Sunday Java
Your weekly digest of the top stories across entertainment and tech brought to you by Technically Entertaining.
Dear Readers,
Sommer came back with a vengeance (at least in Europe), but that doesn’t stop us from drinking and enjoying a well-deserved cup of coffee this Sunday. Throw an ice cube in there make yourself an iced coffee and let’s get to the headlines of this week.
Top stories August 11-17
Creator earnings soar
Our number of the week is 316 million. That’s how much money gaming platform Roblox paid out in Q2 2025 to the users creating content on the Roblox platform - a record high that is also putting a lot of space between Epic Games and creator-economy rival Fortnite.
Here’s a look at Roblox’s Q2 earnings in more detail:
Revenue $1.08 billion - in line with expectations
Loss per share of $0.41 - 4 cents larger than analysts had forecasted
Bookings of $1.44 billion - 51% increase YoY
Daily active users of 111.8 million - 41% increase YoY
Engagement hours of 27.4 billion - 58% increase YoY
Roblox’s stock surged 13% following the news, hitting an all-time of just over $150 - well above the pandemic era high of $141.60 in what may be the sign that creator economy is the real deal and Roblox is on track to be the platform in the space.
Battlefield beta buzz
The stock of Electronic Arts also hit an all-time high driven by positive results of the beta test of its newest instalment of its flagship franchise Battlefield, namely Battlefield 6. 521k players at its peak played the game on Steam, which is higher than any of the last three Call of Duty games were able to achieve. Investors took that as a promising sign of billions of dollars in revenue around the corner, pushing the stock up just shy of 5% to an all-time high of $176.11. EA is still clearly pushing a big hit-driven model while relying heavily on its largest franchises. While the company’s revenue on Q2 remained largely flat, profitability took a dive mainly driven by a shift and a bigger investment on R&D in order to double down further on its established franchises - its proven winners.
Ellison opens the purse
In the broader entertainment world, David Ellison, CEO of the newly formed Skydance / Paramount didn’t waste any time in just the first week after officially closing the merger between two companies. Ellison made it a point to visit the CBS newsroom first to express a vote of confidence and how important news is to the network and the new company at large (let’s see how long this lasts). He then closed a whopping $1.5 billion deal for the rights to South Park and its newest episodes. But if that wasn’t enough, Ellison decided to dish out a $7.7 billion contract for the exclusive streaming rights of the UFC. Now, that seems like a lot of money and on an annual basis Skydance/Paramount will will pay $1.1 billion to the UFC while already having struggled with profitability in recent years.
However, as Ellison tries to position his company in a fiercely competitive streaming market, pushing for exclusive content and for more live content that gives users not only reasons to subscribe in the first place, but to come back and stay engaged, this might turn out to be a smart move - especially as the UFC has become an effective monopoly in the world of MMA, dominating fan viewership while MMA as a sport as a whole is on the decline.
So how much longer until AGI?
In the world of AI, this are happening at the usual breakneck pace. Meta keeps offering billions for individual researchers trying to grow its super intelligence team while Anthropic is building an AI psychiatry team to understand why and what triggers its models to adopt certain personalities when interacting with users. Last but not least, OpenAI released its new ChatGPT model, GPT-5. Some of the performance metrics are objectively better to the predecessor model GPT-4. However, ChatGPT struggles with simple tasks like making sure the scales in a graph are accurate and users are already complaining that the new version doesn’t validate their own assumptions and thoughts as much as the previous version.
While the latter point says a lot more about our state as human beings than the capabilities of AI, it is true compared to the massive leaps in model release has delivered up to now, this one fell flat of expectations.
But hey, at least you can personalize your ChatGPT now by picking a color for your chat.
On deck next week
Gamescom is taking place from August 19-22
I’ll be giving a keynote speech at the Gamescom Congress on August 21
Now, brew yourself another cup. Have a great Sunday.