Pixel P&L: Tencent Tests Installment Payments for Honor of Kings Skins

Welcome to another Pixel P&L edition. This issue takes 4 minutes to read. If you only have one, here are the 5 most important things:

• Tencent is testing installment payments for Honor of Kings skins.

• IGDC returns to Chennai for its 18th edition in October 2026.

• The Super Mario Galaxy Movie opened to $34M on Wednesday.

• Bungie commits to long-term Marathon updates after a slower-than-expected launch.

• Sony quietly acquired Cinemersive Labs, a UK machine learning firm, for its Visual Computing Group.

Let's get into it.

Tencent Tests Installment Payments for Honor of Kings Skins

Tencent's TiMi Studio is piloting a subscription-style cosmetic payment system in Honor of Kings, letting players access premium "legend" skins for roughly one-tenth of the standard purchase price (h/t Niko Partners). The feature, called "pay-to-enjoy first," launched with the game's Season 43 update and targets the title's estimated 139 million daily active users.

Under the model, a skin that typically costs around 3,000 star coins is accessible for 300 coins upfront, granting one month of use. Payments accumulate toward permanent ownership, shifting the acquisition path from a single large transaction to incremental spending over time.

The system is currently limited to select new legend skins and is widely seen as a controlled test. If conversion and retention metrics hold, TiMi could extend the model to older cosmetics. The risk, per analysts, is that players in smaller-scale games cherry-pick renewals, dragging down per-user revenue — a concern less pressing for a title with Honor of Kings' user base.

IGDC Returns to Chennai for 18th Edition, Sets October 2026 Dates

The India Game Developer Conference (IGDC) will return to Chennai for its 18th edition on October 28-29, 2026, with the Chennai Trade Centre again confirmed as the venue, according to the Game Developer Association of India (GDAI). Early bird tickets are now on sale.

The 2025 edition, IGDC's 17th, was also held at the Chennai Trade Centre after GDAI moved the conference from its longtime base in Hyderabad. That edition allegedly drew over 4,000 attendees and 200+ speakers across 150+ sessions.

The 2026 edition has seemingly trimmed the conference from three days to two. The return to Chennai comes months after Tamil Nadu formally notified its AVGC-XR Policy 2026, a five-year framework targeting 200+ startups and 2 lakh jobs in animation, VFX, gaming, and extended reality, with up to Rs 40 crore earmarked over five years to attract major AVGC-XR conferences to Chennai.

KitKat Partners With One Piece in India

Nestlé has rolled out a One Piece-themed KitKat collaboration in India, placing character-branded packs in local stores and on quick-commerce platform Blinkit without any official marketing announcement. The packs feature standard KitKat chocolates inside, with packaging redesigned around characters including Luffy, Zoro, Usopp, and Sanji.

Buyers can enter a contest called "Ultimate Break" by visiting epicbreak.in, submitting their mobile number and a batch code printed on the pack. The promotion runs April 1 through May 30, 2026. Nestlé has not disclosed the prizes beyond describing them as One Piece-themed merchandise.

The India launch comes as Nestlé manages an unrelated KitKat story in Europe: roughly 12 tons of the chocolate bars went missing in transit between Italy and Poland ahead of Easter. The company has leaned into the attention, launching an online tracker for the stolen shipment.

⚡️Quick Bytes

Bungie Commits to Long-Term Marathon Updates After Slower-Than-Expected Launch

Bungie has pledged multi-year improvements to Marathon, its newly launched extraction shooter, following a technical blog post on PC performance optimization. The studio said it will release updates in smaller, frequent batches rather than periodic large drops. 

Sony Acquires UK Machine Learning Firm Cinemersive Labs for Visual Computing Push

Sony Interactive Entertainment has acquired Cinemersive Labs, a UK-based machine learning and computer vision company, folding it into SIE's Visual Computing Group. The studio will work on rendering techniques and visual fidelity improvements for PlayStation games. Sony said the deal is part of broader efforts to advance visual computing within its games division.

Super Mario Galaxy Movie Opens at $34M, Tracking Below First Film's Weekend Record

The Super Mario Galaxy Movie pulled in $34 million on its opening Wednesday, edging past The Super Mario Bros. Movie's $31.7 million debut in 2023. Universal projects a $128.2 million three-day opening and $186 million over five days, which would fall short of the first film's $146.3 million and $204.6 million respectively, but rank as Illumination's second-best debut. Critics scored it 42% on Rotten Tomatoes against a 91% audience score.

⚔️Side Quest

🤣Laugh:

📺 Watch: A former Rockstar audio designer on Kiwi Talkz explains why the studio's open worlds sound the way they do. The answer is simpler than you'd expect: no creative constraints. You want 10,000 unique footstep sounds? Go nuts. Trim it later. It's a small portion of the interview but the philosophy it describes, overshoot and cut rather than scrape for that last 10% at the end, is one of the more useful production insights you'll hear ahead of GTA 6 dropping later this year.

🎮 Play: The Last Spell is a roguelite base defense tactical RPG, which sounds like too many genres at once until you're four hours in and still going. During the day you rebuild your haven and gear up your heroes, at night you hold the walls against escalating hordes until dawn. The build variety is genuinely deep, glass cannon mage with a gun is a real and viable choice, and the DLC maps add enough new wrinkles to keep experienced players on their toes. 

📚 Read: Wes Fenlon for PC Gamer digs up cassette recordings from the 1989 Computer Game Developers Conference, where designers who built Activision and Ultima were already mourning the golden age of games being over.

💡Did You Know

Gabe Newell stopped making games at Valve because no one would argue with him. After Portal 2, Newell wanted to work as a regular team member, pitching ideas and getting honest pushback. Instead, every suggestion landed without friction. "Whatever you say," was the room's default response, even when he pushed back against it. Josh Weier, Portal 2's project lead designer, told Kiwi Talkz that Newell eventually accepted the reality: "I guess I'm just not going to be able to interact with everyone that way." He stepped back from hands-on development in the late 2000s and has largely stayed there since.

📜 Quote of the Day

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