Tech Brew Ride Home - Fri. 12/10 – Google Play Games Coming To Windows

Starting point is 00:00:00 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 the Tech meme right home for Friday, December 10th, 2021. I'm Brian McCullough today. Google Play games are coming to Windows, while Microsoft was apparently willing to bend over backwards,

Starting point is 00:00:44 if Apple had let X cloud games into the iOS app store. Meta's first tangible foray into the metaverse is here, the English football punters buying into NFTs, and of course, the weekend long read suggestions. Here's what you miss today in the world of tech. Google says it will release Google Play Games in. in 2022 as a native Windows app that will bring Android games to Windows 10 and Windows 11, quoting the Verge. Starting in 2022, players will be able to experience their favorite Google Play games on more devices,

Starting point is 00:01:18 seamlessly switching between a phone, tablet, Chromebook, and soon Windows PCs, says Greg Hartrell, Google's product director of games on Android and Google Play in a statement to the verge. This Google-built product brings the best of Google Play games to more laptops and desktops, and we are thrilled to expand our platform for players to enjoy their favorite Android games even more, end quote. Google spokesperson Alex Garcia-Comert tells The Verge that the company has built this app on its own, which means Google hasn't partnered with Microsoft, BlueStacks, or others here. The upcoming app will also allow players to resume games on a desktop PC after playing them on a phone, tablet, or Chromebook. For now, Google is simply teasing the app during the Game Awards, which were last night,

Starting point is 00:02:00 with a promised release window of sometime next year. It's not clear what technology Google is using to emulate Android apps on Windows, but games will run locally instead of streaming from the cloud. This will be a native Windows app distributed by Google, which will support Windows 10 and up, explains her trill. It will not involve games streaming, end quote. Google's app won't rely on any special integration with Windows 11, and the company will also distribute the app itself, end quote.

Starting point is 00:02:26 Speaking of games, emails shaken loose from the Epic versus Apple trial show that Microsoft, coincidentally, offered to bring AAA Xbox exclusive games to iOS if Apple were to let its Xcloud game streaming service into the App Store. Quoting the verge again. Remember when Apple pretended like it would let cloud gaming services like Microsoft XCloud and Google Stadia into the app store, while effectively tearing their business models to shreds, knowing how Microsoft replied that forcing gamers to download hundreds of individual apps to play a catalog of cloud games would be a bad experience. In reality, Microsoft was willing to play along with many of Apple's demands,

Starting point is 00:03:12 and it even offered to bring AAA Xbox exclusive games to iPhone to help sweeten the deal. That's according to a new set of private emails that The Verge unearthed in the aftermath of the Epic versus Apple trial. These games would have run on Microsoft's Xbox Clubs, cloud gaming or X-Cloud platform, streaming from remote server farms filled with Xbox 1 and Xbox Series X processors, instead of relying on the local processing power of your phone. If the deal had been made, you could have theoretically bought a copy of a game like Halo Infinite in Apple's App Store itself and launched it like any other app, instead of having to pay $14.99 a month for an Xbox

Starting point is 00:03:49 GamePass Ultimate subscription with a set catalog of games and then needing to use Microsoft's web-based App Store workaround. But primarily, Microsoft was negotiating to bring its Netflix-esque catalog of X-Cloud games to the App Store at a time when Apple had gotten very touchy about cloud gaming in general. The emails between Microsoft Xbox head of business development, Lori Wright, and several key members of Apple's App Store teams, show that Microsoft did start with a wide array of concerns about stuffing an entire service worth of Xbox games into individual App Store apps as of February 2020. Wright mentioned the, quote, complexity and management of creating hundreds of thousands of apps, how they'd have to update every one of those apps to fix any bugs and how all those

Starting point is 00:04:33 app icons could lead to cluttered iOS home screens, among other worries. But by March of last year, Microsoft was proposing that it could actually create those hundreds or thousands of individual apps to submit to the app store as long as it could make those apps a bit more like shortcuts instead of stuffing the whole cloud gaming streaming stack into each one. She argued that's similar to how watchOS apps already worked, end quote. You know, we read that tweet recently, wondering if Apple internally was preparing for a changed app store landscape in the near future, and I've said all along that gaming would likely be the thing to crack the app stores open.

Starting point is 00:05:11 Think about it. How great would it be to play AAA games on your iPhone or iPad? like if it weren't so crucial to their business to preserve the 30% Vig and their own gaming center, you can imagine Apple showing Xbox games on a new iPhone as a cornerstone of some future Apple event. For how much longer can a logical technological evolution be held back by Apple trying to protect its cash cow? It feels unsustainable to me. Something I'm going to have to test out this weekend. Meta has opened its VR social platform Horizon World.

Starting point is 00:05:49 to all adult users in the U.S. and Canada. So this is basically meta's first real stab at Metaverse Stuff, quoting The Verge. First announced in September 2019 as a private beta, Horizon Worlds has evolved from primarily being a Minecraft-like environment for building games to more of a social platform. Its thousands of beta testers have held regular comedy shows, movie nights, and meditation sessions. They've also built elaborate objects like a replica of the Ecto 1 from Ghostbusters. Now we can open up and say we have interesting things that people can do, Vivek Sharma, Meta's VP of Horizon tells me. During a demo of Horizon Worlds, I was greeted by a few meta employees at the plaza,

Starting point is 00:06:30 a central gathering place used to enter custom worlds and games built by users. We first visited a creator lounge area where you can try custom items being built like a bow and arrow or paperplane launcher and enter building competitions to win cash prizes. Then we hopped to another world and divide it up into teams to play a battle royale shooting game. After that, I was given a demo of Horizon's building tools that let you create a world and items from scratch. A key part of Horizon Worlds is the ability to write basic code that sets rules for how objects work, such as a gun shooting when you press the trigger or a ball bouncing when it touches a surface. The code, which meta calls script blocks, acts similarly to layers in Photoshop by letting you chain together

Starting point is 00:07:13 rules to create complex interactions, such as a leaderboard that automatically updates after a game is finished. Attaching behaviors to objects is actually one of the biggest innovations that I'm proud of for the team, says Sharma. He says that so far meta employees have been making the script blocks at the request of beta testers, and that the company eventually plans to release a free library of them. An asset library of objects is also coming. Right now, the coding for script blocks is done entirely in VR, but eventually meta plans to let them be built from a desktop computer. Another unique aspect of Horizon Worlds is the human guides that exist to greet new players as they teleport from the plaza to different worlds. These guides are power users that

Starting point is 00:07:53 meta employees train to know best practices for navigating Horizon and following its behavior rules. Sharma calls it one of those areas where we're doing unscailable things to keep the environment to be a place that's healthy for communities, end quote. For now, there's no way to make money in Horizon Worlds as a creator, guide, or player. The plan is to eventually tie it into Horizon venues, a standalone experience for throwing large events in VR, and Horizon Work Work Collaboration Software, until monetization is added meta hopes that the world-building aspect of worlds will entice people. The act of creating itself is part of the appeal of this thing, says Sharma. Creation is kind of the product, end quote. On the flip side of the Metaverse coin,

Starting point is 00:08:43 and also tied to my usual weekend activities, apparently English Premier League soccer fans have already spent more than 262 million pounds on crypto-based fan tokens, often offered by a startup named Socios, as critics worry about the fans being exploited, quoting the BBC. Some of the tokens are marketed as offering real-world perks to the buyer, but critics say these perks are insignificant. One offered the chance to vote for songs to be played in stadiums, and clubs have insufficient protection for supporters. So far across the five major European leagues, 24 different clubs have launched or are considering fan tokens, including eight Premier League sides. Most offer tokens akin to a club-specific cryptocurrency, virtual coins that can be

Starting point is 00:09:29 bought and sold, and their value rise and fall depending on supply and demand. Some clubs, such as Manchester City, also sell digital collectibles known as NFTs. Most of the clubs offering fan tokens have signed up to a company called Socios that organizes the initials. The sale and subsequent trading of the virtual coins, but other platforms, including Binance and Bitchi, are growing too. Research by crypto analysts Protos suggests many buyers are speculatively trading their tokens like other cryptocurrencies in an attempt to make money. But the value of many fan tokens has decreased since they were initially sold by the clubs. BBC News asked every Premier League team and some major European sides about their plans for and views on the new trend. Only one was

Starting point is 00:10:12 happy to comment. Brighton-Hove Albion spokesman said, quote, we have not sold these products and have no plans to enter these markets, and quote, which, if you're familiar with Brighton, is pretty much right on brand for them. Time for the weekend long read suggestions. Remember how recently I asked why all the NFT artwork, all the board apes and the like all look like that guerrillas style cartoon sort of aesthetic from the late 90s and early 2000s. Well, in the New Yorker, Kyle Chakia, takes a stab at answering this question in a somewhat related way with a piece titled Pokemon and the first wave of digital nostalgia, quote, as I talk to artists, designers, and trend forecasters

Starting point is 00:10:58 about the burgeoning appeal of these lo-fi digital aesthetics, another motivation emerged. Nostalgia is partly a response to disappointment with the present. For many people, the earlier era of the internet represents a time when they still had power over their digital lives, before they became dependent on the repetitive templates inhuman scale and turbocharged content feeds offered by the likes of Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and TikTok. The company formerly known as Facebook is now pitching a new vision in the form of the metaverse, a virtual reality space in which we are supposed to live our lives. But the cartoonish 3D rendered avatars that Mark Zuckerberg showcased in a recent video

Starting point is 00:11:35 presentation are a far cry from those charming early Pokemon sprites. The revival of pixel art may be a quest for the kind of variety and texture that massive social media networks have gradually banished, it harkening back to a messier, more human moment in our digital lives, end quote. Also from the New Yorker, look, I can't help sharing something like this. It's not Schadenfreude, because I do feel bad for this dude, but it's a word similar. Like, just listen to this. Dude thinks half a billion dollars worth of Bitcoin is sitting in a landfill in Wales, because dude thinks he accidentally threw out the hard drive that the Bitcoin was on. So dude wants to have the landfill painstakingly excavated, which, you know, would

Starting point is 00:12:21 maybe be worth doing if you could rescue a half a billion dollars. Quote, when Howells had his uh-oh moment, his hard drive was already buried under other people's trash. He wanted to go to the dump, but he was embarrassed and afraid that nobody would believe his story. Explaining Bitcoin at that time was not easy, he recalls. So for about a month, he told no one and watched helplessly as the Bitcoin market soared and with it the value of his lost holdings. He remembers saying to himself, O.S. This is turning into a bigger and bigger mistake. Around the time that his Bitcoin became worth $6 million, he confessed to his wife. She was shocked to learn of the potential windfall and encouraged him to go to the dump and see if anything could be done. When he told the manager

Starting point is 00:13:03 there that he'd actually thrown away about four million pounds, he got a lot of headshakes, but eventually the manager took him to an elevated spot to survey the site. The mounds of churned earth, the depot where trash was mixed with soil and grassed over areas of retired landfill, Howl's heart sank? He saw 10 to 15 soccer pitches worth of garbage. How could he possibly sift through it all? But then the manager gave him some cheering news. Dumps were not filled randomly. Like computers, they had an architecture. Newport had organized its dump into different cells. Asbestos was deposited in one location, general household trash and another. It would not be impossible to pinpoint the area where the hard drive was buried, then disinter it. All he needed was

Starting point is 00:13:44 the city's permission, end quote. Next, CNBC points out what we probably already expected. Amazon is largely surviving the recent supply chain crunch because it made its own containers and has enough of a system in place already to bypass other supply chain bottlenecks. Quote, Amazon has been on a spending spree to control as much of the shipping process as possible. It spent more than $61 billion on shipping in 2020 up from just $38 billion in 2019. Nowadays, Amazon is shipping 72% of its own packages, up from less than 47% in 2019. It's even taking control of the first step of the shipping journey by making its own 53-foot cargo containers in China. Containers are in short supply with long wait times and prices surging from less than $2,000 before the pandemic to $20,000 today. Amazon has produced probably 5,000 to 10,000 of these containers over the last two years.

Starting point is 00:14:39 I've been tracking it. An analyst said, when they bring these containers onto U.S. soil once they unload them, guess what? They get to be used in the domestic system and the rail system. They don't have to return them to Asia like everyone else does, end quote. Then The Verge has the story of the TikTok influencer that is making six figures a day by making videos about how to use Excel. She's a Microsoft Excel influencer, if you can believe it, and she's only been doing it for about a year and a half.

Starting point is 00:15:08 Quote, Kat is a one-woman operation with no staff or management layer. She uses her iPhone and consumer software to make her videos, and I've got to say, she has one of the healthiest relationships with the social platforms of maybe any creator I've ever talked to. She thinks of them purely as marketing channels for the video courses she sells elsewhere. That's a big flip from the traditional creator business model, which is usually aimed at monetizing the platforms directly. Kat's just not doing that, end quote. Then the second to last link in the long reads today is to Ben Evans' yearly slide deck exploring the macro and strategic trends in the tech industry. I think when we had Ben on briefly

Starting point is 00:15:49 for the Twitter space recently, some of you might not have been familiar with his work. So a link to this year's deck so you can see why at Andreessen Horowitz and before, Ben, has become such a legend in the valley for his deep analysis of where tech is going. And finally, once again, this is not tech, but in honor of the final episode of Succession Season 3 this weekend, did you read that New Yorker profile of Jeremy Strong, who plays Kendall Roy on the show? Lots of chatter this week around how much of a method acting maniac he seems to be, but also it's a profile of hustle. Like, if this was a profile of a tech founder, all the hustle porn folks would be all over themselves, praising Jeremy for his tenacity.

Starting point is 00:16:32 Like, he's definitely going to make it. Quote, when I asked strong about the rap that Kendall performs in season two at a gala for his father, a top contender for Kendall's most cringeworthy moment, he gave an unsmiling answer about Rishkalnikov, referencing Kendall's monstrous pain. Kieran Culkin told me, after the first season, he said something to me like, I'm worried that people might think the show is a comedy. And I said, I think the show is a comedy. And I said, I think the show is a comedy? He thought I was kidding. Part of the appeal of succession is its amalgam of drama and bone-dry satire. When I told Strong that I, too, thought of the show as a dark comedy, he looked at me

Starting point is 00:17:08 with incomprehension and asked, in the sense that, like, Chekhov is a comedy? No, I said in the sense that it's funny. That's exactly why we cast Jeremy in the role, McKay told me, because he's not playing it like a comedy. He's playing it like he's Hamlet. When I asked Brian Cox, who plays Logan, the patriarch of the family to describe Strong's process, he struck a note of father. He struck a note of fatherly concern. The result that Jeremy Gitz is always pretty tremendous, he said. I just worry about what he does to himself. I worry about the crises he puts himself through in order to prepare. Cox, a classically trained British stage actor, has a turn it on, turn it off approach to acting, and his relationship with Strong recalls a famous story about Lawrence Olivier working with Dustin Hoffman

Starting point is 00:17:47 on the 1976 film Marathon Man. On learning that Hoffman had stayed up partying for three nights before a scene in which he had to appear sleep deprived. Olivier said, my dear boy, why don't you try acting? Cox told me, actors are funny creatures. I've worked with intense actors before. It's a particularly American disease, I think, this inability to separate yourself off while you're doing the job, end quote. For this weekend's bonus episode,

Starting point is 00:18:21 another longtime friend of this podcast, Andrew Chen of Andresen Horowitz fame, sat down to talk about his new book, the cold start problem. It's a really well-done book about how to seek, create, and then benefit from network effects. As I say in the interview, it's not just a book full of cold theory. There are real tangible examples from startups that you know that will provide useful guides for basically any founder in any situation. Look for that on Saturday. Talk to you on Monday.

Tech Brew Ride Home - Fri. 12/10 – Google Play Games Coming To Windows

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