🚨📢 BREAKING NEWS: Netflix heartbroken after WB, Disney AI fun, Meta losing $70B 🤯

Speaker 1 Game of the Year awards, which is drumroll Pokémon TCG, which also won three weeks ago the Google Play Game of the Year. So, no surprise here.

Speaker 1 I'm still playing the game, even though I'm just opening the packs, but they are still crushing it. And yeah, they were over 1 billion in the first year.

Speaker 1 Two and a half gamers exclusive

Speaker 1 breaking news,

Speaker 1 Literally breaking. Hello, hello.
Newsroll, literally, as we get into the breaking news today and break down the most important stories of the week of the 8th of December for you.

Speaker 1 So lots of stuff happening. Yeah, there will be pretty interesting things.
So stay tuned and let's get to it. So the biggest news of the week is, of course, Netflix bid for Warner Bros.

Speaker 1 which is the big media conglomerate that owns like lots of IPs basically.

Speaker 1 stuff like Batman for instance Netflix is pretty much going after all the content there to kind of integrate it in its platform but the deal was to be something like 8280 82.783 billion basically but the kicker is of course the counterbid by paramount which did an all cash deal of 108 billion

Speaker 1 which was kind of a presented as hostile kind of deal because the board should then down so they went to shareholders directly if I understand

Speaker 1 But the thing is that this is all cash deal compared to Netflix one which is cash and stock and also the problem that because Netflix would then own the third biggest

Speaker 1 streaming platform

Speaker 1 it could also end up at FTC regulation commissioner it could actually be blocked as for monopoly reasons

Speaker 1 yeah we are looking at this battle from the sidelines. It's kind of quite interesting.

Speaker 1 The latest that I read on this is that

Speaker 1 Paramount or the guys there, Elisa, will actually raise

Speaker 1 the pit even higher by 10% from $30 a share to $33 a share to kind of force this and pretty much be the winner here. So let's see what happens.

Speaker 1 And yeah, it seems still that by regulatory reasons, the Trump government is maybe more positive about Paramount taking it instead of Netflix. So let's see how that goes.

Speaker 1 But again, it's gonna be very interesting. The Assault into the Wounds was also shared this week where Netflix

Speaker 1 Gregory Peters said on investor call that the whole whole Warner Brothers gaming division is pretty much attributed zero value and it's relatively minor compared to the grand scheme of things.

Speaker 1 So yeah, that's also quite interesting, especially for us in the gaming industry.

Speaker 1 That Netflix, as we know, doesn't have any reliable gaming strategy, even though they try to pause as they have, but they don't.

Speaker 1 So, nothing new here, and it's just kind of confirms that they don't have an idea how to run a gaming business, and this is not even their goal here.

Speaker 1 They have it as some kind of nice-to-have afterthought. What they're really going after is the Warner Bros.
IPs, of course, because

Speaker 1 IPs are very important.

Speaker 1 Yeah, we'll see how this goes. My bet is that the Paramount will probably win, but let's see.
Because again,

Speaker 1 bidding war always ends up, I guess, surprisingly here. Anyway, let's move on.
The other quite interesting news of the week is with big corporations, Voldisnip

Speaker 1 partnering with OpenAI, basically, in this kind of Langmar agreement.

Speaker 1 where they will actually allow their characters and IP, 200 characters, basically to be generated by OpenAI on their Sora platform and then they can have of course those characters streamed and used at Disney Plus as some kind of user generated content I guess in their streaming platform and also as part of the agreement this they will make a 1 billion equity investment in open AI yeah this is really interesting because yeah just of the context of the whole AI thing like usually it's the other way around where all these kind of IP holders are against AI because it's learning based on their copyright and material without permissions, yada yada yada.

Speaker 1 But here we actually get to the, you know, if you can't beat them, join them kind of a deal. So this is super interesting.
And yeah, we'll see. Because

Speaker 1 ChatGPT, I mean, OpenAI itself is kind of lacking lately. I know that they just today released ChatGPT 5.2.
So let's see how that release goes because we still don't have the full reviews.

Speaker 1 But yeah, Google is kind of crushing it with Gemini and their kind of AI capabilities. So these guys guys really need to catch up.

Speaker 1 They still have the first movie advantage and the giant user base which produces all the data that their model learns on.

Speaker 1 But again, others are catching up and not even talking about the open source community in China. So let's see how that goes.

Speaker 1 But it's quite interesting, especially also for us as for the IP kind of a context and what will happen to it. Anyway, that was most of the major news.
Let's get to the smaller ones now.

Speaker 1 So we got Duolingo doing a collaboration with Genshin Impact. This is quite interesting where players actually get to complete a three-day

Speaker 1 quest in Duolingo

Speaker 1 for some bunch of rewards, mainly primer gems, which is the hard currency in Genshin Impact.

Speaker 1 So you do the streak in Duolingo and then you get to redeem those gems somewhere like on the end of December.

Speaker 1 Yeah, this just confirms the trend of Duolingo being more and more kind of catering towards the Camodians.

Speaker 1 And there's been like a number of complaints lately that I've seen that like, again, the app is actually breaking its own philosophy of being a learning app rather than just being a gamified app as it is.

Speaker 1 Like, we, for instance, covered Impulse. So, let's see how this goes.

Speaker 1 The stock is down pretty harsh, but again, yeah, I guess they know what they're doing, but uh, learning is not the priority, it seems.

Speaker 1 But yeah, quite interesting if this is gonna go into different IP collaboration with different games. Then, we have the results of the App Store

Speaker 1 Game of the Year awards, which is drumroll Pokemon TCG which also won three weeks ago the Google Play game of the year so no surprise here I'm still playing the game even though I'm just opening the packs but they're still crushing it and yeah they were over 1 billion the first year of revenue and they're i think they're currently the biggest pokemon team game on the mobile masters they have like double revenue of pokemon go now so let's see and yeah fingers goes for scope to turn this around i guess then we have some minor news from activision that they'll change their call of duty release schedule because it seems it is does isn't working that well even though the press release doesn't mention that but yeah from all the data sources we see that like yeah black ops 7 didn't really sell that well so i guess this is the same thing that happened with marvel so they won't be releasing these games back to back uh to a year but rather in like one a year's schedule which means that again same thing that happened to marvel marvel next year is just releasing two movies because those movies aren't really doing much after end game.

Speaker 1 So let's see how this one goes. And then we have some, again, nice news by Merchmayer.

Speaker 1 This was taken from Pocket Gamer Biz, where again, sending regards to Anti, where he goes into detail how the team actually utilizes AI and goes full on with it by asset creation and speeding up stuff such as prototyping and all these other things.

Speaker 1 Yep, this is just great positive news. I'm all for AI and for realistic use of it with kind of a, you know, we know what we're doing, we're not just following the hype, so that's great.

Speaker 1 It's tough there. Then we continue.

Speaker 1 The Rockstar saga continues, which if you don't know, Rockstar, the makers of GTA, they recently fired 34 staff for gross misconduct as the official reason, but of course everybody's talking about that.

Speaker 1 For the real reason was they were trying to force a union, which is something that American people don't really like, as not in Europe, where we have thousands of unions.

Speaker 1 Yeah, so this is still ongoing case and I guess there will be some lawsuits happening in the future. Then we have Meta planning massive cuts finally to the Reality Labs Metaverse division.

Speaker 1 I've seen videos lately about this division being pretty much 70 billion in minus now. This whole metaverse dream that Zuk made is quite costly.

Speaker 1 And they're losing still somewhere around 5 billion per quarter. Or that was the last kind of a setup.
so

Speaker 1 yeah i guess what's happening here that they're just changing the hype cycle and moving from vr to ai so i guess all the resources everything will just move there and ai will kind of be again put on a lifeline a very small one so no more five billion a quarter burn rate so let's see what happens there then we have of course today is the game awards kind of

Speaker 1 show where you can get the fullest I'm sorry when you can get the biggest show pretty much the gaming Oscar so that's currently being watched by millions of people around the world.

Speaker 1 Again, game of the year nominees, we can just go through there. Claire Obscure, that's trending to Donkey Kong Bonanza 80s to Hollow Knight, Silk Song, Kingdom Come Deliverance.

Speaker 1 My bet is either on Claire Obscure or Kingdom Come Deliverance, because again, this just puts the context of the time of

Speaker 1 everybody's moving to double A instead of triple A. The other interesting thing here is that, yeah, best mobile game of the year, year.

Speaker 1 The nominees are rather confusing because there's stuff like Sony Grumble, which is in Soft Lunch, or Persona 5 Destiny Rising, no Kink Shot.

Speaker 1 There's Umamusume there, which I'm hoping it will win because it's amazing, even though it was released in 2021. But again, Western release just this year, so my bet's there.
But yeah, let's see.

Speaker 1 And then, last one, yeah, Google is planning to use, of course, expected Gemini for an ad network, so they'll bring ads to it in 2026.

Speaker 1 Let's see how that one goes. That was the roundup for this week.
Uh, yep, thanks very much, and see you next time. Nice day, bye-bye.