Karol Severin

Karol is a co-founder and Research Director at MIDiA. With over a decade of experience in consumer research, industry analysis, and consulting, Karol oversees the direction, coverage and quality of all MIDiA’s research output. Prior to co-founding MIDiA, Karol gained experience in TMT market research and consulting, as well as an entertainment industry startup founder. He holds a business management degree from Queen Mary, University of London, with specialisation in strategy, quantitative methods, and entrepreneurship.

MIDiA’s 2025 predictions
It’s social’s stage now

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Mark Mulligan, Karol Severin, Hanna Kahlert, Tatiana Cirisano, Ben Woods, Rutger Rosenborg, Rhys Elliott and Olivia Jones
The creator economy reshaped entertainment in the first half of the 2020s and social wasthe big winner, now positioned at the centre of the entertainment economy. In 2025 wewill see the second-order effects begin to play out, set against the backdrop of attentionsaturation, content commodification, and increased focus on profit.
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Playable Post Malone in WWE is a cross-entertainment bullseye

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Karol Severin
Wrestling game WWE 2K24 shared an image of the playable Post Malone character this week. The rapper and producer is joining the playable roster as a part of the game’s upcoming DLC pack. Having curated the soundtrack to WWE 2K24, becoming a playable character in-game is a further continuation of his relationship with the title and serves as a great case study for cross-entertainment in-game activations.
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Gamers
A cross-entertainment summary

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Karol Severin
This report presents the key figures, behaviors, and preferences of gamers across entertainment. Graphics in this report show selected gamer segments, compared to relevant consumer segments across entertainment as appropriate. An accompanying Excel file provides country-by-country figures and data for 60+ additional gamer segments, including by games genre fandom, by games title, and by various gamer specific behaviors (e.
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Gamers' time
Where it is and how to get it

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Karol Severin
With the attention economy saturated, there is next to no incremental entertainment time up for grabs. This comes precisely at a time when more games depend on growing time spent. As games are only the fifth most consumed entertainment activity among PC and console gamers, the path for games to meaningfully grow time spent is to absorb consumers’ time spent on other entertainment formats.
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Quick take: The games industry health check

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Karol Severin
In recent weeks and months, a growing number of people have been asking: “What is going on with the games industry?”, “Is the games industry doomed now?”, “Is it done growing?”, “If neither a new Switch or GTA 6 are getting released this year, is the games industry going to have a weak year?”, or some other typically sceptical permutation thereof.
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Why the Xbox announcement is an important and strategically smart nod to developers

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Karol Severin
Xbox announced on its podcast with Phil Spencer, Sarah Bond and Matt Booty, that it is bringing four of its titles to other consoles. While no specific titles were named, it ruled out Starfield and Indiana Jones, and mentioned that two of the games are community driven and the remainder are smaller games that may have reached a plateau on Xbox.
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The context behind Disney’s investment into Epic Games

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Karol Severin
Disney announced it is investing $1.5 billion into Epic Games. The same announcement talks about a creation of an “ expansive and open games and entertainment universe connected to Fortnite ”. This move makes sense for Disney on several levels and is perhaps one of the most impactful games-related moves for Disney’s overall cultural relevance, engagement, monetisation capabilities, and profitability.
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For years, we said to take games efforts of these companies seriously – now they are serious players

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Karol Severin
MIDiA has always been bullish about traditionally non-gaming tech companies’ opportunity in games. The first time we wrote about Netflix’s opportunity in games was in 2017. We also wrote about the significance of Apple Arcade early on ( here , here , and reiterated reasons for the games industry to take it seriously again, here ).
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