Millennial Slop and the Elden Ring Clone Era: Why Opening Night Live Felt Like a Rerun

I recorded this one from a timeshare on hotel Wi-Fi, which is fitting, because the whole conversation was about who is getting a good signal this fall and who is getting nothing.

The guest was Alex Lee, lead news writer at GamesBeat, four years at Digiday before that covering gaming and the creator economy, and an NYU instructor whose Business of Esports course got quietly pulled from the catalog. Alex's opening line to students was that it was ridiculous to teach a course on a business nobody had figured out. Somebody in administration apparently agreed. Colan Neese joined from the Screen Engine side with the attention data he runs through MindGame.

We meant to talk about Gamescom. We mostly talked about the thing Gamescom could not escape.

Opening Night Live was a rerun

Alex did not want to be the hater. He said so three times. But he watched the full Opening Night Live presentation and described himself as stone-faced the entire way through. He was waiting for new IP, or at least a new story, and what he got was a parade of long-standing franchises. Witcher. Gears of War. Final Fantasy VII, part whatever. Ubisoft announced a strategy game, which is interesting, and then attached it to Rainbow Six, which is not.

I pushed back a little. The original Rainbow Six and Rogue Spear were planning games. You mapped the team's routes and picked flashbangs or gas before every breach, and those mechanics have been missing since the original trilogy. An XCOM-style Rainbow Six is a return to the roots, not a cash grab. Alex conceded the point and then made a sharper one: Tom Clancy is a deep well, so why not name the tactical game after a different book? There are options. Why Rainbow Six?

Colan went further. Everything on the show floor was either nostalgia or what he called the Elden Ring clone era. Dark feudal setting, Lovecraftian monsters, one enemy at a time, giant sword. Even HoYoverse, the Genshin Impact studio, showed what looked like an Elden Ring clone. He asked his team for their vibe check and one of the younger analysts called the whole show "millennial slop." He said he felt seen and it hurt.

The honest version of my own take is that some of this might just be us. Gears will track fine. Final Fantasy will sell to people over 35. Maybe the games are landing for who they are built for, and that is no longer the three of us.

The one game that broke through

Colan had a single exception, and he spent ten hours researching it before the show: Ananta, NetEase's open world action game out of its Montreal studio.

His pitch for why it matters is that it is not a clone of anything obvious. It is closer to Grand Theft Auto crossed with Insomniac's Spider-Man traversal, with Yakuza mini games and a Persona-style cast of teenagers. The plot is about content creators chasing attention, which on a show about the attention economy felt a little too on the nose. The trailer closes on a Cranberries track and includes a character doing the Leonardo DiCaprio toast. It is meme-literate in a way most big releases are not. Alex noted, fairly, that the memes are millennial-coded too.

Then the numbers. Colan's tracking has Ananta at roughly 85 percent of Black Myth: Wukong's demand at the same point in its cycle, and it grows every week without much marketing. He put preregistrations somewhere around 18 million, with the caveat that it was his recollection. His research says NetEase has spent north of $100 million on it. It is free to play, day one on PlayStation and mobile, with no gacha. Monetization is cosmetics only, the Marvel Rivals model, and NetEase has already proven with Rivals that it can launch a game in the West. Colan's hunch is that this is the next Rivals-scale hit for them, and possibly Black Myth-scale.

Two details worth sitting with. It is not on Xbox, which Colan called a major miss. And it launches January 14 or 15.

Attention hates a vacuum

That January date is the most interesting strategic decision at Gamescom, and it is barely being discussed.

Colan's argument is that the industry has a superstition about release windows. Games have to ship in September, October, April, or May, because grandma needs something to buy or because kids supposedly do not play in summer. He does not buy either. Palworld shipped in January and pulled 20 million players. This July and August were wide open and almost nobody took them.

"Attention hates a vacuum. Something is going to fill it, and it is usually an indie."

— Colan Neese

Alex's version was the same idea from the other side. Yes, GTA 6's shadow will still be over January. But a single-player GTA is finite. People will play the story over the holidays, finish it, and by February be looking for something else. Smart studios should release into that, not away from it. And a free game aimed at China, Japan, and Korea, markets Colan's data says are not GTA-centric, does not need the West to be done with Rockstar.

I asked Alex what happens when GTA 6 does need to be more than a story. His answer was that the budget forces it. At whatever Rockstar has spent, GTA 6 has to become a platform. There may not be much online or UGC at launch, but the quarter after the story crowd subsides is exactly when the creator tools show up. Colan agreed and said the plain part out loud: the online announcement is probably a bigger event than the game sale itself. That budget is a forever-game budget, not a launch budget.

GTA ate Gamescom, and the leaks helped

I asked whether the leak week took any air out of Gamescom. Both of them said it took all of it.

Colan's data point was the one that stuck with me: last week, on the strength of the leaks alone, GTA 6 added more demand growth than every other fall game in the top 15 combined. Take-Two's stock dipped on the leaks and Colan's read was that it did not matter. More people searched, more people got targeted with Netflix ads for the extended look, and more people tuned in. He called it a literal case study in all press being good press. Terrible for the developers who built the thing and for the marketing team whose plan just got shredded. Zero consequence for interest or sales.

Alex, a journalist, admitted he had not even looked at the leaks. He read one article listing what was in them and decided to wait for the official Netflix look. He thinks a lot of people made the same choice. The official reveal dampened the leaks more than the leaks dampened the reveal.

The cost lands on everyone else. Colan's list of what breaks through this fall is short: Call of Duty, Gears, Venom, Wolverine, EA FC, and a Zelda remake whenever Nintendo decides to say the date. Everything else, including well-reviewed games like Star Wars Zero Company, gets buried. Metacritic scores matter to a point. They guarantee nothing.

LIV Golf is not the EA story

The EA sale came up sideways, through a question about LIV Golf reportedly running out of money. Alex rejected the premise. The fund does not run out of money. LIV struggled because golf had a healthy, rich incumbent to disrupt. Gaming does not. Revenue is up, profit is down, and the industry is actively looking for someone to write checks.

He pointed to the Esports Nations Cup delay as the real tell. The public reason was regional conflict. The actual reason, in his read, was insufficient buy-in from players, publishers, and federations. That is a growing-pains signal, not a retreat, and notably they went back to the drawing board rather than throwing more money at it.

Colan's forecast for a private EA: EA FC becomes a live service instead of an annual box, the FIFA license comes back before the World Cup, some assets get sold to service the debt, and the franchises they keep get more investment, not less. Both of them said the same thing about sportswashing: it is real, and it is the side dish. Vision 2030 is a diversification plan, and games are a knowledge-economy bet.

What I would do on Monday

• Pick the empty window, not the crowded one. If your game is not in Colan's list of five, the fall is a bad place to be. Model January, or next July, against what is actually shipping.
• Do not launch on EA FC day. Colan's free advice to the audience. Unless you have written off every market except the United States, that date is gone.
• If you are courting creators, think ownership, not rental. Alex and Colan spent the first fifteen minutes on why studios rent attention by the hour while creators like Clix build products for the audience they already own. The math on that is changing.
• Watch Ananta's first month as a comp. Free to play, no gacha, January, not on Xbox. If it lands, half the release-window conventions on your calendar are up for revision.

Gamescom did not have a bad week. It had a normal week in a year where one game owns the calendar. The interesting question is not who broke through in August. It is who is smart enough to ship when Rockstar finally lets everyone breathe.