Tech Brew Ride Home - (Bonus) E3 Wrapup and the Gaming Space with Brian Heater of TechCrunch

Episode Date: June 23, 2019

E3 was last week, not even this past week, but I did want to get a debrief on what went on there, so I had to wait for everyone to get back from E3 and Brian Heater of TechCrunch is here to file a report. Where is gaming in this transition to streaming? What were the headline games announced at E3? What about Project Scarlett? Sponsors: Pantheon.io/ride Rhone.com/ride Promocode RIDE for 20% off! Subscribe to the ad-free premium feed! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On April 4th, 2023, around 2 in the morning, a man was found stabbed multiple times on a sidewalk in downtown San Francisco. Hey, who did this to you? What happened next turned the story into a political firestorm. Reports have identified the victim as Bob Lee, the founder of Cash App. From Bloomberg Podcasts, this is Foundering, the Killing of Bob Lee, beginning April 16. Welcome to another weekend bonus episode of the TechMeme Right Home. I'm Brian McCullough. E3 was last week, not even this past week, but I did want to get a debrief on what went on there,

so I had to wait for everyone to get back from E3, and Brian Heater of TechCrunch is here today to file a report. Where is gaming in this transition period to streaming? What were the headline games announced at E3? What about Project Scarlet? Please enjoy. E3s before, right? Yeah, this was something like, I think, my seventh or eighth at this point. Just in a really broad way, like, was this year's different than previous years?

How did it feel there on the floor, as it were? Sure. It's been a really, it's been an interesting show over the past 10 or 15 years, I guess, however long it's been going. From a standpoint that it tends to ebb and flow, I think, more than any other show. We talk about that a lot during CES, you know, the changes that's going through how, you know, some of the larger companies have backed out and it's, you know, transition to smaller startups, things like that. But I haven't seen any other shows

of this scale that have expanded and contracted the way E3 has. A few years ago, it went through this major transition where it just became essentially a series of beatings. I wasn't at those years, but I think they were kind of basically doing them out of hotel room. So all those really large, over the top booths that, you know, companies like Nintendo and Microsoft have were pretty much non-existent. Obviously, it's come back in a pretty substantial way over the last few years. The primary difference this year from the standpoint of attendance, well, actually, let me back up a second. So the other major transition that it's gone through is it's turned into something that kind of skirts the line between a professional and consumer show. It, in some ways, the

closest thing, the closest show that I attend to E3 is probably Comic-Con. I was going to say that, yeah. Yeah, which, you know, I go to the New York one pretty much every year and I've been to San Diego a handful of times. And it really has become kind of a fan fest, which is good from the standpoint that, you know, it's great that it's not closed off and that these, you know, huge mega fans get to be there at these events and, you know, interact with the company, things like that. but it's kind of chaotic from the standpoint of actually attempting to get from point A to point B.

You know, when you've got a meeting in South Hall and you're in North Hall, it can be kind of a nightmare. Everybody's walking around their phones, but that's just sort of me being a whole seasoned person who's been through a lot of these and has a lot of complaints. They also tend to more so than other consumer electronic events, although you will see this with Samsung and even Apple. they tend to pack the press conferences full of not only their own employees, but mega fans as well. So, you know, if you watch like the Square press conference, for example, there was nothing really major announced except for a handful of Final Fantasy Masters and a very lacklister-looking Avengers game, but every single piece of minutia got a huge cheer. The biggest difference this year, however, between, say this year and last year, it was the absence of Sony. you really felt it in the North Hall. It was just one massive booth that wasn't there.

There was just kind of a very large spatial difference. And then obviously the fact that Sony didn't have a press conference this year was big as well. So that was one of the big three gone. Nintendo over the past few years has really transitioned from having their own in-person press conference to something they call Nintendo Direct, which is basically a bunch of pre-recorded vignettes and trailers that they attend the show, which works perfectly fine, especially on years like this where there wasn't any new hardware to announce.

It essentially has the same effect, but they were very much there in terms of presence. They had a huge booth and, you know, a handful of games. I spoke to one of their executives while it was there and got some hands-on time with a few of the new titles as well. All the headlines, because I'm not super deep in the gaming space, but sure, all of the headlines were about this, you know, people talking about their coming streaming systems and subscription plays and things like that.

But there wasn't actually that much tangible for you to actually see at E3, right? It was all about announcing stuff, but you can't actually see anything yet. Yeah, E3 is a weird show. You know, I'm a hard work guy in terms of what I do at TechRatch in terms of what I've done for the last several years, which means that, you know, unless it's like a... new VR headset or a new console, which, you know, those come out once every, what, like eight or ten years at this point, it seems like. There's not that sort of hands-on time. You know, it's really just kind of games to play through. But yeah, I mean, you're right insofar

as all of these plays are essentially being announced for the second half of the year. I don't have any of days in front of me, but, you know, I think we're talking like October, November timeline for Stadia and XCloud, which is Microsoft's Play. So it's really, I mean, this is a huge platform. This is, I think, still the biggest game show of the year that don't quote me on that. So, you know, this is really kind of the opportunity for them to get out in front of everything. And Google didn't have a booth or much of a presence of the show, but they did their big event the Friday before, which they were clearly kind of trying to take the wind out of everybody's sales. And it worked as far as Microsoft was concerned. Their press conference,

which, again, was the only of the big three with an actual impers of press conference, was kind of strange in that, you know, it was a few dozen game trailers and then kind of squeezed into the last few minutes of the show. They announced Game Pass for PC. They talked about XCloud for about two or three sentences and then unveiled their Project Scarlet, which is their upcoming next generation console, and all of that unfolded in the space of probably under five minutes. I think I read or something that you saw an XCloud demo. Was that a hands-on demo, or you just saw them demonstrate it?

Yeah, so Microsoft does this kind of fun thing. So I don't know how well, you know, Los Angeles. So that downtown area right next to the Kavitsa Center, the freeway is right down there and there's also the what do they call it? Like they it's basically where they hold the Grammys and

the Staples Center which is where the Lakers play and then there's the Microsoft Theater or Xbox Theater I think it's called which is where they do their event so they do their big unveiling one day and then they have it rented out for the next week so you can essentially kind of walk into that area

and get hands on time. So we did we got a demo. I I can't remember which which game it was. I played a lot of games that week. But yeah, we got a demo of it. It was playing on a galaxy S-10 devices with a little controller attached. And it seemed great. Lucas, who has a little more experience, he's actually played with Stadia, which I haven't at this point.

You know, said there was a little bit of lag. But honestly, it wasn't a dot that would really, I think, have a serious impact on a gameplay. Now the question is what sorts of underlying technologies they're using here and how different that's going to be when there are a lot of people on the service. You know, there's going to be a lot of constraints that they're going to have to deal with. And I suspect that we're really talking about 5G, I think, is going to be the thing that really pushes these things forward. Yeah, I think you, when you were speaking with some Microsoft reps, like they're saying this push towards all cloud-based gaming is probably, inevitable, but it's still probably also a ways off in Microsoft's calculation, at least? Yeah, well, I mean, you know, you would say that too if you were working on an $800 console,

right? But yeah, I mean, I think that's fair for a lot of reasons. One, I think people are still interested in buying this hardware. And the idea, God, given the amount of people that play games, the idea of going to exclusively to cloud seems just completely nuts at this point. There's There's a lot of very kind of pragmatic technological barriers that need to be overcome to really get there. So to what degree are all the players like, you know, the actual studios and things like that, thinking that moving to the cloud and streaming is an inevitability as well? The writing seems to be on the wall. Are they talking about that?

Like when you're on the floor, is that like the sense that the industry is on the version? of a major transition? I think so. I mean, once you get all these big players in there, and the dominoes have fallen from the standpoint of every single other kind of major form of media. So, obviously, music streaming was the first to really get there. We've since gotten there with movies through Netflix, Hulu, Amazon Prime,

and things like that. So it makes sense that, at the very least, that I think the writing is on the wall for, subscription services, certainly. So, you know, Game Pass going forward. Apples are arcade going forward. And I think we're finally at a point where the technology for streaming is there to give people a reasonably good gaming experience and getting somebody like, somebody like Google and

Microsoft in play here, I think is going to have a major effect. You know, we've been seeing online. We've seen a lot of these companies over the past decade attempt. this. I've seen a lot of startups attempt this, but when you're talking about companies with the infrastructure and the hosting services of Microsoft and Amazon, I think it's pretty clear that we're getting there, at least from the standpoint, of having a certain reasonably large percentage of your gaming happening through the cloud. I'm totally ignorant of this stuff, but I'm assuming Sony's probably going to do streaming as well at some point if they haven't

already announced their plans? Yeah, they do have a subscription offering, but yeah, I mean, I'm sure they're getting there as well, but they don't, you know, they don't really, at least here in the States, they don't have the same kind of large-scale infrastructure that, you know, at Google, Microsoft, or Amazon have. I mean, those are very much enterprise companies. So they have the back end to really, to handle this. So the question is whether they would build themselves or work with an Amazon or somebody else.

And Nintendo says it's evaluating it, but then even the publishers are kind of dipping their toe into this idea of subscriptions and services as well. Yeah, yeah. I mean, I do think it's important to make that distinction. I think I probably muddy the waters a little bit in my piece and a lot of the raves have as well from the standpoint of when we're talking about Google Stadia, we're talking about a service that really kind of splits the difference here that is both a streaming that's a streaming service with a subscription element you know I think something like 10 a month but we don't know exactly how that's going to work right now and one of the interesting things to bring up here is the fact that Ubisoft announced a service during their event

which is going to be like $15 a month which is completely nuts but that will work through Stadia. So, I mean, that's going to be kind of interesting to see where the line is drawn. But for publishers and developers, for Nintendo, this certainly, maybe not streaming, but subscription certainly makes a lot of sense because they've absolutely got the back hotlog and the library to do it. And I think the idea of paying $10 a month to, you know, have access to every Mario game on your Switch makes a lot of sense. Right. So that's what it is. There's two different channels here. There's the concept of I can game on any screen, like even a dumb screen because the gaming is actually on the cloud. And then the second channel is this idea that as

opposed to buying shrink wrap boxes, you pay a monthly fee and you get access to a certain number of games, right? That's right. And another important reason is to draw this distinction. And this is something that we came out with that I don't think was highly reported until I talked to one of the Microsoft, excuse me, Microsoft execs towards the end of the week, which is the fact that Microsoft is also drawing a line between XCloud or streaming service and game console streaming from the Xbox One. So that's going to be a similar service, but instead of having it happening on, you know, Microsoft machines on a server somewhere, you could actually potentially be anywhere in

the world and stream a game directly from your Xbox to your iPhone, for example. So, you know, the analogy, we even mentioned, like, this is where all the industries seem to be going. So I guess it's an inevitability that we're going to eventually have the same problem that people are already worried about for video streaming services. Like, are you going to have to get six different subscriptions? But like you, I think in one of the somebody's piece, they pointed out that it's an even bigger issue on the gaming front. It's not just, well, I want to watch Friends, but Friends is on that service over there. Like, if you've invested time in a game, like, you've had progress in that game that you've invested. You might have

bought actual micro-transactions and stuff. So, like, if you have to move between different platforms, like, it's different than I can't access a movie. It's like, we're getting into weird questions of ownership here. Yeah, I talked about that in the piece. I think it even goes beyond that. I mean, Friends is a good example because you'll notice that there's an easy story that a lot of sites do. I'm not saying this disparage. I totally get why people do this, but there's that you'll see that story come out once a month from a lot of different entertainment and tech sites. the here's all of the movies and shows that are leaving Netflix and that's something that we're going to have to grapple with here right publishing deals laps and companies are only interested in

having things for a certain amount of time you know maybe there's like a sequel to a game that's coming out you know say there's like a new assassin's creed coming out so um game pass wants to get access to all the the assassins creed but yeah the question is if you've invested a lot of money and then it goes away from the service, what happens, which is something that I put to these GamePass executives. And essentially what they told me was that people with, who subscribe to their service,

will get a discount to purchase the game, which makes sense from their standpoint in that I don't think they want game ownership to go away in the same way that record labels don't want downloads, to go away, right? Like, in an ideal world for them, you're listening to these things on Spotify, and if you really love them, you're going to purchase them. But

maybe games are similar to albums in that way, and that you'll go back and listen to an album numerous times, but they're very different from Netflix in the way that for most of us, we watch a movie, and we're done with that movie, at least for

some time. If you're over the age of 12, you're probably not watching the same movie week in and week out. Although that's an argument for being able to own kids' movies at least. So like you said, you're more of a hardware guy. So based on the limited details that were released,

what did you think of Project Scarlett? I mean, the specs are impressive. I'm going to assume that in a couple years we're going to be at 8K, but it's always it's always hard to say with sets you know as at c s this year and we saw like several 8k uh screens but that seems like a number of years off um i i it's too early to say you know obviously like i've always been my my my dirty secret is i'm not much of a gamer myself either but i've always been you know titles over hardware when it comes to most of these things so i think when we're at a point where the only thing that's been announced so far is a halo sequel

it's way too early to say. And I think that the consensus is essentially that Microsoft's kind of certainly Sony had a leg up in this last generation. So with the PS4. So it certainly makes sense that Microsoft's trying to get out ahead of this thing. Well, then what were some of the game-specific highlights for you? This is an area I know absolutely nothing. What were the big hits or the announcements for games that got people? heads turned?

There were a lot of them for different reasons. I mean, you know, that Avengers was a really, it was a weird one. Always a bad sign. Like, that was going to be Evasov's biggest title of the event, and it's always a really bad sign when you don't see any actual gameplay, and I think it's scheduled to come out, I think, later this year. So that's always kind of a rough sign. spend some time at the Nintendo booth, which I mentioned before.

So I'm old. So the one that kind of really excited me was the Link's Awakening reissue, which is essentially, I think it was the first, yeah, it was the first Zelda title for Game Boy. They're doing a complete reissue. It looks really terrific for the Switch. So that should be coming out toward the end of the year. the

cyberpunk 277 got a standing ovation mostly because Keanu came out on stage that's very exciting for people that looks very cool the the watchdogs trailer was really impressive I think that took a lot of people by surprise the ability to play

as an insane number of characters was a big hit at the event what was what is Guigi well obviously Obviously, Guigi is a goo-based version of Luigi that appears to, okay, so there's a new Luigi's Mansion game. I think it's a third Luigi's Mansion that's coming out, which is Luigi in a house. We spent time playing it.

It's a lot of fun as just about every Mario Tour is, and Mario Game is. And the big innovation here is a gelatinous version of Luigi that appears to either emanate from, I can't say for sure, whether it's his weird Ghostbusters vacuum or actually from inside of Luigi. So there's a lot to impact there. but it's it's uh it's it's like if you took a a luigi shaped jello mold and made green jello out of it it would look like luigi and he's able to kind of um to get to things and do things that that regular uh man luigi is not able to and it sounds like something that i need to actually see the images of to even have a chance of grocking but exactly i sort it sounds like it's exactly

like it's um it's like secret of the ooze meets luigi Does that paint a picture? Yeah, a little bit. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's how you have to do it like that Hollywood thing of it's like, it's like, it's like die hard, but, you know, in a, in a kindergarten class or something, you know. Yeah. Well, thanks for gamefully trying to describe that, but also wrapping up E3 for us, Brian.

No problem.