Persistent Assistants👨, Movideogames🎥 & Arcades🕹️👾
This week Google went shopping🛒, gaming IPs are moving into TV and cinema📺, and Apple wants to engage🍏
Hi there! A relatively dense week in tech news the past seven days have been and the ratio between tech/COVID has been ideal. As we brace for the second wave tech must go on…
I mentioned North in past newsletters and articles when discussing the state and future of AR, their limited functionality delivered through best-in-class industrial design of the device made them one of the front-runners of the industry —mainly because all competitors have limited functionality right now. Last week, after 8 years of development, the Canadian company was acquired by Google.
What Google is buying here is a preemptive strike against Apple’s rumored AR device that’s expected to launch at some point during over a 1-2 year timeframe. Google’s original solve for not being left behind again in the AR glasses race as they were in the smartphone marathon was to take a stake in Magic Leap, but the recent acknowledgment of failure by that company forced Sundar and Co. to explore some Canadian avenues.
Why North? I hear you not asking. Like I mentioned before, they have successfully miniaturized the tech to an acceptable form factor and, maybe more valuable in the eyes of Google, North has a product already launched on the market, the Focals 1.0. While at $600 the product is far from mass adoption, this still provides a large amount of that digital gold that Google loves, data; or a larger database than a non-launched product. An equally important reason, one that will prove increasingly more important over the coming years, is the fact that North’s glasses are controlled via voice assistant, making them the perfect way for Google to stay close to you all day long when they integrate the Google Assistant product inside. While I imagine all manufacturers of AR glasses will take advantage of voice assistants becoming widely accepted, for big companies operating over multiple fields —e.g. Google, Amazon, Apple— this new tech will enable them to create meaningful network effects and attract the bulk of consumers their way.
With so many phone-connected, proto-AR devices expecting to launch this year the AR landscape could change by quite a lot as we settle for the best solution but one thing’s for certain, these times we’re living…they’re mighty exciting.
Last week we found out two fantastic video game franchises are being adapted to become TV series, both impressive in their own way.
The ‘Fallout’ series will be produced by Amazon and created by the duo behind ‘Westworld’ whilst ‘My Friend Pedro’ will be created by the co-creator of ‘John Wick’ with Legendary in charge of paying the bills. A few things stand out from this news and some implications for the future…
It looks like we’re pivoting from making big-budget movies based on videogame franchises to TV, which is a good way to minimize risk for studios in the beginning but it’s also a more general trend in cinema these days where we see big talent migrating to services like Netflix or HBO who can afford big productions if the franchise proves to be successful.
In the following years, I expect videogame IP to become increasingly more prominent in non-interactive media. As gamers who grew up playing these gaming franchises start entering the workforce and put themselves into a position where they can pay for content, studios and streaming services creating entertainment content will be more than glad to satisfy the demand and cash in. Furthermore, creating new IP is an endeavor that takes a lot of time and energy out of us so exploring established franchises that already found an audience would also make economic and logical sense.
I also expect a lot of products making the trip in the opposite direction, intellectual propriety from blockbuster movies going into successful video games. This would be a win-win for everyone. The static nature of cinema meant that there’s only one chance to monetize users, the first —and for a lot of people the last— time they see your content. Videogames of recent years have evergreen seasons that refresh the content in the game at least every couple of months with items found in the in-game shop being available to be refreshed on a moment’s notice. By lending IP to video games, the rights holders will keep their propriety current in the audience’s mind —without needing to make a movie every year— whilst also taking a cut of the profits while the game will attract more players that can be monetized. This has already started and it’s only going to get bigger.
And finally, we’ve seen video game IP turned into cinematic products in the past, with varying degrees of success, but every time in the past these were all billion-dollar franchises —e.g. WoW or Assasin’s Creed. For those of you who don’t know, My Friend Pedro started as a flash game 6 years ago and only got made to the big platforms late last year by a small team of developers, making this achievement that much more special. Indie game developers will have something to look up to in the future and hope that, provided their work is of high quality, their game too can reach these newly-defined hights.
Last week’s news about Apple canceling some of the titles that were in development and slated for Apple Arcade in an effort to focus more on titles that provide better retention was received in many different ways by the gaming community.
Any subscription service, whether it’s Netflix in video, Spotify in audio or Arcade in games, needs a library of content that’s as diverse as possible with various products serving various roles. Some products are meant to attract first-time users, other genres might cater to specific target demographics, but the most important items are those who keep consumers coming back. The monthly payment, cancel at any time business model of such services demands long-term retention. I would have thought that this much was obvious for the company that owns the AppStore so I can’t really explain why this guidance about creating experiences that focus on mid-to-long term retention wasn’t communicated from the very beginning.
I’ve played most of the 100+ games on Apple Arcade but all of them failed to hook me into playing long sessions and none of them gave me that feeling of a must-have experience. Just a handful of new games are added to the library every month and they all seem to be based on the same recipe: either down-right bland and ‘put-downable’ or a very short gameplay experience. This combination of factors makes a second-month subscription very hard to justify in the eyes of any casual gamer.
Don’t get me wrong, I like short games, some of the best gaming experiences I had were sub-3 hour, it’s just that subscription services might not be the ideal distribution outlet for such products.
The Apple Arcade concept provided a beacon of light for developers that wanted to focus on the game experience but didn’t want to dab into the murky world of free-to-play. Whilst the company doesn’t report subscriber numbers on the service, I can’t imagine many people sticking with the current version beyond the free trial period, but, hopefully, the new direction will give birth to more engaging experiences and keep Apple from cutting the service. While the monthly subscription model is good for purists and encourages the creation of gamers’ games, all business units need to become profitable on their own after a while and we can’t blame a for-profit company cutting an unprofitable department.
After their first AAA gaming product proved to be underwhelming in the eyes of players, Amazon Studios decided to pull the title back into closed beta. This approach is a breath of fresh air in the gaming industry that we haven’t seen before. When traditional gaming companies of a certain reputation launch a big title and it ends up being a flop for one reason or another, they rarely pull it from general release. The main reason is that company reputation I just mentioned and the fact that game launches these days are planned-out events that involve tens if not hundreds of millions of dollars in marketing in the period immediately after launch day. Of course, when I say ‘company reputation’ I mean ‘how Wall Street interprets every move a publicly-traded company makes’. Amazon Studios doesn’t have that problem, this game is 1% of 1% of 1% of 1% of a company that’s valued based on operating income, making it a far smaller risk than a gaming-only company taking this step 📦🕹️
You’ve probably gotten used to me singing praises for either Fortnite or Roblox in every newsletter, so here’s the Roblox paragraph now. In a SensorTower article last week, it was announced that the game made over $1.5B in revenue, with 50% growth in the past 7 months and over $100M in revenue in May alone. The reason I rave about Roblox and why am always surprised it’s not at the top of the ‘Top Grossing’ board every day is the nature of the product, Roblox is a platform for others to create games, not a game in itself. This means that its performance will encapsulate the summed up success of all the experiences created by its players, spanning from racing to puzzle and adventure experiences, al lin one. While big franchise titles like CoD or PUBG help a lot in gaining that top spot in the grossing charts for a short while, the Roblox model, being innately resistant to market trends and slowly becoming a cult item for the young generation, is the better bet in the long term, and once they get that spot it’ll be hard for anyone to get it back 📱💰
After it was announced that the PS5 version of NBA2k21 will cost $10 more than PS4 games cost more, many other developers are also looking at hiking their prices. It’s well known that game development isn’t cheap, I can confirm that from experience, and the quality increase we’ve seen in video games over the past decade does come at a cost. Many studios turned to in-APP purchases to offset the development costs in an effort to keep the upfront cost accessible for as many gamers as possible but we’re at a point where the $59 prices need to go up in order to maintain the product quality. Some studios reported cost increases between 200%-300% when developing next-gen games and admitted even current-gen titles were touching the limit of profitability. If we look at other entertainment areas, while prices for AAA games have stayed the same in the past fifteen years, cinema tickets increased their price by around $40% and Netflix doubled their monthly subscription price. It’s about time this happened 🎮👨👨👧👩👩👧
In more Apple-related AR ̶n̶e̶w̶s̶ gossip, the company applied for a patent that would allow a band on your arm to detect veins under your skin. In the patent application, they mention this would allow them to automatically determine a user’s gesture or finger position, which immediately made me question the usefulness of this when it comes to the Apple Watch. My second thought was ‘this is not the watch, this is AR/VR’, but now I see no reason why it couldn’t be both, Apple ̶c̶o̶u̶l̶d̶ should even create synergies where owning more than the AR Glass device will improve the user experience 👓🍎
Sony sees demand soar for PG-13 and R-Rated animation products during COVID. I feel like the ‘animations are for kids only’ dogma has taken a long while to get wide acceptance beyond Japan but it looks like we’re finally getting there. It only took a global pandemic to broaden some people’s thinking to realize ‘Animation’ is a visual style, not a genre, but I’m glad we’re getting there 🐀🍲
LEGO has launched a collection of pop-art poster sets and you better have a spare kidney —and be willing to donate— if you want one. Pricing apart, I’m glad LEGO is finally leaning into nostalgia with their partnerships as of late, first Nintendo, now Warhol, and figuring out to be profitable without going away from their brand image🖼️
Have you ever desired to smell like space? Not the unused on at the back of your closet, but the ‘Final Frontier’. Well, lucky you because NASA is making perfume and it won’t set you back that much either👨🚀🔫
This indie game is now in early access and if you’re a builder, you should probably get it:
A movie about someone who can sing starring someone who can sing…
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