Welcome to Game Souk, where we explore all aspects of the gaming world from tech, finance, culture, and beyond. Airs live every Thursday at 9am Eastern on X @daltonan. Topics covered in this episode: The unexpected winners of the FIFA World Cup were prediction markets. Kalshi became FIFA's official prediction market partner and posted more than $31 billion in June notional trading volume, roughly 85 percent of it in sports, while Polymarket's international exchange set a monthly record of $10.8 billion Soccer surged on Roblox during the tournament. FIFA Super Soccer, Realistic Street Soccer, and a wave of pack opening, squad building, and penalty kick titles all saw concurrent player gains Roblox announced Build, a mobile first creation tab powered by AI models, with public alpha testing beginning July 28 in New Zealand. New Roblox Plus personalization features including avatar backgrounds, app themes, and profile frames Open source models are closing the gap with the frontier. Moonshot AI released Kimi K3 at 2.8 trillion parameters alongside momentum from Alibaba's Qwen, DeepSeek, MiniMax, and NVIDIA's Nemotron family, prompting Gavin Baker's argument that this may be an inflection point for AI Regulatory pressure on model releases, the OpenAI disclosure that GPT 5.6 Sol escaped a sandbox during an internal cyber evaluation and reached Hugging Face infrastructure Unity and Epic hit their first milestone at Unite Seoul, demonstrating a Unity game rendering natively inside Unreal Engine with physics, lighting, and input synchronized. Early access is targeted for 2027, opening Fortnite to roughly five million Unity developers Felicia Day's Kickstarter for The Guild: Ren Faire'd hit its $1.5 million goal in three hours after Hollywood passed on the pitch, and what Backrooms and Obsession say about creator native economics reaching theatrical film #GameSouk #Roblox #Fortnite #Unity #EpicGames #WorldCup #PredictionMarkets #Kalshi #AI #OpenSource #UGC #Gaming Disclaimer: This material is prepared by SIGNUM GROWTH (“SIGNUM”) and is not intended to be relied upon as a forecast, research or investment advice, and is not a recommendation, offer or solicitation to buy or sell any securities or to adopt any investment strategy. The opinions expressed are as of the date on the front page, and may change as subsequent conditions vary. The information and opinions contained in this material are derived from proprietary and non-proprietary sources deemed by SIGNUM to be reliable, are not necessarily all inclusive and are not guaranteed as to accuracy. As such, no warranty of accuracy or reliability is given and no responsibility arising in any other way for errors and omissions (including responsibility to any person by reason of negligence) is accepted by SIGNUM, its officers, employees or agents. *Past performance is not indicative of future returns. This material may contain ‘forward-looking’ information that is not purely historical in nature. Such information may include, among other things, projections and forecasts. There is no guarantee that any forecasts made will come to pass. Reliance upon information in this material is at the sole discretion of the reader. This material is intended for information purposes only and does not constitute investment advice or an offer or solicitation to purchase or sell in any asset classes or any investment strategy nor shall any securities be offered or sold to any person in any jurisdiction in which an offer, solicitation, purchase or sale would be unlawful under the securities laws of such jurisdiction. solicitation, purchase or sale would be unlawful under the securities laws of such jurisdiction. Private placement securities are speculative, illiquid, and carry a high degree of risk, including the loss of the entire investment. There are also key specific risks associated with any particular private securities offering.
