gaming is bigger than its category

From our work

Our latest work, with the numbers and structural insights compact enough for your coffee brief.

The Gaming Growth Layer: most brands still treat gaming as a niche

Germany has 41.2 million players, roughly six in ten of everyone aged six to 69, and the global games market crossed $200 billion in 2025 for the first time. Yet ask a brand outside the industry what gaming means for its business, and the answer usually describes a media channel. Our new whitepaper, The Gaming Growth Layer, written with the specialists at EarlyGame, a gaming and esports media platform, argues that the opportunity sits well beyond game sales and advertising.

• The paper sorts what brands do with gaming into six layers, from understanding the player and activating attention up to building propositions and transforming the core business. Most companies stop at the second layer, where they rent attention from a platform that belongs to someone else.
• The deeper cases are rarer, and they tend to stop being called gaming marketing at all. Walmart lets developers build its commerce directly into games, and BMW's Virtual Factory connects more than 30 production sites in digital twins, with production-planning costs expected to fall by up to 30%.
• The second half looks at what any digital business can learn from how games companies work: run products as live services, learn from behaviour and design for return, make the community part of the operating model, own the customer relationship, and simulate before committing physical resources.

Most companies have explored gaming as an audience. The community, proposition and operating-model opportunities are far less developed, and the practical task is to go one level deeper than a conventional campaign. (Bloom Partners)

From the news desk

What is happening in the industries we work in, with a focus on the latest in AI.

What Whole Foods expects us to eat in 2027

Whole Foods Market, which belongs to Amazon, published its food and beverage trend predictions for 2027 on 14 October: eight trends chosen by its Trends Council, a group of team members that runs from foragers and buyers to culinary experts. Read together, the list describes a shopper who checks where food comes from and what it actually does.

• Origin is spreading beyond wine. Terroir’s New Territory applies the idea to honey, chocolate, grains and seafood, and Ingredient Minimalism follows the “read your labels” content on social media towards shorter ingredient lists. Whole Foods adds that its own quality standards ban more than 300 ingredients.
• Function is becoming a reason to buy food. Beautrition covers collagen jelly sticks, skin glaze gummies and olive oil shots, and The Bean Boom moves beans and legumes to the centre of the plate as affordable, fibre-rich protein, down to lupini snacks and bean subscription clubs from Rancho Gordo and SIMPLi.
• Palates are opening up. Bitter Done Better lists non-alcoholic spirits, amaro-style drinks, licorice and radicchio, which Whole Foods ties to changing tastes, digestive wellness and the sober-curious movement, while The Yōshoku Effect brings Japanese takes on Western dishes such as omurice and curry rice into the aisle.

A retailer’s trend list is also a buying list, so we read this less as a forecast than as a signal of where shelf space at one influential grocer is heading. What strikes us is how many of the eight turn a product attribute into the story, whether that is the place a product comes from or the nutrient it delivers. For a brand, that moves more of the sale onto the claims on the pack and the evidence behind them, and a product that cannot show its origin or its function will have a harder time making next year’s list. (Whole Foods Market)

AI makes hospital bills bigger. Who pays for it?

In US hospitals, AI now helps write the bills. It finds diagnoses a patient has and puts them on the bill, so the hospital gets paid more.

• For hospitals, that pays off: executives say their AI earns back 3.5 times what it costs on average.
• For insurers, it costs money: Blue Cross says it paid an extra $942m in two years.

The real question is whether the extra diagnoses are true. Hospitals say patients are simply older and sicker. In Munich, a startup called calliora is building a possible answer: AI that checks a diagnosis is documented before the bill goes out. We think billing AI will soon be judged by what it can prove, not by how much more it bills. (Bessemer Venture Partners)

Oracle and AstraZeneca want to find trial patients sooner

Oracle and AstraZeneca announced a non-binding agreement on 20 October to explore how AI and real-world data can help clinicians identify eligible trial patients, speed up evidence generation and bring research findings into everyday care. The joint release quotes both chief executives, Pascal Soriot and Mike Sicilia, and contains no financial terms.

• The plan starts with structure rather than results: shared governance, reusable technical components and agreed outcome measures, set up to test whether an approach that works in one disease area and geography can be carried to others.
• The candidate fields are wide. Oncology, cardiovascular, renal and metabolic disease, respiratory and immunology, and rare diseases are named as possible starting points.
• According to Reuters, the first project will support hypertension research in Abu Dhabi with the UAE healthcare company M42. The companies’ own release, datelined Austin and Abu Dhabi, names neither M42 nor the hypertension project. Reuters also notes that patient recruitment remains one of the biggest challenges in clinical research, and that slow enrolment stretches timelines and raises development costs.

Nothing is signed yet, and we would say that plainly. What interests us is where two very large companies chose to begin. Pharma has spent years applying AI to the molecule, while the delay Reuters describes sits in finding the right patient at the right site, which is a data-access problem as much as a scientific one. That explains why a drug developer is talking to an enterprise software company with its own health data and clinical software business. Anyone running clinical programmes should watch the outcome measures the two agree on, because they are likely to become the reference for what good AI-supported recruitment looks like. (Oracle and AstraZeneca)

Carmakers adopt AI agents faster than the rules for them

The Capgemini Research Institute published a study on 12 October based on a July survey of 800 senior executives at carmakers, tier-one suppliers and technology providers in 12 countries. 68% already use (33%) or pilot (35%) agentic AI in product development, but only 5% describe their AI governance as fully mature.

• Ownership is where it thins out. Only 10% have established shared accountability for the AI lifecycle across their ecosystem of partners, and 45% have not yet defined an AI strategy and roadmap for product development.
• Trust falls as the work moves closer to the vehicle. Executive trust in agentic AI stands at 59% for upstream research and concept work and drops to 40% for development activities.
• Six in ten executives say delays come mainly from process inefficiency rather than from the limits of the technology. Among carmakers, 46% in Europe and 53% in the US are implementing AI initiatives.

In an industry where one vehicle programme runs through a long chain of suppliers, the 10% figure matters more to us than the 68%. An agent that drafts a specification or a test plan inside one company is a productivity tool. Once its output crosses into a supplier’s process, somebody has to own it, and in nine out of ten organisations that question is still open. Much of the supply base sits in Europe and in Germany in particular, and we expect suppliers to meet the governance question first as a customer requirement in their contracts, well before it reaches them as regulation. (Capgemini)

Protein drinks now come with caffeine

Two companies from opposite ends of the shelf have arrived at the same product. Beyond, which has dropped “Meat” from its name, has introduced Beyond Immerse Protein + Energy, a sparkling drink with 20g of plant protein, 5g of fibre and 160mg of caffeine from coffee beans, as Food Dive reported on 15 October. Monster Energy unveiled Monster + Protein at the NACS convenience retail show this month, with 30g of protein and 160mg of caffeine, due to roll out next year.

• For Beyond, drinks are a way to recruit new customers while plant-based meat struggles. The company only entered beverages at the start of this year and has since added powders and bars.
• For Monster it is a return. Its earlier protein drink, Muscle Monster, ran from 2014 to 2017. Rob Gehring, the outgoing chief executive of its Americas business, told Food Dive: “We constantly try to use innovation as a recruiting tool.”
• The space is already crowded. Food Dive names Premier Protein, C4 Energy and Proda alongside the two, and cites research that nearly half of adults are seeking more protein.

The categories that used to organise the shelf, sports nutrition in one place, energy in another and meat alternatives somewhere else, are being redrawn around a single occasion: the drink that gets someone through the afternoon. Both brands are using a familiar format to reach buyers who would never walk into their home category. For anyone managing a portfolio, the next competitor is likely to come from whichever category can claim the same need, and the label on the planogram will say less and less about who that is. (Food Dive)

RobCo passes $1bn as its CEO moves to the US

RobCo, the Munich company that builds robots for manufacturing, said on 5 October that it had passed a $1bn valuation, as Reuters reported. The deal combined new investment with a share sale that let employees sell part of their holdings. According to the company, existing investors including Sequoia, Lightspeed and Lingotto took part. New investors include Cherry Ventures and the European Tech Collective, and the Wall Street Journal put the shares sold at $40m. According to Reuters, chief executive Roman Hölzl says the company has now raised close to $200m in total.

• Hölzl has moved to the United States, which he describes as the larger and faster-growing market, although about 70% of the business is still in Europe.
• Manufacturing and assembly stay in Germany. Some products for the US market are assembled in Austin, Texas, and according to the company as reported by MMH, its US customer operations span more than a dozen states.
• Next comes Alfie, a two-armed, self-learning robot for industrial tasks, which Reuters says is due to launch next March.

The employee share sale is the detail we would look at first. Letting staff sell part of their holdings at a billion-dollar mark rewards the early team at a price outside investors were willing to pay. The move of the chief executive follows a pattern many German industrial technology companies will recognise: engineering and production at home, the growth market and the leadership attention abroad. European manufacturers buying automation should expect more of the product roadmap to be written with American customers in mind. (Reuters)