, from Mandinga Games in Bahia, a game where enslaved people seize a ship and take to the open sea. Its creator, Tiago de Melo Prudente, was only able to go full-time on the project after a government grant from the Paulo Gustavo law, and that first step is what eventually opened the door to an undisclosed investment from ID@Xbox. The whole chain depended on an entry point that's still genuinely hard to access for most people.
The conversation about tax incentives and public funding for game development isn't new, but Gamescom Latam gave it a more concrete face this week, and I think that matters.
What Xbox is measuring now
An internal memo from Xbox leaders Asha Sharma and Matt Booty went public this week, and the central message is worth paying attention to: "The model that got us here won't be the one that takes us forward." The platform is rethinking exclusivity and has announced daily active users as its new primary success metric for games, and the financials already reflect where this is heading: hardware revenue dropped 33% year-on-year in Q3 while monthly active users hit a record.
What this means in practice is that Xbox is increasingly measuring a game's value by how long it keeps people around, not just how many copies it sold. A single-player experience that people finish and never return to reads differently in that framework than a game that sustains an active community for months, and for anyone thinking about platform strategy for an upcoming release, this reframing is genuinely worth factoring in.
Sony's DRM situation and what it tells us about digital trust
Sony spent part of this week managing a conversation it hadn't planned to have. Reports surfaced that PlayStation had quietly added a 30-day verification check for digital game licenses without any public announcement, players reacted immediately, and Sony clarified that the check is a one-time thing and not a recurring timer, with no risk of anyone losing access to games they'd bought. The clarification eventually landed, but the episode is a useful reminder that player trust around digital ownership is still pretty thin. Any move a platform makes in that space, even a harmless one, gets read through a lens of suspicion, and if you're distributing exclusively through digital storefronts, that dynamic is part of your relationship with your audience whether you think about it or not.
GameMaker brings AI into the actual workflow
GameMaker announced that it's integrating Claude Code into its new command-line interface, so developers can now describe what they want to build in natural language and have AI handle the more repetitive technical tasks, things like querying project structures, tracking bugs, or managing build configurations. GameMaker head Russell Kay was clear that this is opt-in and meant to complement the creative process rather than replace it, which is the right framing. What's worth noting is that major development tools are no longer treating AI as a marketing feature: it's being built into real production workflows, and the entry-level technical barrier for getting something running is going to drop as a result. The barrier to making something worth playing stays exactly where it is.
Two indie results that close out the week
Clair Obscur's BIG Festival win is one more data point in a story that's been building for a while, and the 8 million copies sold figure keeps holding. Windrose from Kraken Express hit 1 million copies in six days, peaking at 200,000 concurrent players on Steam. The market is genuinely saturated, but both of these are good reminders that saturation isn't the same as closed, and games that find their audience still have real room to succeed.
This is the first Saturday edition, and I'm committing to keeping it weekly from here. If you read this far, I really appreciate it, and I'd genuinely like to hear what caught your attention this week or what you think is worth covering in the next one.
Take care and see you next Saturday, and if you want to follow along on industriadejogos.com.br as well, the door is open.
