Tech Brew Ride Home - Tue. 02/01 – Destiny And Wordle Get Acquired

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 Tuesday, February 1st, 2021. I'm Brian McCullough today. The time of gaming consolidation is upon us with Sony snapping up bungee. Not exactly related, but the New York Times also acquired Wordle.

Starting point is 00:00:48 Did the CEO of Bolt's tweets lose him the top job at the company he founded? You can no longer roll through stop signs in your Tesla and the best use of augmented reality I've heard in a while. Here's what you miss today in the world of tech. Well, I think we now know one of the big stories of 2022 already. Consolidation in the gaming industry. Sony Interactive Entertainment announced yesterday it is buying Bungy, which makes destiny, among other games, for $3.6 billion. Among those other games, Bungi makes, Halo, the flagship game for the Xbox platform.

Starting point is 00:01:28 So real sort of tit for tat here on some level, quoting games industry.biz, After the deal closes, Bungy will be, quote, an independent subsidiary of Sony Interactive Entertainment run by a board of directors consisting of current CEO and chairman Pete Parsons and the rest of the studio's current management team. Sony has said Bungy will remain a multi-platform studio with the option, quote, to self-publish and reach players wherever they choose to play, end quote. At present, the studio is working on maintaining Destiny 2, expanding the Destiny franchise, and working on new IP. The deal caps off a massive. January for Games industry acquisitions. Take two announce an agreement to acquire Zinga for roughly

Starting point is 00:02:10 $12.7 billion on January 11th, and Microsoft followed up with a $68.7 billion deal for Activision Blizzard a week later. This would be the second time Bungee has been bought by a platform holder. Microsoft acquired the studio in June of 2000, securing its then-upcoming shooter Halo as an exclusive title for the original Xbox's 2001 launch. Bungee would regain its end up. shortly after the launch of Halo 3 in October of 2007. It produced two more exclusive Halo games for the company, Halo 3 ODST and Halo Reach, before signing a 10-year deal with Activision that would lead to the creation of the Destiny franchise, end quote. Yes, about Destiny, quoting Tom Warren on Twitter. If you're wondering how big Destiny 2 is for Sony,

Starting point is 00:02:57 860,000 players played Destiny 2 yesterday at a slow point in a season about to end later this month. 275,000 of them played on Xbox, 355,000 on PlayStation, 224,000 on Steam, and 5,390 on Stadia, end quote. And actually, Tom makes the compelling case that this is more of a platform play in another way, quoting his piece in The Verge. Microsoft has Minecraft, Epic Games, has Fortnite, and now Sony has Destiny. Beyond Destiny, this deal reveals Sony's ambition to compete with games like Fortnite alongside the steps it has been taking to bring the PlayStation brand to multiple platforms. The deal itself is unusual. Bungee will maintain creative independence inside Sony, self-publishing its future games despite being owned 100% by Sony. Destiny 2 will remain

Starting point is 00:03:50 multi-platform, so it's not going to disappear from the Xbox and turn into a PlayStation exclusive. Bungy is even committed to keeping the game the same, quote, no matter where you choose to play, end quote. That likely means we won't see exclusive destiny strikes or weapons on PlayStation like we saw in the past, thanks to an Activision and Sony deal. Bungi's future games won't be PlayStation exclusive either, quote, We want the worlds we are creating to extend to anywhere people play games, reads a Vision blog post from Bungie's Joe Blackburn and Justin Truman. So what is Sony paying $3.6 billion for exactly? You only have to look at Sony's top 10 played PS5 games to see how important Destiny is to PlayStation.

Starting point is 00:04:32 Destiny 2 is number six on the list based on gameplay hours. It's a list that includes Fortnite at the top and Call of Duty Black Ops Cold War in second spot alongside the usual annual FIFA and NBA releases. Destiny 2 is still incredibly popular across Xbox, PC, and PlayStation, even as the game is about to enter year 5. Despite many Destiny Killers promising to compete RIP Anthem, there's still nothing quite like Destiny on the market. It has a unique blend of looter, shooter, and MMO, and a player-versusible mode that lets you show off the guns and armor you've acquired through hours of grinding. While it's technically

Starting point is 00:05:11 free to play, it also has a unique revenue model. You can purchase cosmetics through microtransactions, buy a season pass to get more rewards and unique weapons, and also purchase DLC to to get access to additional campaign content and activities like dungeons or raids. What Sony's acquisition of Bungi isn't about is exclusivity, though. Games like Destiny thrive because they're available on multiple platforms and can connect different friend groups in a virtual world. Fortnite, Call of Duty, and Destiny aren't hugely popular because they're locked to one platform. They're available everywhere, and that drives their success.

Starting point is 00:05:45 Sony might have pushed back against crossplay and cross-platform in the past, but it's clear the PlayStation Maker is now embracing its potential and has bigger plans for live service games. Philosophically, this isn't about pulling things into the PlayStation world, says Ryan. This is about building huge and wonderful new worlds together, end quote. So more than just reacting to what Microsoft is done, this is reacting to what Fortnite has achieved and the sort of metaverse light-like vision that games are seemingly moving toward these days. and there is apparently the next major new franchise bungee is working on as well, something called Matter.

Starting point is 00:06:24 Matter is described as a multiplayer action game with character-based gameplay. Of course, consolidation in the gaming space isn't going to happen unless the regulators let it happen. And, dun dun, dun, a source is telling Bloomberg that the FTC, not the Department of Justice, is reviewing Microsoft's Activision Blizzard acquisition and will focus on potential harm to rivals. Quote, the Federal Trade Commission and the Department of Justice share responsibility for antitrust reviews of mergers and often reach agreements about which one will investigate a deal. FTC chair Lena Kahn has long advocated for a more forceful approach to reviewing deals, particularly by the biggest technology companies, which she says are able to leverage their

Starting point is 00:07:14 dominance in one line of business to gain power in other markets. Under her leadership, the agency has sued to block two major takeovers, NVIDIA's proposed purchase of Arm and Lockheed Martin's deal to buy Aerojet Rocket Dine Holdings. The Activision investigation will focus on the combination of Activision's gaming portfolio with Microsoft's consoles and hardware systems. Regulators are likely to look closely at how Microsoft's ownership of Activision could harm rivals by limiting their access to the company's biggest games, end quote. The Associated Press has seen documents that they say reveal that Tesla will issue,

Starting point is 00:07:51 you an over-the-air update to its full self-driving software because that latest version of the software let vehicles roll through stop signs without coming to a halt affecting around 54,000 vehicles. Quote, documents posted Tuesday by U.S. safety regulators say that Tesla will disable the feature with an over-the-internet software update. The rolling stop feature allowed vehicles to go through intersections with all-way stop signs at up to 5.6 miles per hour. The recall shows that Tesla the vehicle to violate the law in most states where police will ticket drivers for disregarding stop signs. A spokesman for the Governor's Highway Safety Association, which represents state highway safety offices, says he is not aware of any states that allow rolling stops. Tesla agreed

Starting point is 00:08:38 to the recall after two meetings with officials from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, according to documents. Tesla said that it knows of no crashes or injuries caused by the feature. The recall covers Model S sedans and X SUVs from 2016 through 2022, as well as 2017 to 2022 Model 3 sedans and 2020 through 2022 Model Y SUVs. Selected Tesla drivers are beta testing the full self-driving software on public roads. The company says the cars cannot drive themselves and drivers must be ready to take action at all times. A firmware release to disable the rolling stop is expected to be sent out in early February, end quote. There was another big headline yesterday about an acquisition in the game space, but it was a smallish acquisition of a small game that has gotten pretty big of late.

Starting point is 00:09:34 The New York Times announced it has acquired Wordle, the simple word game that has amassed millions of daily players for an undisclosed price in the low seven figures, quoting the verge. Wordle will, quote, initially remain free to new and existing players, end quote, once it moves over to the Times site, and game creator Josh War, Wardle says that he's working with the New York Times to preserve players' existing wins and streak data once the game heads to its new home. That said, the New York Times announcement leaves plenty of room for the company to decide to put Wordle behind its paywall in the future. In his announcement of the sale for a price that the New York Times announcement reports is, quote, an undisclosed price in the low seven figures, end quote, Wardle explains that running the hugely popular game has, quote, been a little overwhelming,

Starting point is 00:10:19 end quote, especially considering that he's the only person who actually handles running the entire game. Quote, we could not be more thrilled to become the new home and proud stewards of this magical game and are honored to help bring Josh Wardle's cherished creation to more solvers in the months ahead, said Jonathan Knight, general manager for the New York Times games in the Times announcement of the acquisition. When it moves over to the New York Times, Worldel will join a lineup of other popular daily puzzles, including the New York Times crossword, the mini crossword, spelling B, letterboxed, tiles, and vertex. and quote. Supposedly, the talks to acquire the game began the very day after the first article about Wordle appeared in the New York Times back at the start of last month. It's the same article that I

Starting point is 00:11:00 shared in the long reads that week. Now, there has been some gnashing of teeth about this news along the lines of people saying, Wordle sold out. Why can't nice, fun things, tiny little fun things avoid being swallowed up by the maw of capitalism? But come on, people. people, what, you would prefer he sold out to Facebook or I don't know, Oracle. Like, the New York Times makes a ton of sense as a home for this. As a subscriber to their crossword product for over a decade now, the New York Times knows how to do things like keep smart little word games like this going. This feels like the perfect home for this game. And as someone who owns a small but very profitable web business and have done so for more than 20 years now, I know that it's so small

Starting point is 00:11:45 it'll never IPO, but that's because I know what it is. It's my little oil well, and as long as I tend it with care, it will reliably throw off a good amount of money for me every year like it has since I was 22 years old. Nonetheless, if someone showed up and offered me like $10 million for it, I would take that offer because, again, come on, people, it's not that everybody has a price, though everybody definitely does, it's that everything has a logical price, a price that makes sense. Wordle didn't try to turn Wordle into a unicorn. It was a little side project that just made him into a smallish millionaire. If your side project made you a million dollars after a couple months of work, you would and should take that money and be happy too, and we should be happy for

Starting point is 00:12:29 him. As Ken Kosyenda tweeted, quote, I'm happy about Josh Wordle's sale of wordle to the New York Times, if only because it shows that it is possible to create something for love, put it out in the world for people to enjoy for free, never act like a jackass even a little, and, still turn a tidy profit. Bravo, end quote. Though, as Tracy Chow tweeted, Wordle has set Valentine's Day gift expectations high for the partners of software engineers, end quote. This is one of those stories I passed on doing earlier because I was like, do I really have to keep everyone informed about every time folks on tech Twitter have a beef? But this is a beef that it turns out had consequences, right?

Starting point is 00:13:18 Breslow, co-founder of One Click Checkout startup Bolt, has stepped down as CEO of Bolt and become executive chairman after, you might have seen his tweets bashing Y Combinator and Stripe went viral last week, quoting TechCrunch. Breslo, who says the decision is his own, is being replaced as CEO by Maju Kurovila, who joined the company as its chief product and technology officer in 2019 and became its C.O. in August of last year. Breslow is assuming the role of executive chairman. On its face, the decision would seem to make sense for the 600-person company, which is currently raising a round of funding that is expected to value the outfit at $14 billion, up from the $11 billion valuation. It

Starting point is 00:14:02 was assigned just earlier this month when it closed on $355 million in Series E funding. Bolt, which earlier this month decided to give employees a four-day work week permanently, has raised nearly $1 billion altogether to date. Of course, it's easy to wonder how closely the move is also tied to the attention that Breslow 27 attracted after publishing a series of tweets last Monday afternoon and who was back at it this past weekend. In what he described in his first series of tweets as a kind of public service to other founders, he warned that rival Stripe and famed Accelerator Y Combinator, which counts Stripe among its biggest success stories, are, quote, mob bosses that will pull, quote, every power move imaginable to squash competitors. One of the power moves, wrote Breslo, is to keep any threat to

Starting point is 00:14:51 Stripe out of Y Combinator, which he says rejected Bolt's application earlier in time. He also accused Stripe of co-running the link aggregator and message board that's owned by YC, Hacker News, and thus limiting how much attention Bolt received. Not last. He accused Stripe of deliberately funding a direct competitor to Bolt at the same valuation that Bolt enjoyed at the time. And quote. Yes, he called the Colson brothers, in so many words, mobsters. So all I'll say about this is that it felt to me when I saw these tweets, like Breslow was trying to become one of those populist troll personas online that tends to thrive these days. Some people believe that stirring up controversy and debates online can only help all sides. I sometimes suspect that is what is

Starting point is 00:15:42 going on with Jack Dorsey and Mark Andresen and their beef. But this shows that not everybody can do it effectively. Some folks, it turns you into a sort of folk hero online, but some folks, it can blow up in your face. And this seems to be an example of that. Either that, or it proves that the Collison brothers are mob bosses, because their nefarious power behind the scenes lost this guy his job. I'm joking, of course. But full disclosure, I am a teeny tiny, infanticestown. investor, personally, not through the fund in Bolt's most recent fundraising round. And finally today, this is some Metaverse stuff that definitely makes sense to me. Although again, maybe we should call it Metaverse Light.

Starting point is 00:16:32 Pinterest has added an augmented reality tool for furniture to its mobile app, which allows users to see how more than 20,000 products from various retail partners would look in their homes, according to the Wall Street Journal. The tool will initially work with 20,000 products from retail partners such as West Elm, Crate and Barrel, and Wayfair, according to Pinterest. It will be available on pins as the company calls posts on its image-sharing platform. Price and further product details also appear within the pins. People use Pinterests partly as a way to discover products that they might want to buy, a habit that retail marketers want to encourage with augmented reality, said Jeremy King, the company's senior vice

Starting point is 00:17:12 president of engineering, and the ability to picture furniture and homes, will help people make purchase decisions as the company has seen with a similar virtual try-on tool for beauty products, he said. West Elm, for one, views the Pinterest feature as a supplement to the shopping experience with the potential to increase purchases among people who are browsing its furniture, as well as a way to reduce returns. We've already known that decorating your home is a really visual experience, said a West Elm spokesperson. Hey, I finally got the video for our World Cup of Entrepreneurs episode, up on YouTube if you want to watch us do that debate live on video. I've got a link at the bottom of the show notes to part one. And part two should be up by sometime this afternoon. Do me a favor.

Starting point is 00:18:06 We lost our ability to monetize our YouTube video since we haven't been uploading some lately and thus don't have enough plays in the last few months. So if anyone wanted to just turn on these videos and just let them play, I wouldn't be mad at you. It's about two and a half hours all told between the two episodes. So if you, just a handful of you, let them play. We'd be monetized and not too long. Check it out. Talk to you tomorrow.

Tech Brew Ride Home - Tue. 02/01 – Destiny And Wordle Get Acquired

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