Erst- und Zweitliga-Erfahrung: FWK holt Nathan de Medina

It's easy to feel like the videogame industry is an endless tornado of shattered dreams and hellfire, and that's because it is. But it also brings in a lot of money, and our beloved PC gaming space in particular is growing faster than both mobile and console markets. Thursday, a report from Alinea Analytics said Steam is just exiting its biggest six months ever.

"In the first half of 2026, we estimate that games on Steam generated $11.1B in gross revenue, the platform’s highest-ever half-year," wrote Rhys Elliott, Alinea's head of market analysis. "That’s up 14.5% on H1 2025, and up 8% even on the holiday-heavy H2 2025, which is the more remarkable comparison given the back half of the year usually wins on seasonal sales and holiday buys."

The full blog highlights some of the biggest reasons for all this growth: new games are more expensive, friendslop megahits like Meccha Chameleon rake in mountains of cash before you can blink, and third parties like Ubisoft are back on Steam after they tried and failed to escape Gabe's dread labyrinth to play ball with Steam's lessers.

The full list of causes and takeaways is in the blog, but this all follows a very long upward trend: as the report states, Steam's yearly revenue has gone from $5.5 billion in 2017 to roughly $20 billion in 2025. A growing percentage of all those sales is from old games, too: so far, "just 21%" of Steam's 2026 revenue has come from games that released this year, down from 29% in 2024.

That said, plenty of new games have been big moneymakers so far: the top five in terms of gross revenue for new games are Forza Horizon 6, Resident Evil Requiem, Crimson Desert, Slay the Spire 2, and Subnautica 2 (Meccha Chameleon snuck into sixth place). It might be especially galling to see a first-party Xbox game at the top of that list given, you know, everything. It's hard to imagine this growth will continue—or even amount to much—if the industry's biggest companies continue to destroy the teams they depend on.

The latest EA Sports College Football game has finally arrived, which is tantalizing news if you were excited for the series' hotly anticipated comeback a couple years ago. Less tantalizing is the game's reception, which so far has been marred by widespread backlash to its egregious microtransactions. Complaining works: in a post on X yesterday, the official CFB account said those microtransactions are out.

"Your feedback on Road to Glory and Dynasty is that we've missed the mark with the introduction of paid progression options," the statement reads. Notably, Road to Glory is a single-player mode (in a game that already costs $70)—a prominent point of contention amid the negative feedback.

"This was added independent of deeper mode progression with the aim to give players more choice … tomorrow morning, we will remove all paid progression options from Road to Glory and Online Dynasty." That's today, so if you were planning to dump some change into those modes, you may have missed your chance.

The backlash was led in part by YouTuber Bordeaux, who got the hashtag "#CFBPlayDontPay" trending on social media. In response to the statement from EA, he posted "we did it" with a clip from Breaking Bad: Walter White saying "I won." Fans are generally elated—"Never let anyone tell you that organizing against giant corporations doesn't do anything," said Reddit user UnrealAce on a thread approaching 5,000 upvotes. "They tell you it doesn't work so you don't try because they KNOW that it works."

"Organizing" might be a strong word given that EA folded in a matter of days and it's not like anyone marched on the developer's offices, but it's hard to argue with the results. That said, it doesn't necessarily seem like the beast is dead.

A line in EA's post notes, "Our goal for live service plans in CFB28 and beyond will be to deliver valuable features and content with greater transparency and communication." Given that and the lines stating EA "missed the mark with the introduction of paid progression options … they're not adding the value we intended," the statement suggests the problem here was merely the rollout and not the notion of paid progression itself.