🔊 Signal Boost: 14 Interesting Things from December
Games industry revenue, AI progress, and a few media recommendations
Hi there again. I thought it might be fun to cap the year with a grab-bag of interesting charts and links with commentary.
But before jumping in: Push to Talk started out as a newsletter about the games industry, and the only story that mattered for anyone in gaming this week was the news of the sudden passing of Vince Zampella. I wrote something on X about Vince’s unparalleled career and the impact he had. Very few people working in any creative medium have changed their industry the way Vince changed gaming.
More importantly, he was a good person and a respected leader in an industry where real leadership is rare. I worked for Vince only briefly when I was comms director as Respawn, and we swapped messages occasionally in the years since I left. Others knew him better than me. But I had plenty of opportunities to witness firsthand how he inspired the people around him. It’s no wonder so many talented game devs followed him for years, even leaving jobs to keep working for him. He will be missed.
X Axis, Y Axis
Some interesting charts about signs of an unexpected games industry revenue surge, datacenter power demand, and some data on global electricity generation.
1. Global games revenue was up significantly. Newzoo’s end-of-year report showed that global spending on games rose by 7.5% year-over-year. Console was mostly buoyed by the launch of the Switch 2. PC is going nuts.
2. No new free-to-play releases cracked the top 10 on PC. Also from the above-linked Newzoo report: Premium priced titles dominated among new releases on PC this year. EA led the pack with Battlefield 6, followed immediately by “Tyler,” the anonymous solo developer behind Schedule I. Video Game Insights estimates that the Early Access game has grossed over $122 million. New-release F2P games may be cooked, but indies aren’t.
3. AI datacenters are power-hungry monsters. I thought the below chart from the a16z newsletter was helpful for visualizing the scale of the AI datacenter buildout. Datacenters in the US are projected to consume 391 TWh annually by 2035. That would be nearly 10% of the US’s current annual energy usage, which is an estimated 4,100 TWh for 2025.
4. But renewables are surging to meet demand. Canary Media has a lot of good reporting on the status of the global renewables buildout, which is being led by China’s near-unbelievable buildout of solar and battery capacity. 498 TWh of additional solar energy was generated just in the first three quarters of this year compared to the same period last year. Together with wind (+137 TWh) and a little help from nuclear, it’s more than enough to cover total new energy demand.
5. The US energy grid is going solarpunk. Over 80% of all new utility-scale capacity additions to the US energy grid this year came from solar and batteries. Most of the rest came from wind. About 25% of utility-scale energy generation in the US now comes from renewables.
AI x Gaming in the News
Most discussion of AI in games contends with the never-ending controversies around its usage (see the controversy around Expedition 33). But some deeper changes are underway. Here are three trends that I think will actually move the conversation forward next year.
6. New AI models are becoming exponentially more reliable. This one’s causing a ruckus with my software engineering friends. There are a million goofy ways people are trying to measure AI progress. One of the more interesting evaluations is METR’s “task length” test. It’s been well-observed that the longer an AI works on an assigned problem, the more likely it is to screw something up. But the leading models have been getting consistently better. The length of time that new models can work while still delivering the desired result (at least half the time, by METR’s measure) has been doubling every four months or so. Anthropic’s latest release, Claude Opus 4.5, even beat that recent trend.
7. NVIDIA is attempting to build an AI agent that can play any game. It’s probably not obvious at first, but this is actually a robotics R&D play. The idea behind the new NitroGen foundation model is that if you can train an AI agent that can navigate the various rulesets and physics paradigms of thousands of different games, you could drop that elite gamer AI into a real-world robot body and have it perform actual physical tasks.
8. World models raise all the money. Back in August I wrote about Google’s big breakthrough with its Genie 3 world model, which offers (I’m oversimplifying here) a way to generate interactive video without the use of an underlying game engine. Since then multiple competing world model startups have appeared and are raising truly wild amounts of capital: a $134m seed round for General Intuition, an in-the-works $586m round for Yann LeCun’s new world model startup, and a rumored fast-follow Series A of “several hundred million dollars” for General Intuition again. Reading between the lines in these announcements, it seems leading AI researchers and investors think that world model tech will be useful for AI training purposes.
Recommendations
Some great Substack pieces, a Finnish action flick, and an ASCII art game
9. GOOD READS: Donald Boat’s review of a 1971 “anti-Western.” The 22-year-old Donald Boat is mostly known for tweeting things like this:
But he is also a genius writer—easily one of the best on Substack. I loved his recent review of the “anti-Western” film McCabe & Mrs. Miller.
10. GOOD READS: Clare Coffey’s beautiful defense of a misunderstood character in the 1946 Christmas classic film It's a Wonderful Life. This piece is actually a few years old, but ‘tis the season.
11. GOOD READS: Aled Maclean-Jones’s take on recent Tom Cruise movies. This is one of the most well-argued cases for a “hidden meaning” in a popular film I’ve ever read.
12. GOOD WATCH: Sisu (2023). It’s an over-the-top action movie about a Finnish gold miner who fights Nazis. If you’re into that kind of thing, just watch it. The wife and I discovered it just a few days ago and are excited to watch the sequel.
13. GOOD PLAY: Effulgence RPG (2025). Click through on the below tweet and check out the 3D ASCII art style this guy cooked up. Unbelievable visuals.
14. My prediction for 2026. My coworkers talked me into filming one of these “Big Ideas for 2026” videos. I make the case that the coming tide of slop is going to raise demand—and thus comp—for the best writers:
Please feel welcome to reply to this email with feedback. I hope you all have a merry Christmas and a restful holiday.