Cecilia D'Anastasio

Cecilia D’Anastasio reports on the games industry and digital culture for Bloomberg, with a particular focus on how companies, platforms and regulators shape the business and governance of video games. Her coverage ties corporate decisions, legal pressure and platform design to the lived reality of developers, creators and players, often through deep investigative and data-driven reporting. Before joining Bloomberg, she built a track record in games journalism at outlets including Kotaku and Wired and has written for publications such as VICE, The Nation, Jezebel, Gothamist and the Columbia Journalism Review.

Games industry deals and corporate strategy

D’Anastasio’s recent work follows major corporate maneuvers across the global games industry, with particular attention to consolidation, investment and leadership changes.

She has reported on Microsoft’s Xbox unit cutting 268 jobs while moving several game studios under Activision, framing the layoffs within broader restructuring of the company’s development pipeline and franchise stewardship. Her coverage of Valve examines the company’s position as an “anticorporate hero” facing antitrust scrutiny over its Steam store, situating the case alongside other platform investigations involving app stores run by Apple and Google. She regularly tracks Saudi Arabia’s ambitions in games, including stories on the government wealth fund weighing a combination of Electronic Arts with Savvy Games and on Savvy Games Group’s chief executive stepping down after overseeing a multibillion-dollar investment program in the industry.

Across these pieces, she writes in a business-forward format, blending deal terms, investor implications and internal communications with analysis of what shifts in ownership and strategy mean for game makers and the wider ecosystem.

Platform governance and online child safety

A core thread in D’Anastasio’s reporting is platform governance, particularly the ways large game and social platforms manage safety, exploitation and moderation. Her investigations into child predation and exploitation on Roblox have been recognized with major journalism honors, including a George Polk Award for technology reporting and additional awards for public interest magazine journalism and online journalism. In that body of work she documents how design choices, creator tools and monetization systems can expose young users to grooming and abuse, and how law enforcement and regulators respond.

More recent coverage continues this line through reporting on Roblox and Discord facing scrutiny from US states over child safety issues, connecting regulatory actions to platform policies and enforcement gaps. She also writes on Roblox’s business and product decisions, such as reporting on a double-digit share price rise tied to new tools for game developers, highlighting how changes in creator tooling shape the economics and governance of the platform.

The format in these stories ranges from investigative features grounded in extensive sourcing to market-focused news pieces that track how safety and governance decisions feed back into company performance.

Creator economy, esports and culture

D’Anastasio consistently covers the creator economy around games, from influencer collectives to esports organizations and streaming communities.

Her reporting on the influencer group FaZe Clan and its business and governance issues has been honored in investigative journalism award listings, underscoring her focus on how money, contracts and culture intersect in creator-led enterprises. She has also produced widely recognized work on sexism within the games industry, examining workplace structures, community norms and harassment and earning awards from professional writers’ and game developer organizations for that coverage. Her articles extend to the entertainment ambitions of major game companies, including reporting on Riot Games’ push into Hollywood and transmedia storytelling, where she follows how game intellectual property is adapted and controlled across film and television. Outside daily news, she occasionally writes essays and features that look at streaming platforms, digital subcultures and the broader creator landscape, reflecting a beat that moves beyond game releases to the social and economic worlds that surround them.

Recognition and reporting style

D’Anastasio’s work has received sustained recognition across the media and technology sectors, including a Polk Award for her Roblox investigation, Writers Guild honors for digital reporting, game industry awards for positive impact and a designation as SXSW’s first Game Industry Journalist of the Year. She has been listed among Variety’s most influential figures in video games and included in Forbes’ “30 Under 30” in media, reflecting both her investigative output and her influence on how the industry is covered. On her professional site, she describes reporting methods that include embedding in virtual worlds and using investigative data journalism, a combination that allows her to connect on-the-ground player experiences with systemic patterns in platform behavior and business strategy. Across beats - from corporate restructurings and regulatory scrutiny to creator organizations and platform safety - her stories tend to be deeply sourced, structurally reported pieces that read equally to industry insiders and to broader audiences interested in how games and digital culture are governed.