Video Gamers Podcast - Changing the Game – Cloud Gaming, Backbone, and the New Era of Play | Gaming Podcast

Episode Date: May 13, 2025

This week, Ryan and John sit down with Maneet Khaira, founder and CEO of Backbone, for a wide-ranging conversation about the evolution of mobile and cloud gaming. We dig into how the video game industry is shifting—from the rise of Game Pass to cloud-first experiences—and what it means for how, where, and why we play. We also explore how Backbone fits into this movement, what it’s like building a hardware company from the ground up, and how cloud gaming might just change the console wars forever. MORE INFO ON BACKBONE: url: https://backbone.com Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/backbone?igsh=bmx0eWZvZGo3NDY2 Your weekly hit of everything video games—from the Video Gamers Podcast. Thanks to our MYTHIC Supporters: Redletter, Disratory, Ol’ Jake, and Gaius Connect with the show: Support us on Patreon: patreon.com/videogamerspod Join our Gaming Community: https://discord.gg/Dsx2rgEEbz Follow us on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/videogamerspod/ Follow us on X: https://twitter.com/VideoGamersPod Subscribe to us on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@VideoGamersPod?sub_confirmation=1   Visit us on the web: https://videogamerspod.com/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Conditions apply to all benefits. Visit PCFinancial.ca for details. Intro Hello fellow gamers and welcome to the Video Gamers Podcast. Today's episode is for anyone who's ever dreamt of turning their passion into something real. What happens when you see a gap in the market and decide to take on industry giants like Nintendo and Sony? Today we're talking to someone who did just that. Not just to build a product, but how we change the way we game. But first, some introductions are in order.

I am your host John, and I'm joined today by Ryan. Ryan, say hello. Oh, sorry, I'm playing Clare Obscura on my phone. Sorry, hey everybody. What? You can do that. That's amazing Did you say day one also? and Joining us today is the CEO of backbone many Chyra I may have butchered the last name I should have clarified that before the show to talk about a product called the backbone Pro

that before the show to talk about a product called the Backbone Pro mobile gamings glow up and what the future looks like when your phone becomes your console. Manith, how are you? Really great to have you on the podcast and excited to tell you more about the product. Yeah. Yeah, awesome. Well, we're excited to talk about the product as well and learn a bit more about you and your journey here. Before we kind of get rolling in the conversation though, I, I feel like there's an important disclaimer that I have to share. So many then backbone were kind enough to share, uh, demo units with Ryan and I of their new product, the backbone pro.

And other than that, we have received absolutely no compensation monetary or otherwise for this product. And the reason this is important is that I won't speak for Ryan on this, but I quite frankly had a superlative experience with this product. And I don't want my enthusiasm to be mistaken for product placement at any point in time. Meneath, we feel, has a very interesting story to share. And it just so happens that they turned out a great product here and You know we're looking looking forward to learning more about it. I mean so I

John before this and sent him multiple free Pokemon, so Pokemon does not count as compensation. I was gonna say too. I got a pretty sweet jacket, which was nice as well Oh, that's true. That's true. Nobody said us a jacket before a man that was class which was nice as well. Oh, that's true. That's true. Nobody said a jacket before a man. That was class. Yeah, we got shirts and hats and stuff,

but a jacket for sure was class. I don't know if you know this though, but we're in Arizona. It's like a hundred degrees right now. I can wear like two weeks of the year, but you know, it'll be, it'll all be happy when I do. Okay, we'll switch to tank tops for next year.

All good. There you go. We might be cutting the sleeves off of these and doing the Larry the cable guy things out guns out, baby Yeah, baby So many I have to I have to understand the motivation behind What's What was the inspiration to create something like this? Like anytime you bring something to market, especially retail, especially in gaming,

you're really like putting yourself out there. It's a crowded market with lots of like, you know, pretty cheap competitors out there and lots of big powerhouses. What was the spark behind it? Like what frustrated or inspired you to start something like this? Sure, I'm happy to give you the full origin story

I Guess just by way of background context. I'll introduce the company really quickly Please the way that I describe backbone to people is that every time there's been a shift in streaming media It's resulted in some of the biggest consumer businesses of all time. So for example in music streaming you had Spotify and Sonos and then in in TV streaming, you had Netflix, Roku. We like to think of Backbone as the analog company, but for the shift to streaming games, which as you know is well underway.

Just like you can stream music and TV on platforms like Spotify and Netflix, you're able to stream games now through services like Xbox Game Pass. And Backbone is really one of the only independent companies that actually indexes against that trend. And not only that, but we're perhaps the only independent hardware software services company in gaming. I guess there was Oculus before, but they're kind of part of Mena now. And so that's how I would explain the company to most people. So quick primer on the origin story.

I used to work at Google on YouTube back in 2018. I worked on short form video products at YouTube, what later became YouTube Shorts, and then also a little bit on gaming as well. In what capacity, do you mind me asking? Yeah, so I was part of the product management program there, um, so helped, you know, figure out what to make. Um, but I come from sort of like an engineering background, so was involved

in the nuts and bolts as well. And so you're really fun at a party is what you're saying. Oh yes, absolutely. Uh, especially in San Francisco. I'm the best. Yeah. in San Francisco. I'm the best. Yeah.

So worked at, uh, YouTube and while I was there, I lived in a house with, uh, four of my friends to split rent, save on it a bit. And pretty much seems to be the way to live in San Francisco. And every single day we would all get back home from work and we'd all play Fortnite on our phones together. It

sounds like a really radical idea because why would you play on your phone when you have multiple high-end gaming PCs and consoles all inside of your house? And the reason we would do it is actually the first time that we could all easily play the same game together because even in 2025 if you want to play games with your friends it actually requires quite a bit of activation as you have to own you know all these different devices and have parallel setups, console, TV, et cetera. But mobile device was the lowest common denominator so we could actually all play the same game together.

And this is great timing because as you may know, Fortnite is allegedly gonna come back to the App Store literally later today. Mm, that's very good timing, sir. For a moment. This was right when Epic had made the update to the game later today. That's very good timing. This was right when Epic had made the update to the game where you could run the game at 60 frames on a phone, which is actually twice the performance that you get versus if you ran it on the Nintendo Switch that we had inside of our house.

So you imagine we were just sitting there like totally forward and completely flabbergasted how it was physically possible to run a game at better fidelity on a mobile device versus a device that was literally purpose-built for playing games. And as we were sitting there, we realized there were two big issues. First of all, even though the game ran exceptionally well, the actual experience of playing it left a lot to be desired because it was really designed to be played with an input device. And Phil Spencer, for example, talks about how input is the first thing that they look at when they're evaluating games at Xbox, because that's what creates that seamless connection between your mind and the game that allows it to be a fun experience. And so input, you know, we thought could be a lot better.

And the other part that we realized is it didn't feel like you're playing on a dedicated gaming platform. And that kind of became the basis for the backbone app, which you can download on the app store today. It's like a gaming home app that turns your phone into like a console experience where you can access all the different games and services in one place. So it's like the only app where you could play Xbox, PlayStation, Steam, App Store games. Right next to each other. Yeah.

Yeah. It's a beautiful interface too, by the way. Yeah. Thank you. And we realized these two problems. And I was kind of in the right place at the right time. Shortly thereafter, two, three weeks later, I went into the office. And an engineer had built this demo

where you could use Google's cloud technology to basically stream games to any screen in your life. Now, more importantly, this technology was being built at Microsoft and Sony and other companies. But I got to catch an early glimpse of it. And back in 2018, there was a very small group of people that knew about the tech that

was being built at the data center level to let you do exactly this. And no company had made a public commitment to cloud gaming or anything like that. So I got to be one of the first people in the world to try the real do exactly this. And no company had made a public commitment to like cloud gaming or anything like that. So I got to be one of the first people in the world to like try like the real version of this. And as I was sitting there, I mean, they basically were able to run,

I forget exactly what game it was, but like GTA or something on a two generations old Android phone. And I was like, I picked it up and I like played around with it. I mean, I just like lost my mind. I was like, this is insane, right? You could even do something like this. I mean, we've seen disruptions in gaming across

audio, content, business models, but this certainly has to be the single biggest disruption in the history of the games industry, at least in my lifetime, or one of the biggest, because it's just a phase shift in terms of who can even access these types of games. And I got really enamored with this idea. So I decided to make a presentation internally on why I thought gaming was going to be the biggest opportunity for Google in like the next 10 years. Because we had Google Play, which was kind of by accident, you know, multi-billion dollar games business.

Then you had streaming. And I made this like slide deck about this whole opportunity and I sent it to the head of product for YouTube gaming and I realized I could go a bit wider. So I wrote a script to schedule it to go to all the relevant vice presidents in the company at 10 a.m. deep reply time Monday morning. Woke up the next day, there were about a thousand people in the document. But my last day at Google, 15% of the company read it and it became one of the most viral documents internally in Google's history. And it became one of the most viral documents internally

in Google's history. And so I got to meet a couple of the different executives that were working on different gaming initiatives. And it was somewhere in those conversations that I realized that there could be an opportunity to build something really, really interesting. Because as I mentioned before, every time there'd been a shift in streaming,

it resulted in these generational consumer businesses. But not only that, none of the existing incumbents, it really felt like to me, had their incentives set up in such a way to want to create the right experience for the player as opposed to the platform. Because you don't want a separate TV for Netflix, Amazon, HBO. You want one device and platform that works with Xbox Game Pass, Apple Arcade, PS Remote Play, etc. So I realized there could be an opportunity to build an independent company, kind of like

what had transpired with music and TV streaming, Roku, Sonos, etc. And therefore, I decided, let's go work on this idea. And this is circa 2018. I built an early team of people that I had worked with before, you know, Google and other places, and started developing Backbone One. Took us a while to kind of arrive at the idea before I left, or after I left Google,

and about two years, or maybe slightly more than that, to get it to market. I won't recount that two-year period in detail, because it's rather unusual. Nearly dire, many opportunities to fail in that period. Such as the life of a startup. Yeah. And then we launched kind of at the end of 2020, early 2021.

And the company just started growing really rapidly after that. Today, our products are available in all major retail stores. We've partnered with Xbox, PlayStation, Hideo Kojima. We raised over $ 40 million from Index, the main investor in Discord and Roblox. We have one of the most popular apps in our category

in the app store. We were number four over holiday in our category. And we've just continued to scale the business and brand. And as you know, this week we just unveiled Backbone Pro, which has been in development for nearly three years. Yeah, I gotta tell you. So this is a really interesting story that you're sharing. And I do believe that you are solving,

or at least capitalizing on a real app opportunity that exists in gaming. And it's something that I think maybe is becoming a bit more salient, a bit more visible to your average viewer. But like I'll be honest, man, I've seen your products in, uh, in best buy walking around and, uh, you know, it wasn't immediate, like the concept of cloud gaming, like AAA titles to my phone,

it just didn't even compute. And so I walked by it and I go, huh, that's interesting, but I don't play mobile games. You know, I have my switch for that type of game, but most of the game, you know, I'm a console gamer and will probably always be a console gamer. And it wasn't until very recently when, uh, I was, I'll be honest, like I wake up at like three o'clock or two o'clock every morning. I'm, I'm a very terrible sleeper. I sleep like two to three hours a night. And so my PlayStation is in my bedroom, but my wife's asleep. And so I go, well, you know, if I'm going to occupy my time right now, I don't want to wake her up. So one morning I was like, you know what, if I'm going to be up, I'm going to be productive with my time. I work on a video game podcast. Why not game? So I go out to the living room and I remembered that there was this,

you know, this pop-up that happens on my Samsung TV every once in a while for cloud gaming. It just says, you know, play brand new titles, no console needed. And I was like, I have an Xbox controller, let's give this a whirl. So I hooked up my Xbox controller to my TV and all of a sudden I'm playing brand new games fairly seamlessly. I won't say 100% seamlessly, but fairly seamlessly on my TV, on my Game Pass. And I go, what is this?

Like, did I just like kind of like unlock a cheat code? Like it's for $25 and no console, I've unlocked like a buffet of wonderful games, wonderful, proper AAA games of any genre that you could potentially want. And so it was like, wow, there's, there's really something to this cloud gaming concept, you know, and what does this mean for consoles? Like if I can play these titles in great fidelity with no console, what does this actually mean for consoles? And then it just so happened, you know, we, we, we receive requests for, for interviews and that kind of thing pretty, pretty regularly. You know, we're at, we're at top in our category for gaming on many of the podcast carriers and stuff.

But when your agency reached out to us with this concept, it was like primed perfectly, because I was just riding this cloud train, like, man, this seems really, really important. This seems like a paradigm shift in the industry. And so we received the product and I walk a lot. My wife happened to be out of town, but I walk a lot. I walk, I don't know, 20, 20, 30,000 steps a day just as a part of my kind of normal fitness routine. I have it stacked. I have my business calls. I listen to podcasts, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

And I drink a toxic amount of coffee. There's a point that might too, right? It's really exactly. So got this product, hooked it up to my phone. The installation took seconds. And within a couple of minutes I was able to stream a brand new heavy lift game called Claire obscure expedition 33 which is by the way we have been shilling this forever it is one of the most like every single interview recall I've done this week this this game has been brought up and. Oh, yeah. If you haven't played it yet, it's amazing.

But it's extremely relevant, right? We are not talking mobile games. We are talking full on, huge lift, triple A title that has an enormous graphical load. And I was playing it on my phone with the, at least to my eye, a imperceptible difference in quality as I would have been playing it on my PlayStation. And it freaking blew me away, dude.

I in, you know, up until I sold my business, I used to run a pretty, you know, pretty large comparatively HVAC business in Washington state, sold it a couple of years ago. But up until that point, you know, I was traveling quite a bit. My wife and I traveled a ton for work for attending conferences and this kind of thing. We walk a lot. We're very pedestrian, lots of time spent in airports, train stations, you know, bus

stops, that kind of thing. And man, this would have been absolutely incredible, dude. Any traveler out there, anybody who's just like a walker and looking to increase their activity while maintaining their gaming habits. Dude, what a game changer, man. This is unbelievable. So I have to ask, man. I mean, like, is this your first company that you started? No, I've had a few other bites at the Apple before this.

They didn't make it this far though. It's like my- Got it. Yeah. Got it. You have to be pretty proud of this product, man. It is, it's really cool. Yeah. And to be fully transparent,

I did not design this. My team did and the blood, sweat and tears that went into it. I mean, I can tell you more about the development process and how we came about it, but the link gaming products that people like really hard. Microsoft spent a hundred million in R and D to get the Xbox one controller developed. Gamers really care.

It's a good controller, to be fair. Yeah, it's great. I mean, it basically undergirds all future controllers. I mean, that was really critical, the development of input. But I think it's really hard to do because you have to make something that's universally comfortable or as close to possible.

So that's to work well for a percentile female hand size all the way to 95th percentile male hand size. And, you know, happy to talk more about the development of it. But, you know, your sentiments around sort of being skeptical of this class of experience are, you know, you're not the only one that feels that way. I mean, I was very skeptical. And the first time I tried Fortnite running on a mobile device in 2018 was that was my aha moment. And I think a lot of people are starting to have that experience where they run like halo or expedition 33 on a smartphone and they're just like really blown away. But of course you know if you describe streaming games to you know the average gamer today you probably met with a fair bit of skepticism literally just utter disbelief they might be like oh I tried this

two three years ago the technology wasn't that great. The performance will never be there. But you fast forward to now, uh, Phil Spencer publicly shared that a double digit percentage of all Xbox playtime is now time spent streaming games in the cloud. When you started backbone, it was zero. Right? Yeah. Uh, yeah, yeah, absolutely. It makes sense.

This, this feels disruptive in the same exact way as when the iPod was released and it's like, oh, I guess we don't need like physical CDs anymore. My giant CD book is just useless now, you know? Yeah, but I do think there's still emerging awareness for it. So we created more or less a product review for this product that, you, you know, how it saw some, saw some dissemination on, on social media, but like we kept getting, well, yeah, but like this can't compete with the switch because like, I don't, I don't need a controller to play candy crush. I'm like, no, you don't get it, bro. You're not playing. You might not be playing Mario brothers,

but you're, you're bringing fricking halo on the go, man. You're bringing, you're bringing master chief on the go. You're playing brand new titles on the go on your phone. No download. You know, it's streaming right to your phone Oh, and by the way, did you know that this product is only 160 bucks compared to whatever? 450 bucks that the the switches Proposing at this point 80 bucks a game dude 25 a month, you pair your game pass with this thing. It's, you have an entire game library for under $200. It's unbelievable. Yeah, I think it's like an incredible art drive for me

because you think about it, you have a thousand dollar phone in your pocket that is much more compute than any other device that's iterating on a mobile cadence, meaning annually. And you know, you can't really keep up with Apple Silicon these days, it's insane. And so when you pair it with, you know, a mobile cadence, meaning annually, and you can't really keep up with Apple Silicon these days, it's insane. And so when you pair it with a backbone pro, it's like a $1,100 or $1,200 gaming device

that you're getting for the cost of like $100, $200. So it's a bit of an arbitrage, like in that sense. And yeah, I absolutely agree with you. We use the term mobile games, but I think there's a stigma attached to that where people think immediately. Oh, absolutely. 100%, yeah. It's not really mobile games that we're talking about. It's really games played on mobile

devices. And I'm not just talking about streaming in this context, but also just like native App Store games. You can download Death Stranding on the App Store and play it on your phone without even streaming it from the cloud. You can play Call of Duty Mobile, Warzone Mobile, and these types of games, Genshin Impact and Fortnite is now coming back to the App Store punitively later today. You can play all these native titles as well. You can even stream your console to your phone and play it anywhere through Remote Play.

So our goal is to put all of gaming in one app and in one device so you can access anything any time you want. And it's crazy the fact that you can access basically every single catalog, including like retro titles now with iPhone supporting emulation, so on and so forth. So I have to ask,

cause this seems like it would be extremely detrimental to some of the first parties, to your Sony's for instance, or your Xbox's. What was it like, you know, forming collaboration with those companies? Like for instance, I've got mine here, but you've got like Xbox right on your cover. I'm presuming you had to get their permission to do this. And now your products, your third party product is competing with their ability to sell consoles.

I know they're kind of like looking towards moving away from consoles at this point anyways, but what do those initial conversations look like? Yeah. So Backbone's ambition has really been to, you know, help game developers just reach as many people as possible. Like that's really why we do this. It's, it always just felt like a bit of a tragedy to me that like you leave the living room

and your gaming experience stops there, right? Or you leave, you leave the living room and your gaming experience stops there. Or you leave the desktop computer and your experience stops there. Why does that have to be the case? Why can't I access all these titles? Why is it so hard to play games with your friends? And that was the exact situation and the reason we were playing Fortnite together in the first place. And so I think from the standpoint of consumers, like making it possible to play these games anywhere you want is a huge value add.

And I think that's precisely the vision that Xbox has laid out. They are talking about, in their new Xbox Everywhere campaign, the idea of basically turning every device into an Xbox. So I think it's quite harmonious with the direction that we're headed in. Our goal is to build the next big gaming platform company, the sixth big one. And we want our products to be first party in quality.

Originally, we thought of ourselves as sort of like the first party of mobile gaming or wanting to be that. But as time wore on, we realized that our vision wasn't just constrained to mobile, but rather, we wanted to be able to allow people to play on any screen. And that's really the shift that Backbone Pro is at the forefront of where you can actually pair it

to every device in your life. So the experience you just described having, you could then jump over to playing on your laptop or on your smart TV and pick up exactly where you left off in the exact same instance of the game. And it all works harmoniously. Yeah, I've been doing that. Slay the Spire is a little indie game that came out

a few years ago. And that's like my go-to walking cardio day game or whatever. But I've done that exact same thing, where you save it on one and then you're able to pick it up right where you left off on the other one. So it sounds like you were able to raise 40 some odd million dollars in development capital What how did you go about pitching this to people? I mean like you know again for forgive forgive the Kevin O'Leary Shark Tank reference but like in the grand scheme of things like you're probably like a cockroach and and like why you you know

Unless you you know, unless you, you know, sounds like you've been in the biz for a while or whatever. I mean, like anybody, you know, this could have come from anybody. Why you, how do you pitch this? How do you pitch it? So look, I'm not gonna claim to be, you know, the best person in the world at this.

Like I think part of an entrepreneur's job is to attract capital. And people talk about like some of the investors I know, you know, invested in like Elon companies and so on, so on, so forth. And they explained to me that one of the reasons they invest in you on companies, because they know that he can attract subsequent financing, right? Because he's just an incredible fundraiser. And I think if you can convince the smartest people in the world to finance your ideas, you can basically do anything. And so, you know, of course, one of the great benefits is you don't need to convince every single investor in the world to believe in you.

You just need to convince- Just people that are into Pokemon that you can buy. Yes, exactly. That is exactly how to go about this. That's the one thing you need to do. It's a very niche niche, but loyal audience. Yeah. Um, you don't need to convince every great investor to believe in you. You just need to convince one really good one. And so yeah, it's sort of the attitude.

Like, um, not every investor is going to believe in your idea, but again, if you got, if you had to get, you know, the story of Airbnb is, as one such example, apparently they got rejected like 40 times or something like that before they eventually raised from one of the greatest venture capital firms in Silicon Valley. So you just need like one really good investor to believe in you. And so you just have to be absolutely ruthless. To speak about it more tactically, I think it's a combination of having a really clear vision for how the future would unfold. And I think, in my view, backbone was sort of inexorable. Like a business like this has to exist.

Whether we're the ones to build it, I think remains to be seen. And I hope that we're the ones to build it. We're certainly the market leaders today, but that could change. And my thesis has been, the games that you're gonna be able to play on mobile devices and other screens

are gonna become better and better. Right, because of streaming, because locally you can run better games thanks to all the compute on like an iPhone. And if that's true, you're gonna need software and devices on which to play those games, right? So we built those. Now that was really the simple premise of the company. I believed really in two macro trends.

One was, you know, gaming moving to streaming. And I think the fact that there wasn't any company that was thinking about that makes it clear to investors, like, hey, if game streaming continues to play out just like it did in music and TV, there probably is going to be a company that rises as a result. And then similarly, the other trend being high fidelity games on phones, which we've talked about as well. But back when I was at Google, it was like a single digit percentage of

Google Play revenue. Um, these games like Genshin and, you know, Roblox and Fortnite. And now it's over half of all overall mobile games revenue. So it follows that there would be some business opportunity on top of that. And that was sort of the rough story. Right. That's great. I want to make sure to highlight something for any budding entrepreneurs out there, anybody who's looking to start a business. Every no is just one step closer to a yes. You have to be absolutely tenacious when you are looking to build a business and

be absolutely crystalline confidence to be able to do it. You, you're gonna hear a lot of nos in your journey. You're gonna hear a lot of them. That's just part of the process, but all you need is one really good yes. And that sparks a huge wave of momentum. Thomas Edison famously created something like a thousand different iterations of the light bulb that failed before he made the one that worked.

He only needed the one. You only need the one. Yeah, I mean, I think you have to be absolutely relentless. I mean, there are investors that passed on the investment opportunity multiple times before they actually invested in Backbone. And there's one investor that shared with me that basically, they got close a few times,

then they finally invested in this kind of latest round of financing. And they actually tell the story of how we kept coming back as, you know, whenever they pass on other investments to remind entrepreneurs the importance of resilience and the fact that, you know, hey, these guys just kept on coming back. And eventually we actually believe what they said because they said what they were going to do. And then they did that thing. To support sustainable food production, BHP is building one of the world's largest hot

ash mines in Canada. Essential resources responsibly produced. It's happening now at BHP, a future resources company. Are you familiar with Jim Collins by any chance? He's a business author. He wrote a few books, Good to Great, Great by Choice, Built to Last, things like that. No, I'm not familiar. Well, anyway, there's a really important principle

that I love quoting all the time. It is not that fortune favors the bold, it's that fortune favors the persistent. And that, I think, that applies in so many things in life, whether it's fitness or your friendships, or certainly your business, obviously, but anything you're looking to progress at, the consistency almost always beats intensity. If you really believe in something, you have to just continue to do the successful actions that will get you there. And you will have a higher likelihood of good fortune. Nothing's guaranteed, obviously, but you will have a higher likelihood of good fortune just

based on your stamina, your ability to withstand and push aside those nos in conquest for the yes. So anyway, I love that, man. I love talking to entrepreneurs, Minnith. This is such a cool- I can tell you're all geeked out right now, man. I love it. Oh, broaneeth. This is such a cool- I can tell you're all geeked out right now, man. I love it. Oh, bro, yeah, yeah, yeah.

For many, many, many years, my primary business was, my primary gaming was business. It is one of the most intoxicating games that you can have. And now it's awesome that I have both. There you go. So let me ask you this then, Maneeth. You know, you are like actually in this industry when there you this then many, you know

You are you are like actually in this industry when there's a lot of you know, there's a lot of questions Circulating that you've got Xbox just kind of followed suit with Nintendo announcing that their Prices for their first party games are gonna be in that $80 range, we're hearing Grand Theft Auto for $100, Switch is $450 and it frankly doesn't even have all the peripheral devices that you need to make it work, I think the way they intended. Are you seeing signs that are sort of signaling

the demise of dedicated consoles at this point? Or what's your thought on that? No, I mean, I'm quite bullish on consoles. Like I think there's different points of view on this, of course, like across the industry. Some people are rather bullish on cloud gaming and they think it'll supplant everything in the long run, especially as just the streaming technology gets really good. And if there are data centers close enough to people's houses and everything works out as planned, in let's say several years time,

there will be some cannibalization. There are others that view it as more of an augmentation of the existing gaming experience. And I fall more into that camp and point of view. I think that, again, our really goal is to extend gameplay hours and time and bring gaming to more people who maybe haven't had the chance to access it before. You could be living in Southeast Asia where consoles aren't as vague and the cost might

be prohibitive, and you could buy one of our products at a much lower entry price. You may have never gotten a chance to use Xbox before, and it would be interesting to you. Yeah, yeah, big oh, now your phone's an Xbox. Yeah. Just like that. Someone from South Asia, that's sort of how I felt about it. It's like, it's actually quite,

it's quite difficult to procure one of those devices there because of all the tariffs and the cost that gets passed on to customers and everything, so yeah. So then, this is really interesting to me. We have talked probably a bit too much on this Nintendo Switch to reveal that Nintendo does a fantastic job of maintaining integrity of their first party titles. They have some of the most iconic IPs in gaming, iconic IPs in gaming, but you know, tech technologically, they've always been just in raw computing power a bit behind. And I think when this switch to the Nintendo direct came out where they were announcing

the switch to and the price point and stuff, There was certainly a lot of sticker shock that we were exposed to, you know, by way of our gaming community, people sort of flagging us in it or whatever. What is your thought on how Nintendo is positioning themselves coming into this next generation? Because they, at least outwardly, don't seem to be wanting to jump onto this cloud trend. It seems like they are very much sort of holding firm to kind of their bread and butter mobile gaming experience that they refined with the Switch. Yeah, they've dabbled a bit in streaming games. There's some experiences they offer,

but not in the way that Microsoft or others are adopting it. Again, I'm really bullish. I just think Nintendo is a unique class of company and the content and IPs is just so incredible. I think they just continue to be really innovative and I'm sure they'll find ways to like adopt this technology as it becomes more commonplace and like commoditized.

Similar to what happened to TV streaming, right? Like in the beginning, there were a handful of services, but then over time, the power went to the IP owners and it became unbundled, and everyone started offering their own streaming services, and you saw a huge proliferation of different streaming platforms. And they play out like that. So maybe Nintendo in five years' time

has a streaming service after the technology costs come down. I doubt it I well Mario Mario Kart 8 right now. It's 11 years old. It's still $60 Yeah, well why would they be streaming? Here's exactly things are worth exactly what people are willing to pay for it. You buy it every day, too Yeah, exactly people buy it every day. There are a lot of Nintendo loyalists and again, they maintain a good integrity product. I think there's a certain amount of nostalgia that helps to float their brand as well. They have, again, some of the most iconic IP is that you can only get through Nintendo. They certainly satisfy a niche, but there's, I can't help but feeling there's like a blockbuster

video element to this man where they're like no man We're doubling down on this. It's gonna be DVDs forever. And like guys have you heard of Netflix? This thing is like really emerging here now We're worried about it right now. We're selling DVDs. We're running DVDs and like well, yeah there's also this on-demand video like you don't even like need like a Cartridge or anything to like be able to watch this anymore. Nah, don't even like need like a cartridge or anything to like be able to watch this anymore nah don't worry about it and then by the time they reacted by the time they pivoted too late even even red box came in and they

took over there was red box on every single corner and every single Walgreens and and they didn't adapt and now now they're gone. Yeah, yeah, it's interesting. Yeah, and RIP Sega for similar reasons. I guess they weren't just able to compete on a, I don't know. I actually, I mean, this actually raises an interesting question for me, Maneeth. So again, it sounds like you've been pretty successful in raising capital, but the dollars that we're talking about, at least on this show, are pretty, pretty small compared

to your big, you know, your big Sony's and Microsoft's and that kind of thing. What's what do you do to communicate to your customers? Like what are you doing to find people? Like, like, I feel like this product has a, and I'm an example of this. I was your ideal customer. I'm your ideal customer. And it wasn't until I work on a video game podcast and I happened to receive a solicitation

from an agency that said like, hey, we've got an interesting story to tell and a good product. Would you guys be interested in seeing what it looks like? And we go, yeah, you know, this looks interesting. We just happen to be on this sort of cloud hype or whatever. You're not just communicating, hey, our product is the best.

It's like you're re-educating your average customer. It's like, no, no, this isn't Candy Crush. This isn't that silly game where your guy is running back and forth and multiplying their troops and avoiding barrels or whatever. But then it ends up being Candy Crush. This isn't that silly game where your guy is running back and forth and multiplying their troops and avoiding barrels or whatever. But then it ends up being Candy Crush. This is like, this is, this is what you, this is the quintessential high polish gaming experience, but on your phone. How do you, how do you educate your customers and then also convince them that this is the right product. Yeah, so I think there's a lot of elements that answer and the short short of it is that first of all, 10 words or less please. You have five seconds to respond. First and foremost, we think that building a great product is the

single most important thing. If you make something that's good enough that people want to talk about it, you solve half the problem because then you've created some k-factor or coefficient every time you're selling one product to a customer, or they're talking about it with their friends or whoever. And so we really put a lot of energy into the design of this thing. I think we probably did more iterations on this product than maybe even Xbox or Sony do on their controllers because we don't have really any fault. This is the thing we have, one product we're designing, whereas these other companies,

they have to design many different products and we're expressly focused on mobile and creating the best experience across mobile and all these other screens. So we had to invest in a really significant way and get it right. And it took a passionate team working on it for three years to realize that. And then everything else, it's really expensive to educate a market, very costly, especially with new concepts and ideas. So it takes time and also great macro tailwinds. If you look

at some of the best new companies, there was always some kind of macro tailwinds. If you look at some of the best new companies, there was always like some kind of macro tailwind that helped educate customers. And I think in this case, it's just the increase in interest in cloud gaming, like you guys discovering it organically, and then people kind of like wanting to look at products like this as a result. And also because App Store games

that you can play on your phone are just getting better and better natively too. Like again, I think Fortnite returning to the App Store will drive a lot of awareness. So we do our best to kind of like ride those moments and be present when those things happen. But we really think it starts and ends with the product and just making that as great as possible. I love that. I do like, I love what you said about getting it right. I know, I mean, even with game development, you get these companies that have made these

multi, multi-million dollar games that they've spent years and years on, like Cyberpunk. And it wasn't right when it came out. And there's people that have written that game off, you know, even though they fixed it, it is one of the best games ever made. Final Fantasy 14 too. Yeah.

Their initial experience just wasn't good. And then they just write it off. So to make sure, especially in kind of entry into the market, something that's not something people are super comfortable with and making sure that their experience is flawless and executes perfectly, like I admire that that was a focus, you know, on, on your development. So that's, that's something that's super cool to see somebody take that time and, oh, we'll fix it later.

Let's get it right the first time and give people the best experience right off the bat. And so maybe I can share a little bit more context around how we developed it, I think. Yeah, definitely. So we started from this really basic idea, which is that if you're going to be able to run games on every screen, because of cloud or, you know, just locally, you're able to run these games,

you're going to want to have one device that works across all those screens. And today gamers identify heavily with the console, but we think they're actually going to identify more of the controller in the future, perhaps, because that's the one device you'll need to bring with you to play across all these different screens like your smart TV your laptop Etc. It's it's certainly the most iconic component of whatever device you favor There's almost like an allegiance associated with it exactly and there's you know somewhere like 400 million game controllers in the world today and you know, mostly from Mostly designed for use with a single console, right? And so our thesis is that really hasn't changed

in like 15 or so years. So we got to go back to first principles and maybe revisit some of those assumptions about what type of a device that works at every screen should look like. And of course I use the term controller because we have to like couch things in the terms that we have,

but we really would describe Backbone Prize as a system consisting of two modes. And the first mode we call handheld mode where you can dock a phone inside and it's as comfortable as the best gaming handhelds in the market today based on our testing. Yep. I can confirm that. Yeah. And I'm a larger man. I'm six foot two and this felt very good in my hands. And this was exceedingly hard because first of all, we love some of the gaming handhelds in the market today. Like they're incredibly comfortable now. You get like full size form factor, et cetera.

But one of the problems we see with these like PC gaming handles is that because they have to include like a battery, a screen, a lot of compute, so on and so forth, they end up being very large in terms of form factor. And then on the other side of the equation, you have these like more portable gaming devices, but they end up not being that comfortable. So like, what if we could take the ergonomics of a much larger form factor and squeeze it in the smallest package ever. This is actually the smallest product to actually have a full-size joystick component like the same form factor that's in the DualSense Edge and the Xbox Elite. If you were to open this thing up it's almost like an Apple

Watch. There's three circuit boards on each side whereas a typical game controller would have like one or two. At one point during the design development process, we realized that the joystick was gonna be 250 microns higher in the Z dimension than we had anticipated, meaning it was gonna jump. Oh, the Z dimension, yeah. Yeah.

We don't know what you're talking about. We don't know what you're talking about. I do, I do. Do you really? I'm saying the thumbstick was gonna be 250 microns taller than we were hoping. And that was going to throw off the ergonomics. 250 microns per context is about three thicknesses of a human hair.

And so the team was like, no, we cannot change the ergonomics on this thing. And they found 10 different locations to shave 25 microns. Um, to get it. That's so neat. I'm geeking out right now. Uh, so we did over 9,000 individual part iterations. microns off the top. Wow. To get it to stay. Wow. I'm geeking out right now. That's crazy. So we did over 9,000 individual partner iterations. We hired a team of world-class researchers

and designers and engineers that worked on products like the iPhone and the MetaQuest. And we did, the way we tested our products and to make sure they were comfortable is we had to break it down to a science. So we have this set up inside our office and you guys are always welcome to come by if you're ever in the Bay Area and check it out.

Oh dude, I'll take you up on that. I've got family there. We basically have this like 360 video system where we can record video footage of people playing games in real time. And what we're able to do in that video footage is use this software to basically do what's called digital goniometry,

which is measuring joint angles of the hand. And usually if you're an ergonomist, you might, if you're testing a device, have someone stop playing and then use a tool called a goniometer to measure their hand angle and then, you know, determine if something's comfortable or not and then ask them some survey questions. The problem is during gameplay, people are in motion all the time. So if you ask them to stop, it's going to like kind of ruin the fidelity of the data. So we have to get it in real time. So we created this video recording system. And that allowed us to determine if something was comfortable or not

and measure joint angles of the hand. And then we'd use 3D printing to make additional iterations of the device based on the feedback from that and what customers said. So you bring people in the office, have them try it out, learn from the feedback, make a new iteration. And we did that like so many times, it's almost unbelievable. And because of all the rapid advancements in 3D printing and additive manufacturing technology, like we were able to do multiple iterations of the device in a single day to like test with customers.

Oh, wow. And so we were so confident in the comfort of the device by the time we launched it, because we had just done so much testing. We knew that it was gonna be as comfortable as these gaming handheld products, even though it's like a fraction of the size. And then the, okay. Go ahead. Yeah, well, I was gonna say,

so for anybody viewing the actual video of this, I'm showing the actual product here. So the first thing, very first impression that I had, yep, when I picked this controller up is that it feels tremendously high quality. Like we were just talking about the Xbox controller, which I think is a very fine controller. This feels better built to me than that Xbox controller. The PlayStation is probably honestly, I would say that from a quality perspective and just from a design elegance perspective, this is right there, man. I mean, it is, it is a gorgeous, like, it looks like a luxury product. It looks very

high end. They even just the, the, the sheen of black, like this satin black color that you have on it, the way the joysticks feel, the button response, everything, even the extension here to be able to install it around your phone. I mean, it just feels over-engineered a little bit, honestly. It feels fantastic. It is a really cool quality product, man. But I will say that, so you were mentioning that because of advances in technology, you were able to produce these iterations and stuff, you know,

pretty quickly. You are not the only person with access to those iterations. What is the company doing itself to defend itself against like knockoff products? Like, you know, so like your, your Temu and your Aliexpress stuff. Oh, you're right. Like your Temu and your AliExpress stuff. Get for $499. Yeah, exactly. No, I think, first of all, I'm always flattered, because as they say, imitation is the highest form of flattery. Not just the small companies, but large companies

take a lot of inspiration from the things that we do in terms of product innovation. I think that our view is that, first of all, this product is so complicated design, I think it would be much more difficult to pull something like that off. Because I described how we had to make it comfortable in handheld mode, but we also had to make it comfortable in wireless mode, where it also has to feel native to playing on a regular game controller independently, which meant that the device weight had to be exactly, we calculated around 200 grams.

So if you remove kind of the magnetic parts, it's exactly 199, which means if you couple with the mass of the phone, it's still a good weight. But if you use it independently, it's not too light and it's not too hefty. It's like the kind of ideal weight for both modes of gameplay. So you can see how constrained this gets and how much engineering had to happen to like even get it to fit inside something like this. Right, but you've done all that work now. Like it's a lot easier to reverse engineer something, you know, like for me it would be I'm like, I'm a dummy. I you know, I didn't know what the Z whatever thing, Z dimension you guys were talking about.

But I feel like I could have a much better go at copying this thing than I could at creating it initially. You would think so, but still, I mean, because it's finessed down to like the sub-millimeter level. Just tell me I'm really smart, Manny. Yeah. You didn't even know Z axis. What are you talking about?

Shut up, Ryan. Yes, I think, I say it's, there's still a lot of complexity to it I didn't even know Z-axis. What are you talking about? Shut up, Ryan. Yes. I think I'd say there's still a lot of complexity to it, because you have to, like, down to a sub-millimeter level. Like, even if you change the ergonomics in a very slight way, it'll feel different, right? Like, that's how much gamers care about this stuff. Oh, yeah.

Controllers are especially hard to copy for this reason. Like, you can buy lots of controllers that look like an Xbox controller online, but they don't feel as good as what Microsoft created, right? And it's the same principle here. But I think the other benefit we have is the software. And we care just as much about the software platform as we do about the hardware. And then I think that creates this kind of like vertical experience that becomes more difficult because the companies that do hardware really well, they kind of sell you a device and they forget about you

after they sell you the device. But because Backbone is kind of working on our app and ecosystem just as fervently as we are on the hardware, you know, you're getting the benefits. Like people who bought Backbone One back in 2022 are getting a lot of the software updates that are coming out with Backbone Pro because they're just part of our ecosystem. And so in that sense, we're a lot of the ecosystem company. So you buy our products, you can bank on the fact that we're going to continue to support you and give you access to like really great features, which you know, we

can talk about some of the software as well. But you know, the ability, for example, to, for example, I'm, you know, game controllers today, if you want to pair your game controller to another screen, one of the biggest problems you have to like hold down like a button combination, go on the Bluetooth menu on a different device, and kind of configure all of that to work together. and it takes a lot of time. And every time you want to switch from one device to another, you got to repeat that process.

We created this technology called FlowState inside the Backbone app, where we basically present a visual look at all of the devices you previously paired. And you can then simply go in there and just connect one device by tapping a button once. So you could be like, jump to the TV and it'll push you right over the TV instantly. And again, because of the system we've created in the software, we're able to make that system experience really good. And then you can undock your phone

and play wirelessly on that device. So you can move from screen to screen basically instantly with kind of the technology that we built on top through software. And that's just one such example of some of the developments that we built on top through software. And that's just one such example of some of the developments we made. Well, that's awesome. Yeah, I gotta tell you,

we're running a little short on time here, but I have to tell you, we were absolutely impressed with this product. It feels like a true premium quality device that feels like a genuine disruptor in the gaming market field, whatever you want to call it, gaming industry. I can't recommend this high enough, especially for all those travelers out there, heavy commuters. What a wonderful way to be able to take your hobby on the go.

Just aside from that, it's cool. It is. I do have one real quick, John, before we wrap up totally. Yeah, please. The dreaded question with all handhelds and all controllers, what was done for stick drift? Ah, great question, Ryan. Cause you're going down to the microns on ergonomics and Z angles and everything like that. So as someone who's replaced multiple, and I know John is as well with his Switch, like SickDrift is just like the bane of our existence as console gamers and people that play a lot.

Like what was done within this unit so I don't have to go and buy another or try to do warranty or anything like that. Right. We're going to be asking for your cell phone number after this. Actually, you know, anyone that has a question like I'm on Twitter and I respond to customers comments and awesome. Love that. X.com mini chaos. You can always message me if you have some question about this.

But to go into detail on the joysticks, we went about the joystick decision in like an insane way, like we evaluated almost every single component on the market to look at everything from accuracy to durability to a gameplay feel. And we settled on a unique component with Alps, who's one of the leading joystick manufacturers in the world. And we worked with them to design and spec out

the right joystick for this form factor. And on every metric, comfort, durability, precision, it's very optimized. I also want to clear up a misconception that I think some customers might have. There's a lot of talk, particularly on Reddit, about hall effect joysticks versus non-hall effect. And I guess I think that there's a misconception there

that to say that all hall effect joysticks are better than all non-hall effect joysticks isn't really true. It'd be like saying like all the Android because, you know, it depends on the vendor, right? Like the type of implementation of it. And we evaluated numerous Hall effect joystick implementations in the market today, and a lot of them compromise on things like gameplay feeling and are just not from like reliable vendors that don't have the durability.

So I think to say all of these things are better than all of these things is kind of a really big blanket statement. And so I think what we did is we just tried to find the best component possible on the market and that's what we sourced. And our products come with a long warranty. And so if you ever encounter an issue, which I'm dubious, the probability is quite low, then we'll replace it for you so I think customers can rest assured that we really care about this and

went to an extra mile because it sucks when your joysticks give out on these devices like you don't want that to happen and Yeah, I just want to make sure people understand that like just because it's Hall effect doesn't mean it's better It's like not necessarily how it works. Yeah Yeah, Nintendo's proven that how it works yeah yeah Nintendo's proven that awesome many we like to wrap these shows up by asking a couple of like silly this or that questions you ready for them sure sure go for first person shooters or RPGs first person shooters for sure are you a late to sleep late nighter or early riser I'm a recovering late night person game pass or PlayStation plus both both now that you gotta go this or that I'm

on both of them I actually play on both secret have you seen the box on the box dude he's got both what do you no, I'm actually being very transparent about this. Like I play on every system. Like, so do I. Yeah, like I really, it's just about what content is available, literally. So like, you know, I'm gonna play Death Stranding 2 on PS5 and then I'm gonna jump back to something else

in Xbox and it's just, yeah. Do you see this cloud trend maybe blurring those lines of it Is this cloud trend maybe blurring those lines a bit, like the first party title lines, or do you see it more going the way like Netflix has their own shows and Paramount Plus has their own shows, and now it's less that like PlayStation is a console, so to speak, but a entertainment hub.

I think each company's strategy is just different in this space. Xbox's strategy is the closest to what you just described where they're literally saying Xbox is everywhere. But I think other companies are thinking about it from a different point of view. And there's not one right or wrong answer, I think. And ultimately gamers will just have the odd choice.

And again, our goal is to enable that, make it possible to play all of these games in as easy and as simple a way as possible. What I'm particularly excited about are just the Cloud gaming. We talked a lot about Cloud gaming today, but even just mobile games running on phones are incredibly interesting. Apple made a bunch of updates to the game development kit to allow it to be

possible to take Windows games and get them to run on like Mac and then by extension iPhone. So you're seeing like the latest Assassin's Creed ship on like iPhone 15 onwards. So I'm excited for like the native games as well. I, we're actually kind of agnostic to how you play. Like you can use backbone pro to play like regular warzone or PC and then warzone mobile on your phone.

You don't have to use it with just cloud. So we just want to enable every class of gaming. As long as you're using backbone. Yes, of course. As long as you're using backbone, it doesn't phone. You don't have to use it with just cloud. So we just wanna enable every class of gaming. As long as you're using Backbone. Yes, of course. As long as you're using it, it doesn't matter. I don't care if you're using it. Awesome. Maneeth, this is probably a good time to wrap up.

Thank you so much for joining us on the show. We're gonna be, oh, where can people find more about Backbone? So our website, backbone.com. You can follow us on all socials, Instagram, Twitter, etc And you know as I mentioned before you can always message me to you on next Awesome, so we'll make sure we'll post those links in our

in our podcast description below which you guys can find in your on your viewer and We of course want to thank everybody for tuning in. If you've enjoyed the show, please take a moment to like us on or follow us on your podcast viewer of choice. It's either gonna be a follow button or a plus button or something along those lines.

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We hope you enjoyed the show and until next time happy gaming See ya! Thank you. ["Skyward