The Esports Foundation Club Partner Program reaches fans globally and changes the way they experience esports. Over the past editions, it has created a platform for Clubs to strengthen their brands and engage with audiences.
"We want to make the Graham Norton of video games," says Kirsty Rigden, the chief executive of Brighton-based FuturLab, which makes PowerWash Simulator. Aspiring to emulate a talkshow host who has a reputation for being affable rather than for setting pulses racing is perhaps an unusual ambition for a gaming studio.
Petit Planet is the studio's take on Animal Crossing, though with a few interesting ideas of its own. The game's most recent test took place all the way back in November, but its next big test isn't far off.
"I thought about two books that I'd read. The first book is by an author called Miyamoto Musashi, it's called The Book of Five Rings, and the other book I was thinking about was called Here Be Dragons, which is a physics book about wormholes, and advanced physics, and extraterrestrial life and so forth."
The VanEck Video Gaming and eSports ETF ( NYSEARCA:ESPO) offers pure exposure to an industry defying traditional entertainment economics. With $405 million in assets and a 0.56% expense ratio, ESPO delivered 28% returns over the past year, outpacing the S&P 500 by nearly 11 percentage points. The fund holds 28 gaming companies, led by Tencent Holdings ( NASDAQ:TCEHY) at 8.1%, Nintendo ( NASDAQ:NTDOY) at 7.6%, and NetEase ( NASDAQ:NTES) at 7.4%. Recent trading shows the ETF consolidating around $105 after hitting $111 in November 2025.
Dragon Ball has its own take on the MOBA genre with Gekishin Squadra. The name sure is a mouthful, but this is one of the most welcoming experiences for newer MOBA players, even if you aren't too familiar with the Dragon Ball universe. But if you are an existing fan of the late Akira Toriyama's masterful manga and anime series, you'll be pleased with the wide selection of characters and abilities.
The best new co-op games are those that do something a bit different, offering more than a single-player experience with another player thoughtlessly tacked on. These multiplayer games account for groups of friends all wanting their own role, with a shared goal in sight and plenty of chaos on the path to getting there.
Thousands of games are released every year, with numbers increasing recently thanks to an explosion of indie games across all platforms. That means there's more opportunity than ever to find something new and unexpected among the latest releases, but for a lot of players, the comfort of a few familiar games wins out. Newly released statistics show that, at least on consoles, the biggest games of 2025 were exactly the same as 2024's top titles. Do those figures point to an industry in crisis.
Developer tools for in-game transactions were available in Unreal Editor for Fortnite (UEFN) in a preview state since November, letting creators charge V-Bucks for digital items in their unpublished Fortnite Creative modes and games, or "islands." Epic Games has just flipped the switch, allowing for these islands to be published. The implementation of these developer tools for monetization in Fortnite Creative has raised complaints and worries, with players comparing this development to Roblox's revenue model.