It was a mixed week for the tracked universe: 28 of 59 companies rose, with the median stock flat on the week. Five of the six moves explained below had a clear trigger: a game launch at Remedy, a new AI model at Tencent, a restructuring plan under court-supervised recovery at NACON, passive selling after an S&P 500 removal at The Trade Desk and a UBS downgrade at Nintendo. The week’s top gainer, Firy, rose 20.1% on no company-specific news.
The catalysts behind the week’s largest moves are below.
What moved them
Firy (+20.1%) Formerly Skillz, rose on no company-specific news. The move came on Sep 22 on about five times normal volume, a week after it named Avenue Capital’s Marc Lasry to its board.
Remedy Entertainment (+10.0%) Rose into the Sep 24 launch of Control Resonant, which passed 34,000 concurrent Steam players, about four times the original Control’s peak, and hit first place on Steam’s bestseller chart.
Tencent (+4.2%) Rose after it launched its Hy Image 3.5 Preview image-generation model on Sep 22, into the Yuanbao chatbot. Its Hong Kong shares gained over 5% that day as Alibaba held its own AI conference.
NACON (-13.0%) Fell after it set out a restructuring plan under court-supervised recovery on Sep 22: $35.5m (EUR 31m) of new equity plus creditor haircuts that will heavily dilute existing holders.
The Trade Desk (-9.5%) Fell as passive selling tied to its S&P 500 removal kept weighing on the stock, two weeks after it announced a 15% workforce cut. Shares are down about 65% this year.
Nintendo (-6.7%) Fell as UBS downgraded the stock from Neutral to Sell on Sep 25, cutting its target to JPY 5,500 from JPY 7,800. The figure is for the US ADR (OTC: NTDOY) in dollars, and the move is overstated by the ADR’s own yen exposure.
Also in the top five: Frontier Developments +4.9% and Paradox Interactive +4.5% on the upside; Enad Global 7 -10.0% and Azerion -8.2% on the downside.
The rest of this issue is premium content, unlocked for all readers this week.
The full deck
Sixteen slides: the full deal list with descriptions and links, the news roundup, the Xbox restructuring, Kingnet-Wemade and Digital Hearts deep dives, the PC/Console Pulse with Control Resonant and Silent Hill: Townfall, indices, movers and this week’s press and podcasts.
Remedy, in more detail
Control Resonant launched on Sep 24 at $59.99, with a $69.99 Deluxe edition that added two days of PS5 early access from Sep 22. Alinea Analytics estimates $15.8m in gross revenue and 285k copies across Steam, PlayStation and Xbox, with 270k players. Steam took 53% of revenue, PlayStation 42% and Xbox 6%, though Xbox reports about two days late, so its share is understated. Daily active players reached 146k on Steam, 91k on PS5 and 14k on Xbox on Friday Sep 25, and 279k on Saturday.
The launch came with 2 million wishlists across platforms two days before release and a Steam peak of 34.3k concurrent players, Remedy’s highest (SteamDB). Critics sit at OpenCritic 84 from 86 reviews, 86% recommending, and back the switch to melee combat and an open-world Manhattan from the first game’s gunplay and corridors. Players are at 88% positive from 3,318 Steam reviews, with audio desync, GPU crashes and a forced 90GB re-download leading the complaints.
Remedy bought the Control rights back from 505 Games in February 2024 for up to $18.5m (EUR 17m) and self-published the sequel, co-financed and co-produced by Annapurna Pictures. Tencent holds 14.8% and lent Remedy $16.8m (EUR 15m) as a convertible loan at 8% PIK in October 2024. Control Resonant follows FBC: Firebreak, the 2025 co-op shooter Remedy wrote down by €14.9m.
PC/Console Pulse, with Alinea Analytics
Releases of the last two weeks ranked by gross revenue, plus the week’s biggest riser, across Steam, PlayStation and Xbox on Alinea Analytics estimates for Friday 18 to Friday 25 September. All six are franchises, and one live-service title, EA Sports FC 27, grossed $231.2m against $73.8m for the other five combined.
EA Sports FC 27 (EA Sports / EA Canada) grossed $231.2m and sold 2.73 million copies in its first full week, as early access from Sep 18 ran into the $69.99 standard launch on Sep 25: 2.4 times its first day. PlayStation took 79%. It also led the table on Twitch with 8.78 million hours watched, while Steam players sit at 56% positive.
Marvel’s Wolverine (Sony / Insomniac, PS5 exclusive, out Sep 15) grossed $43.6m and sold 570k copies in the week, with a critic score of 78.
Control Resonant (Remedy, out Sep 24) opened at $15.8m and 285k copies, with 1.66 million Twitch hours, critic score 84 and 88% positive on Steam.
Silent Hill: Townfall (Konami / Screen Burn Interactive, out Sep 24) took $5.8m and 116k copies but drew 4.65 million Twitch hours, second only to FC 27.
Dune: Awakening (Funcom) was the week’s biggest paid riser at +$4.1m to $5.1m, after it reached PS5 and Xbox on Sep 22 and went 50% off on Steam.
Graveyard Keeper 2 (tinyBuild / Lazy Bear Games, out Sep 22) grossed $3.5m on 205k copies, with a critic score of 83 and 84% positive on Steam.
Free-to-play Aniimo (+$3.0m) and Warframe (+$2.0m) are out of scope.
Attention against revenue for the same six titles. FC 27 is alone in the breakout corner, buzz and money together. Silent Hill: Townfall is the week’s clearest buzz-led launch, with hype above sales.
Silent Hill: Townfall
A psychological horror set in a 1990s Scottish coastal town, and the first Silent Hill played fully in first person. It launched on Sep 24 on PS5 and PC at $49.99, with a Deluxe Edition adding 48 hours of early access, an artbook and the soundtrack, co-published by Konami and Annapurna Interactive. PlayStation took 70% of its $5.8m and Steam 30%; daily players reached 66k on PS5 and 41k on Steam on Friday Sep 25, and 117k on Saturday.
Critics are at 81 on both OpenCritic (76 reviews) and Metacritic, and Polygon ranks it below Konami’s Silent Hill f (Metacritic 86). Steam players are at 67% positive from 2,244 reviews, with stutter, crashes and forced stealth leading the complaints; Alinea’s review read is to wait for patches. Its Steam peak of 8.4k concurrent compares with Control Resonant’s 34.3k. The developer, Glasgow-based Screen Burn Interactive, has 30 employees and is owned by its two founders, Jon McKellan and Omar Khan; it was known as No Code (Stories Untold, Observation) until July 2025. The series stood at 17.8 million copies to June 2026 (Konami).
Indices, week and year-to-date
Public-market moves are Friday-to-Friday, 18 Sep to 25 Sep close, across InvestGame’s six tracked gaming indices, AdTech included. Mid Cap Mobile +1.7%, Large Cap Diversified +1.4% and Mid Cap PC & Console +1.2% rose; Large Cap Mobile fell 1.7% and Large Cap PC & Console 0.3%, with AdTech flat at +0.1%. Year to date, AdTech remains by far the worst-performing segment at -50.1%, followed by Large Cap Diversified at -24.2%, Large Cap Mobile at -18.4%, Mid Cap Mobile at -12.9% and Mid Cap PC & Console at -5.7%. Large Cap PC & Console is the only index above its January level, at +1.9%.
Deals of the week
InvestGame tracked 11 announced deals disclosing $248.5m this week, close to last week’s $242.3m across 14 deals: 2 public offerings for $216.5m, 6 private investments for $29.4m and 3 M&A deals for $2.6m, plus one fundraising not counted in the total.
The largest fresh deal was Embracer Group’s $203.9m (SEK 2.0B) two-year revolving credit facility, led by SEB alongside DNB, Nordea and Swedbank, which consolidates bilateral loans ahead of the planned 2027 Fellowship Entertainment spin-off. Türkiye’s Circle Games raised a $25m Series A led by Tencent, taking total funding to $32.25m, to expand Jelly Escape and keep scaling Sort Express. Denmark’s Trophy Games is buying Paris-based Playrion (Airlines Manager, Airport Simulator) from Paradox Interactive for $2.6m (EUR 2.25m) upfront plus a 9%-of-net-revenue earn-out, its largest deal to date. Russia’s state owner put World of Tanks developer Lesta Games up for sale, and Undead Labs closed its separation from Microsoft, keeping the State of Decay IP; as a closing, it sits outside the week’s count. Outside the total, Bessemer Venture Partners closed $5.75B across a seed and early-stage fund and a growth fund.
The two largest figures of the week update older deals. Kingnet is paying about $298.0m for 49% of Neosphere, the holding company behind the consortium taking 40.25% of Wemade, which would leave the Chinese publisher that fought Wemade over Legend of Mir royalties until a settlement earlier this year with an indirect ~19.7% of the IP’s owner, provided the Oct 30 closing completes. In Japan, Digital Hearts’ $75.4m (JPY 11.86B) MBO tender succeeded at JPY 1,060 a share, a 41.0% premium to the pre-announcement close, taking founder Eiichi Miyazawa’s vehicle Sandbox and his own holding to 90.20% once the Sep 30 settlement closes.
Share price moves are Friday close to Friday close, 18 to 25 September. This digest is published for information only. It is not investment advice and not a recommendation to buy or sell any security.