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Jay-Z Announced as 2027 Super Bowl Halftime Show Performer
It will be the eighth Super Bowl halftime show produced by Roc Nation, the entertainment and sports company founded by the rapper and businessman.
Super Bowl 2027 halftime show headliner revealed
Jay-Z will headline the Super Bowl 2027 halftime show, with the rapper set to lead the biggest music event of the year at the NFL’s big game.
Britain Covey leaves Monday vs. Cowboys with knee injury
Philadelphia Eagles wide receiver/kick returner Britain Covey left the Week 7 game in the first half due to a knee injury, and he has been ruled out.
JYP Entertainment soars 10% on reports of tender offer plan to buy up to half of firm
South Korean pop music agency JYP Entertainment's KRX:035900 shares jumped 10% on Tuesday after Korean media reported Japan's Nexroc Group and related firm SVCV Inc were planning to announce a tender offer to buy up to a 50% stake in the company.The 50% stake is worth about 700 billion won ($528.04…
Bolsonaro effectively concedes in Brazil after Trump suggests he won’t help
Trump says the presidential election looked “rigged” but did not say he planned to intervene on behalf of the right-wing politician.
Trump has made transactional promises in roughly half of states holding key Senate contests
President Donald Trump kicked off his general election push by making voters a highly controversial offer. Now he’s gone quite a bit further — and more localized — with his quid pro quos.
Survey: More Than Half of Women in States with Abortion Bans Wouldn’t Know Where to Get an Abortion if They Needed One, Up Since 2024
More than half (53%) of reproductive-age women living in states with abortion-provision bans say they would not know where to go or where to find information if they needed an abortion, up from 43% in 2024, according to a new KFF survey.
2026 Internet Invitational episode 1 spoilers: Round 1 teams revealed
Half of the 64-player field will be eliminated at the end of the 2026 Internet Invitational's first episode.
Halide’s Duo update just knocked an item off my camera wish list.
Halide III just got its iPhone Duo update with re-worked controls for the new screen formats and a feature that Apple’s native camera app left out: a waist-level viewfinder. When you use the phone in its L-shaped pose the image preview will appear on the top portion of the screen. I was hoping I’d be able to move the preview to the lower half of the screen and use it like a classic Hasselblad camera. It’s a nerdy little detail, but Halide is made by nerds, for nerds, and I appreciate that. [Link: Halide for Duo: Electric Boogaluo | https://www.lux.camera/halide-for-duo/ | Lux — iPhone camera apps, camera reviews and more]
Oppo Find X10 Pro Max Review: The Incredible Triple 200MP Cameras Are Only Half the Story
It's more like a camera that is also a phone than a phone with a camera.
6 citizens sue Trump, saying media ban deprives them of news as audience stakeholders
A new lawsuit against President Donald Trump's media ban stakes a claim for the public itself. The lawsuit was filed on behalf of six ordinary citizens. It argues that Trump's
Cherokee Federal company awarded contract to strengthen US Navy fleet readiness
Cherokee Nation Government Solutions, a Cherokee Federal company, has been awarded a $99.3 million, five-and-a-half-year contract through a competitive small business set-aside under the SeaPort-NxG contract vehicle.
What happened to Meghan Markle’s dad Thomas Markle? Child pornography scandal explained
The Duchess of Sussex’s half-brother Thomas Markle Jr. has accused their father of possessing a “huge stash” of child pornography.
📈 Monday data: The bottleneck isn’t intelligence
In the AI Investment Brief today: CapEx updates and lease commitment breakdowns Anthropic co-founder Jack Clark recently said in a speech at the IMF that the singularity has begun: For many years, researchers and science fiction authors have forecast a future in which AI systems drastically increase the pace of overall scientific and technical progress, making things move so quickly that it is hard for humans to keep up. They call this the singularity. I believe that this year we have gained convincing evidence that it has now begun. This follows Anthropic’s claim that in August, 26% of its AI R&D was led by Claude, with a human supervising its work. In October, OpenAI posted 719 math manuscripts1 made by its internal model. Math and coding are two fields where a research loop can close without leaving the desk. But can the loop close in the rest of science? Subscribe The loop is real The idea is not new. Mathematician Irving John Good, who had worked with Alan Turing at Bletchley Park, argued that a machine smarter than us “could design even better machines; there would then unquestionably be an ‘intelligence explosion,’ and the intelligence of man would be left far behind.” The Gödel machine, a self-improving computer that can rewrite its own code better than its prior, was first proposed in 2003. In 2025, researchers at Sakana AI and the University of British Columbia set out to show that this was possible. Their agents iteratively improved their own code through a feedback loop, resulting in gains of 30 pp on SWE-bench and more than 15 pp on Polyglot, testing coding skills beyond Python. The idea has since been tested in other labs. A Gemini-powered agent called AlphaEvolve found a faster matrix multiplication kernel used for training Gemini, speeding up the kernel by 23% and cutting Gemini’s training time by 1%. In China, MiniMax reported that its M2.7 model worked on improving its own agent’s harness, skills, sampling and memory. Over 100 rounds of rewriting led to a 30% gain, per its internal evaluations. In each case, what was being rewritten was not the model itself but everything around it. Is it better than human work? In September this year, in what seemed like a milestone, an AI-built agent proved as good at improving other AI agents as a human-built one. It did that in what appeared to be half the steps. But the result was inconclusive: the differences between runs were greater than the difference between the AI- and human-built agent results. Nonetheless, this is increasing the chatter around recursive self-improvement (RSI) in AI. Google’s Sundar Pichai said that “you have RSI loops along with AI researchers in various aspects of model development.” Sakana AI published a paper on RSI through multi-agent collaboration, finding that after two cycles its system scored 1.2–1.6x better per output token than the base model across four research benchmarks. Ramez Naam challenges that view. He splits AI self-improvement into five overlapping types. The first four describe how autonomous the AI is; so far, only types 1 and 2 have been observed. The fifth type describes accelerating returns, and he notes that greater autonomy doesn’t guarantee a takeoff scenario. Instead, each round of self-improvement would need to deliver at least as much as the last. The results from Sakana, AlphaEvolve and MiniMax above might look like type 3 or type 4 autonomy. But in each case, the AI wasn’t updating its own weights directly, only the ancillary parts — the harness, the memory. And where Claude leads its own R&D, for now a human still supervises.
“Breaking Bad” star RJ Mitte’s sister pays tribute to late brother: ‘I just lost my other half’
Lacianne Carriere shared photos and videos from her brother’s life on Instagram.
Exclusive: Health tech PE megadeals surge as deal volume drops
The average health care buyout size jumped to $3.4 billion in the first half of 2026.
At this Columbus school, getting to know students starts at their door
Rough half of Horizon Science Academy high school's students are immigrants. Teachers are required to make eight home visits a year.
Xavier Worthy locked down in Week 7 loss
Xavier Worthy caught half of his six targets for a measly 11 yards during the team's 20-3 defeat against the Seahawks.
The Rise of Independent Voters Is Reshaping American Politics
In this Fulcrum Roundtable discussion, Jeremy Gruber of Open Primaries explains why voters are leaving the major parties, how closed primaries limit participation, and what reforms could expand representation for nearly half the country.
High school sports roundup for Oct. 23-24, 2026
Friday, Oct. 23 Football Meadowdale defeated Lynnwood 48-0 The Meadowdale Mavericks jumped out to a 41-0 halftime lead en route to a 48-0 shutout win over the Lynnwood Royals. The […]
🎥 Drama galore as LAFC and Galaxy finish level
There were major fireworks in Los Angeles as the city's two bitter rivals, LAFC and LA Galaxy finished level in a crucial MLS showdown. The Galaxy had a two-goal lead in the second half and looked w...
Holland Taylor says ‘Two and a Half Men’ ‘never paid me very well,’ even after 4 Emmy noms
Holland Taylor is looking back on her 12-season run on ‘Two and a Half Men,’ during which time, she claims she never got a raise: ‘I loved a lot about that show, but they were not full of courtesies.’
Early voting underway in Michigan
Early voting began Saturday, Oct. 24 in Michigan. County officials say the first day of early voting went well and more than half of mail-in ballots have already been returned.
Bengals Shut out in Disastrous First Half vs Ravens
The Cincinnati Bengals are off to a first half they’d like to forget. Cincy trails the Baltimore Ravens 13-0 in Baltimore.The story has been the Cincinnati Bengals’ defense which has been struggling against this Ravens offense.The Ravens got off to a hot start as Zay Flowers took a 48-yard pass to the house from backup […] The post Bengals Shut out in Disastrous First Half vs Ravens appeared first on HEAVY.
Here's how Bengals' second half vs Ravens made NFL history
The Cincinnati Bengals became just the 10th team in NFL history to get shut out in the first half and then score 35 points or more in the second half.
Here's how Bengals' second half vs Ravens made NFL history
The Cincinnati Bengals became just the 10th team in NFL history to get shut out in the first half and then score 35 points or more in the second half.
Ravens surrender 35 unanswered points in stunning loss to Bengals
Baltimore squandered a 13-0 halftime lead as Joe Burrow threw four touchdown passes and Cincinnati handed the Ravens a 35-13 defeat
How Nathan Fielder's cringe-comedy career led him to Elizabeth Holmes
Spoiler alert! We're discussing the themes and structure of the Elizabeth Holmes documentary "You Can See Everything" and touching on a surprising aspect of its second half, so turn away if you want to go in completely cold.
Stateliner Pride on Display: Phillipsburg Band and Alumni Unite at Halftime
Phillipsburg’s Stateliner band and alumni joined for a halftime performance celebrating school tradition, pride and community at Friday’s football game.
World's Fastest Lawnmower Company Is Officially Going Out Of Business
Dixie Chopper made the world's raddest lawnmowers for almost half a century, but its story is now coming to an end.
US employer health insurance premiums exceed $28,000 for family coverage in 2026
US employer health insurance premiums rose 5% in 2026, exceeding $28,000 for family coverage, while nearly half of working-age adults lack adequate coverage
Browns Week 7 fantasy start-sit: Boston, Judkins, Fannin, Concepcion
Tennessee has allowed the 10th-most half-PPR points to receivers, while Dylan Sampson’s return from injured reserve threatens Quinshon Judkins’ receiving work.
Takeaways from Colorado's disastrous 57-24 loss to Oklahoma State
Oklahoma State fell to Colorado after an abysmal second-half collapse. Here are five takeaways from the Buffaloes' fifth straight loss.
CBS News political experts weigh in on Texas Senate race halfway through early voting
The latest CBS News poll showed Talarico leading 51% to 49%, well within the margin for error.
UCLA’s perfect start has one glaring flaw it must fix soon
Bob Chesney has made UCLA the second-half darlings of college football, but the Bruins must address their slow starts if they hope to reach the playoff.
Guest Commentary: How anti-Muslim politics endangers every Floridian
The political caricature of Muslims as a national security threat bears little resemblance to the reality that Floridians are living, working, and raising families in peace with nearly half a million Muslims woven into the fabric of the state.
Job-based health plan costs rise, with little relief in sight
Nearly half of large employers have increased the amount their workers must pay for health insurance — a response to rising premiums.
Cowboys Standout in Second Half in Win Over Colorado
Oklahoma State's defense stifled Deion Sanders’ Buffaloes while the offense exploded for 37 unanswered points, turning a halftime deficit into a dominant Homecoming rout at Boone Pickens Stadium.
Takeaways from BYU’s Exhibition Win Over UNLV
BYU finished off its preseason slate with an 89-77 exhibition road win over UNLV Saturday afternoon in Las Vegas. BYU won a closed scrimmage 102-53 versus Long Beach State, beat Nebraska 72-61 last week, and closed things out with a double-digit win over the Rebels. BYU trailed 42-30 late in the first half, but ended […]
Colorado's collapse brings more scrutiny on Deion Sanders
Colorado's 57-24 loss to Oklahoma State raises questions about Deion Sanders and his staff after a second-half collapse extended the losing streak.
Simply unbelievable! Neymar sent off under the 'Vini Jr law'
Neymar's Saturday night (24th) borders on the unbelievable.After halftime in Santos' 1–0 loss to Bahia at Vila Belmiro, the star No. 10 CONTINUED taunting Rodrigo Nestor before play resumed at the s...
Lamar dominates second half to end Houston Christian's winning streak
Lamar took control of a close game in the second half to deny Houston Christian its third consecutive win.
Obama rips into Ramaswamy over attack ad: ‘There’s no line he won’t cross’
The Ramaswamy campaign cut in half the length of the ad featuring Amy Acton’s estranged mother after the spot sparked an uproar.
Austin Hedges’ Future With the Guardians Appears Uncertain
Austin Hedges has been an important piece of the Cleveland Guardians roster for the last half-decade, but there's no guarantee he's back in 2027.
Demichelis' Gamble Pays Off As Leipzig Crush Elversberg 4-0
After a tactical reshuffle, the Red Bulls maintained their flawless home record as Rômulo’s clinical double and Christoph Baumgartner’s emotional return ignited a dominant four-goal second-half blitz.
Indiana stays alive against Michigan, gets 13-6 overtime win in grueling defensive snoozefest
The Hoosiers were held scoreless in the second half by the Wolverines defense, but were able to get a key overtime touchdown to pull off the ugly win.
Netflix’s Leadership Shake Up…Explained
(Welcome to the “Most Important Story of the Week”, my bi-weekly strategy column analyzing the most important (but often not buzziest) news story of the last two weeks. I’m the Entertainment Strategy Guy, a former streaming executive who now analyzes business strategy in the entertainment industry. Please subscribe.) Well, I had a simple article planned for this week. Called “Whoa, I Missed It!”, I’d take a gander at a few important-but-under-the-radar stories I didn’t cover while I wrote about all things “Skydance. (Formerly known as “the saga of Netflix trying to buy Warner Bros., but not Discovery, then Paramount-Skydance bought all of Warner Bros. Discovery”.) Alas, that article will have to wait. Netflix made news. Ironically, my “Whoa, I Missed It!” article would have mostly been about “content” strategy decisions, which is also what today’s article is about. But instead of the entire industry, this article will only cover Netflix’s decision to upend their film and TV content teams. Just that! So that’s the full topic of the day. I’m going to tackle the issue in the opposite direction of the way “stuff” flows: uphill. We’ll start at film, then move onto TV, and then onto the CEOs themselves, and the strategy questions that still remain. But we start with the numbers driving this. Let’s dive in. Subscribe Most Important Story of the Week - Netflix Upends Their Corporate Hierarchy I’ve got a lot of thoughts, but we’ll start with the most common response to yesterday’s article. Let’s Talk Stock Price More than one person, responding to what I published two days ago, pointed out that, well, actually, the thing driving Netflix’s actions is this: In short, stock price! Even if Netflix isn’t obsessed with their own share price—they probably are, but, for the record, my strategic advice to every CEO is to absolutely ignore stock prices, which will, ironically, probably help the stock price long-term—most everyone thinks they are. By the way, I prefer market capitalization to stock prices, because it’s a more apples-to-apples way to compare companies: But there’s an even better way to look at it, and it kinda casts some doubt on the entire push here: price-to-earnings. I have a long list of articles that I wish I had written, and chief among them is an article titled, “Am I Still a Netflix ‘Bear’?” meaning someone who thinks Netflix’s stock is overvalued. As of last summer, Netflix had solved their biggest problem—which for me (circa 2019) was the lack of free cash flow—but their stock was CRAZY overvalued. That’s this chart here: Why did Netflix’s stock price increase to a price-to-earnings ratio of 50 last summer? What financial metric changed so quickly? Nothing. Given that, historically, mature entertainment companies average 10 to 20, with 16 being the average, that increase made little sense. Netflix’s stock swoon these last eight or so months wasn’t irrational; the stock price rise last year was. So if you want a really hot Netflix take, here it is: Netflix’s stock price has been going down because the financial industry recovered its senses, not because of any strategic mistake. Yes, that would imply that cleaning house may have been a mistake. That’s why the charts yesterday are so important, because they show that Netflix did have a strategic problem (a lack of hits) and that’s what they moved to address. (One could also argue the industry drastically overrated Netflix’s growth prospects, but that’s a financial industry problem, not a Netflix strategy problem per se. Some growth estimates are just crazy. *cough* AI *cough*) Now, the last time Netflix’s stock price crashed—circa 2022—it gave them an opening. I’d argue Netflix insiders knew they needed to expand post-COVID-19 crisis, adding advertising, cracking down on password sharing, and dabbling in sports. But if they had done that when their stock price was high, it would give folks a reason to second guess their strategy. (Arguably, last year, when Netflix pursued the Warner Bros. merger, it gave the industry a chance to review their business.) Instead, after the 2022 fall, they had the opening to make strategic changes. We may see Netflix pivot again following this latest slide. For example, the “binge versus weekly” conversation is alive and well again. Same for expanding into theaters even more. And adding both linear channels and streaming bundles. And maybe more either social, user-generated, vertical, or creator content. But the first shift came with who is making the content calls. A Message from Our Sponsor Last winter Pulp Fiction was on Netflix. For those same 90 days, it was also free, with ads, on Pluto TV and the Roku Channel. That is not a glitch, and it is not rare. The title has run on 20 different US streaming services since 2019, across 80 separate windows, and for more than 600 of those days it sat on a paid subscription service and a free ad-supported one at the same time. Almost nobody can see this, because when a title leaves a service, the record that it was ever there tends to leave with it. Reelgood keeps that record, dated to the day rather than the month: 4MM+ movie, show and episode titles across 300+ services globally, with timestamped arrivals, departures and moves across SVOD, AVOD, TVOD and vMVPD. Licensing teams price against every prior window. Rights teams check what a licensee actually delivered, and when. Pick a title you think you know: data.reelgood.com/title-availability Film - Dan Lin Want to know why I don’t opine on individual film or TV executives, especially new hires? Dan Lin. As I always caution, it’s really, really, really tough to predict which executives will succeed in new roles and which won’t. The successful head of co-production/finance partner, Rideback, Lin was considered for the head of DC Studios job before taking the job as the head of Netflix. By all accounts at the time, this was a smart hire. (That’s my read of the news coverage anyways.) But now that Netflix has fired Dan Lin, we got a slew of news stories about how he was doing a terrible job. In sports media, Bryan Curtis, new Substack writer/podcaster from The Ringer, calls this the “now you tell us” story, when you only hear the bad news after a star athlete leaves a sports team. In this case, now they tell us that Dan Lin was bad with talent after he got kicked out the door. So was Dan Lin a flop? It’s actually tough to say. While film moves faster than TV, even two years isn’t really enough time to evaluate a person’s output. The new head hasn’t really taken control. As Emily Horgan noted, it takes much longer than two years to produce animated films, so yeah, it’s definitely too early to judge in that domain. As for live-action films, I just published an article by Brandon Katz called “Netflix’s Summer of Bummer”, but I’d point out Netflix had a bad summer two years ago too. Arguably, their best summer came from KPop Demon Hunters last year and Happy Gilmore 2, the latter of which I saw credited to Lin. Then, the stories came out that Dan Lin clashed with talent, both Ben Affleck and Greta Gerwig, classic “now they tell us” factoids to explain his firing. This may have been true, but also should have been expected given that he was given the mandate to bring budgets back in check, especially after Rebel Moon. So if he made folks upset, well, that’s what he was hired to do! But also, he was described as “well-liked” at his hiring! In that case, I’m a bit sympathetic to Lin, since he may have been undercut by senior leadership, as often happens. Basically, a CEO hires a subordinate to be their “bad cop” and keep budgets in check, but then when talent complains, the CEO ends up undercutting them. That’s how I think you end up with a Narnia movie as expensive as any of the other flops, along with a film executive the town no longer likes. As a result, I think that Netflix is now executing a classic “hire the opposite” move by hiring Peter Rice. This phrase comes from my experience following football and basketball coaching decisions, where teams generally hire the opposite of who they just had. If you have an offense-minded head coach, hire the defensive guy. Or in college football, if you have a strong recruiter, then you pivot to an “X’s and Os” type of guy. Or in pro basketball, if you have a very analytically minded coach, you hire the player-friendly guy. I see that here. After dropping Scott Stuber—arguably a talent-friendly executive with lax budget control—Netflix hired the business guy to keep costs in check. Now Netflix is pivoting back to Peter Rice and presumably a more talent-friendly regime. (Disney, by the way, has done this twice: hiring business guys to succeed talent-friendly Bob Iger. It didn’t work out last time.) When it comes to Peter Rice…we’ll see! Maybe he works out, but maybe he doesn’t. I’d actually say the biggest problem is that Netflix still hasn’t solved its “IP Problem”, in that they don’t own much IP, so they just have a lower hit rate. The new executive won’t solve that. (Though buying Lionsgate would help.) Share “Content” - Bela Bajaria I almost published yesterday’s article after this column, but ended up flipping the order, because it told the story so well. So if you want the data for why Netflix is looking at TV to fix their problems, it’s in that article, this graph in particular: I know I just wrote that it’s often hard to judge executives, but Bajaria ran TV for six years and film for three and a half more. That’s more than enough to judge hit rates, and Netflix needs more hits. That’s the story. Since 2023, Netflix hasn’t had as many hit shows as it used to, and many of its previous power house TV shows have ended their runs (Stranger Things most of all). Also, many shows from 2020 to 2022 probably pre-dated Bajaria’s tenure. (That said, one thing may have been outside of Bajaria’s control, which I explain below.) Let’s lump some content strategy thoughts about Netflix and TV into one place: We’re just getting started with this issue, but the rest is for paid subscribers of the Entertainment Strategy Guy, so if you’d like to find out… Why I partially blame Squid Game for Netflix’s latest troubles… What is “the football trap”... Why it might not be the TV shows or films’ fault at all… What change I don’t think Netflix will make... How Bela Bajaria evolved Netflix’s TV strategy in smart ways… Whose departure likely submarined Bajaria’s final few years… One sneaky explanation for Netflix’s content struggles... And a whole lot more... ...please subscribe! We can only keep doing this great work with your support.
Trail Blazers Start Season 2-0 After Win Over Kings
A lethal 44-point third quarter propelled Portland past Sacramento, proving this deep roster can overcome defensive lapses and halftime deficits to remain perfect in the Western Conference.
Health Data Privacy Lawsuit Against Humana Brought on Behalf of Plaintiffs Represented by Schlichter Bogard Will Proceed
VitalLaw reports that a health data privacy lawsuit against Humana brought by Schlichter Bogard will proceed over alleged tracking and disclosure of health information.
Everybody panic: A Valve developer said "HLX" in public
Sound designer lets Half Life-related codename slip at a conference.
Business News: LVMH-Owned Zenith Is Restructuring In Major Reset As Brand Plans Job Cuts And Production Drop In Shift To High-End Market
Up to half of the employees at Le Locle manufacture could lose their jobs as the brand cuts models and production in restructuring after years of financial losses.
Poll: Low-information voters have turned hardest against Trump and the GOP
In 2024, the voters who knew the least about politics were some of Donald Trump’s strongest supporters. A Data for Progress poll released just before the election found Americans who didn’t consume any news at all said they’d vote for Trump over Kamala Harris by a 20-point margin, 60%1 to 40%. In February, we reported that many of these voters had soured on Trump. Voters who couldn’t name the party in control of Congress moved away from Trump at about twice the rate as high-information voters. But approval isn’t vote choice. With the midterms less than two weeks away, it is worth asking if these voters are turning against the president’s party in federal elections, too. In our October Strength In Numbers/Verasight poll, conducted Oct. 13–19 among 2,028 U.S. adults, we asked respondents two factual questions about politics: which party has the most members in the House, and which has the most members in the Senate. I classified anyone who got at least one of these questions wrong as “low-knowledge.” About 30% of adults miss at least one question, including 25% of 2024 Trump voters, 22% of Harris voters, and more than half of people who didn’t vote in 2024. In this article, I do two things with this data. First, I repeat my February analysis and compare how these two groups feel about Trump’s job as president; then I look at each group’s voting behavior in the upcoming House midterms. Register for free to read the rest of this piece.
Half-Life 3 is back in the news again as Valve developer accidentally sort-of references it in public, reigniting hope once more
After a flurry of Half-Life 3 rumours last year, the codename HLX has resurfaced once more; this time straight from the mouth of a Valve developer.
Another disappointing showing for A.J. Brown
A.J. Brown was targeted six times in Week 7, catching half of them for 48 yards in a loss to the Chicago Bears.
Thursday Night Football: Luther Burden, Bears lead Patriots 20-14 at halftime
Breakthrough vaccine for the deadliest skin cancer cut risk by almost half
The skin cancer vaccine is based on mRNA technology that helped end the coronavirus pandemic.
The Collaboration Economy: Independent Contractors Are Essential to Small Business Growth - Small Business & Entrepreneurship Council
SBE Council Small Business Check Up Survey: Nearly half of small business employers use independent contractors, highlighting their role as a force multiplier for growth and the importance of policies that protect flexibility, choice, and entrepreneurship. By Karen Kerrigan – Independent contractors are an essential part of America’s economy, providing specialized expertise, flexibility, and the […]
The One Chart That Explains Why Netflix Cleaned House
(Welcome to my weekly streaming ratings report, the single best guide to what’s popular in streaming TV and what isn’t. I’m the Entertainment Strategy Guy, a former streaming executive who now analyzes business strategy in the entertainment industry. If you were forwarded this email, please subscribe to get these insights each week.) Yeah, I’ll be honest: I went with a clickbait-y headline today. One chart? That explains everything? That’s as clickbait-y as it gets. But let’s be real. I’m analyzing a dataset that I’ve built over six years, and c’mon, I never write articles which feature just one chart! If you think this article—which includes a level of data detail unheard of in journalism twenty years ago—is clickbait, fine by me. Really, what I’m doing is using data to explain Netflix’s recent strategy changes, since the story of the month is the turbulence at Netflix. First, head of content Bela Bajaria was fired. Then head of film Dan Lin followed her to the unemployment ranks. (Along with, sadly, 1,000 other Netflix workers.) And then Netflix delivered a “sub-optimal” earnings report, which continued their year-long stock price slide. Then came a flood of articles explaining why all this is happening. (Mine’s coming shortly, rest assured.) I realized I had the perfect chart to explain Netflix’s woes. Specifically, Nielsen’s weekly top ten charts. Usually I focus on one or two weeks in my Streaming Ratings Reports, but sometimes it’s worth stepping back to look at the larger story. And hoo boy, what a story. This article is my annual (plus three months) follow-up to one of my most popular articles of last year. (And a topic I’ve been visualizing for the last half decade.) Subscribe Netflix’s Share of The Nielsen Charts Continues to Decline
Gears of War: E-Day, Cancelled Last-Minute for PS5, May Have Cost Half a Billion to Make
Fenix down
1Password launches a way for AI agents to log in on your behalf without seeing your password
The new feature allows agents to log into a customer's personal accounts while still protecting the private credentials that secure those accounts.
Valve Employee Seemingly Slips Up And Says Rumored Half-Life 3 Codename On Stage
Wait a minute, what's HLX?
Launching the search for our next dean of the School of Business
This message is shared on behalf of President Peter Rodriguez. Dear Wake Forest colleagues, Today, we begin a national search for the next dean of the Wake Forest University School of Business. The School of Business plays a vital role in our University’s overall mission [...]
Valve Developer Mistakenly Mentions Rumored Half-Life 3 Codename
A Valve developer mistakenly slipped up and made mention of Half-Life 3's long rumored codename during a recent conference.
How well have past GOTY winners sold?
We’re less than two months away from 2026’s The Game Awards, and what a year it’s been for fantastic games, including Resident Evil Requiem, Forza Horizon 6, Slay the Spire II, the Blood of Dawnwalker, and Control Resonant – just to name a few. So as we approach the end of the year, we thought we’d look back on our estimates for the GOTY winners of the past four years. In terms of revenue, Elden Ring (2022 winner), Baldur’s Gate 3 (2023), Astro Bot (2024), and Expedition 33 (2025) have generated a combined $3.8B via 73M copies sold: Let’s have a look, then. Elden Ring has generated $2B in revenue Elden Ring is a phenomenon in every sense. It’s sold a whopping 36.4M copies across Steam (50%), PS5 (35%), and Xbox (15% across console and PC). Want more free estimates and insights in your inbox twice a week? Subscribe below! Subscribe Elden Ring also just passed an astronomical milestone: $2B in revenue. While PlayStation and Xbox account for half of Elden Ring’s copies sold across these three platforms, they account for 57.5% of revenue. This – as ever – is due to regional pricing and the higher relative share of PC gamers in lower-priced markets. For example, around 17.4% of Elden Ring’s Steam copies sold were in China, where the game costs about 26% less than the price in the States. There’s an … interesting narrative going around these days that console gamers are only interested in ball-and-gun games and have the patience for little else. Well, Elden Ring’s impressive sales prove that is simply not true, and across all platforms. What’s more, over 9.8M people have played Elden Ring for over 100 hours, with nearly 3.5M people getting all of the achievements and trophies. For reference, 10.9% of Elden Ring’s PlayStation players have the platinum trophy, while 10.5% of players on Steam and 3.9% of Xbox players unlocked all the achievements. Git gud, Xbox players! Of the 1.5M people who played Elden Ring on PlayStation last month, 4% also played Dark Souls 3 last month, 4% played Bloodborne, and 3% played Sekiro. There’s those Soulsborne diehards for you. By many accounts, including my own, Elden Ring is one of the best games of all time. It’s an evergreen seller that will continue to be a cash cow for Bandai and FromSoftware for years to come. Want more free estimates and insights in your inbox twice a week? Subscribe below! Subscribe Elden Ring has sold another 2M copies across Steam, PlayStation, and Xbox this year, generating almost $110M. This means it’s outperforming many of this year’s high-profile releases. Even Elden Ring’s standalone run-based PvE spinoff, 2025’s Nightreign, has sold 7.8M copies and generated $282M in revenue. Baldur’s Gate 3 is another billion-dollar-plus banger Another cross-platform phenomenon is Baldur’s Gate 3, which has sold 23.2M copies and generated over $1.2B in revenue. About 18.7M of these copies (80.6%) are via Steam, 2.9M via PS5 (12.7%), and 1.6M (6.8%) via Xbox. Around 1.3M folks on Steam bought BG3 before it hit 1.0. The PlayStation version launched about a month after the PC 1.0 release, while the Xbox version came four months later due to technical issues around developing local co-op on the Series S. Want more free estimates and insights in your inbox twice a week? Subscribe below! Subscribe Across platforms, Baldur’s Gate 3’s monthly active users have never dropped below 2M, including 2.2M MAUs last month (68.5% on Steam, 21.9% on PS5, and 9.6% on Xbox). And it still regularly brings in 280K to 400K players every day: About 1% of BG3’s Steam player base has played for over 500 hours! That’s a little under 200K people. Astro Bot is also an evergreen seller, albeit a more niche, family one Astro Bot, 2024’s winner, has now sold 4.7M copies and generated $291M in revenue. The budget, including marketing, is almost certainly under $100M, given the small Japan-based core team and three-year dev timeline. You can really see why the tides are changing toward less expensive hubs. Astro Bot is the only first-party winner on this list, but follows other first-party winners of The Last of Us Part II (2020’s winner), God of War (2018), and Breath of the Wild (2017). Around 46.6% of Astro Bot’s copies sold have been physical, which is far higher than the typical game. This makes sense for a couple of reasons: There’s a large family audience for this one, and physical boxes are an item to wrap when giving Astro as a gift. Astro has collector value for the PlayStation core (this is nostalgia-fueled platformer celebrating PlayStation’s history) Want more free estimates and insights in your inbox twice a week? Subscribe below! Subscribe Astro is another one of those games that continues selling over time, regularly selling more than 100K a month. It’s sold around 1M more copies this year ($60M in revenue) and is a popular title with families. We can see this using the Alinea platform’s MAU crossover tool: Astro Bot’s top #2, #3, and #4 games by crossover in any given month this year are Minecraft, Fortnite, and Roblox – without fail. The #1 title every month, though, is Astro’s Playroom, a pack-in with all PS5 consoles. For every month this year, between 20% and 30% of Astro Bot players also played Astro’s Playroom that month. So the free pack-in is a noice funnel for converting players to a full paid product. Expedition 33 sells 8.7M despite Game Pass cannibalisation Finally, we have last year’s winner – Expedition 33. The turn-based-RPG banger has generated $366M via 8.7M copies sold, with 58.8% on Steam, 35.7% on PS5, and 5.5% on Xbox. Xbox’s share of copies sold is this low due to Expedition 33 launching on Game Pass, where 4.3M people across console and PC accessed the game. A little under 700K Xbox players used their subscription to play Expedition 33 this year. That said, the game’s 1.5-year Game Pass deal ended last week on October 16, and we’re already beginning to see a positive trend on Expedition 33’s copies sold via Xbox (but the jury’s still out!). There’s understandably a lot of French pride behind this one, as France is the game’s #3 market on both Steam and PlayStation. Vive la France! One thing that stood out to me is that the GOTY winners aren’t $300M Hollywood productions made in the US. They’re mostly mid-budget studios outside the traditional AAA cost centres. Lots to think about there. Also, good games sell well; who’d have thunk it!? And there’s a whole load of them this year, with GTA 6 still to come, too. GTA just made the cutoff point for the VGAs this year. What a coincidence! Loading... Cool links and other stuff Our physical games newsletter from Tuesday was picked up by GameSpot, Eurogamer, TweakTown, and a bunch of others. We’re offering a free trial of our platform for games companies. Send us a message here, or reply right here on Substack/email, and we’ll set you up. Next week, we’ve got some exciting news regarding the future of our newsletter, so stay tuned! The last word Reply to this email – or reach out here – if you have any feedback for the newsletter – or want to request a game for us to cover. Want to see why these companies (and many others) are subscribed to Alinea? Get a free platform trial! [Alinea Analytics boasts the most accurate PC and console estimates in the business. Game makers use our platform to understand their audience, keep an eye on the competition, monitor sales trends, and spot new opportunities. We equip game studios and financial institutions with accurate data and the confidence to make smarter, data-driven decisions. Want to talk about all things games market data? We’d love to chat!]
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