Preachers, Pokemon & Payment🙊🙉🙈
Stadia adds some seemingly-menial functionality that could pay big in the future 👩👩👦, Pokemon joins the big boy club 🏦, and WhatsApp lets you pay💸
Stadia now allows you to share games with other members of your family, or, you know, that broke friend who’s piggybacking on your Netflix account. The feature will allow multiple accounts to use the same game license once purchased and only one of the accounts needs to be a ‘Pro’ subscription in order for this to work. The small catch is that no two accounts can play the same shared game at the same time, but that’s not much of a catch and definitely not something that can’t be resolved quickly on Discord.
I see you wondering how this is useful for families since they mostly live under the same roof and would otherwise just use one account on all devices in the house. Well, it isn’t really, Google is just masking the feature as a ‘family’ thing but they’re actually encouraging you to create small groups with your friends and share your games with them.
While Netflix’s version of this might have been seen as a lapse in judgment in the past, Google is effectively creating a word-of-mouth-based social feature here in order to transform its current users into evangelists for the product. It’s well known that organic growth brings in the highest quality of users to a product and if the adoption rate for the service has already flattened out, this newest feature would have close to zero downsides.
It’s official —or at least as official as it can be without a report from the developers themselves— Pokemon GO has surpassed $1B in revenue since the beginning of the year while lifetime revenue went up to $4B.
Players spent 30% more in the first ten months of 2020 compared to the same period last year and while some of this performance can be attributed to the overall increase in downloads and revenue across the entire market, the new features that allow gamers to continue to collect characters without leaving their home were brilliant in both concept and execution.
Creating features for an AR product that has its core centered around location-based mechanics is no small feat and it just goes to show that perseverance in improving a product pays off when it’s done by competent people. It’s impressive to look back at Pokemon GO since its launch and see the journey they’ve been on since the beginning. From not being an ‘AR game’ per se, to defining what an AR game is today. From having no social features, to redefining social in augmented reality. From being a purely location-based game, to being playable at home. From being heckled for not being able to compete with traditional games, to proving that AR games can cohabitate.
Bravo to the Niantic team, awesome job👏
WhatsApp is playing catchup to China’s WeChat by expanding its payment system in some geographies, India being the latest country where the feature is available for 20 million users to start with. The Facebook-owned company might be a bit late to the party when compared to WeChat’s user numbers, but the fact of the matter is, the Chinese company does most of its business inside their home borders and the rest of competitors only command large market shares locally, like Venmo in the US and Revolut in Europe.
With its truly worldwide reach and the convenience factor on their side coming from the social aspect of the APP, WhatsApp is on track to scale its user base in record time and to record heights, and India is a good place to start if you want to be #1. But while, at the moment, the fight for the mobile payments market is mostly happening between software-first companies, the field will become a lot more skewed when solutions from hardware manufacturers scale into more and more countries.
Even if there will be little difference between competing products when it comes to functionality and reliability, Apple and Google can make their proprietary solution more convenient since they own both the software and the hardware on which it runs. If history is any indication, it’ll be a while until regulators are alarmed by this and then take action in this sense, and this while might just be enough for tech giants to reach a majority in the market, at which point it will be too late to force them to play fair.
You can now pre-order the Atari VCS if you have $399 to blow and join the crypto world while you game. On top of the 100+ Atari games and 1000+ old-school games available to be played on the new PC/console hybrid —read, you can also install any OS apart from the Linux-based ‘Atari World’ that comes pre-loaded on the device— you’ll also get the ability to purchase and then spend Atari Tokens. While this product is relying on the Atari brand name in order to become the industry standard across all of gaming, in the future, the company might also create a stablecoin to be used in its own ecosystem. Both of these look like desperate efforts to remain relevant in a world taken over by Sony and Microsoft to be honest, it just goes to show that spending company money on drugs and exotic dancers in the ‘80s was not a good long-term business strategy and neither is it today 🕹️💲
Apple, Google and Facebook are hiring —or ‘aquihiring’— special effects experts in hopes of putting them to work on their AR/VR efforts currently in development. Even if we’re talking low volumes here, it’s positive to see the talent in the VFX industry has something to pivot to after their skills in the cinema field were underpaid for. If you as me Accenture’s estimation of the market size over the next 3 years is as accurate as it can be in the current zeitgeist, I expect that to increase by quite a bit if Apple launches a device inside that time frame 👓👓
Apple’s third event in three months is happening tomorrow, with the tagline ‘One More Thing’. With all the rumors around it and considering that the first MacBook was a ‘one more thing’ mention back when it was launched, it’s safe to say that Apple Silicon laptops will be the central piece of the event but we can’t completely rule out other announcements like AirTag trackers or the AirPods Studio headphones. Until then, feast your eyes on some newly-announced MagSafe accessories here 👀👀
Wondering just how fast an internet connection coming from a satellite in space is? Well, the answer is: almost always above 50Mbps, around 100Mbps on average and up to 200Mbps at the top end. Next step, reducing the high-but-not-obscene upfront cost of 600$ for the gear📡🛰️
Reviews for both the new generation Xboxes and PlayStations are out and about on Youtube, pick a media outlet you trust and give them a whirl 🎮vs.🎮
Yep, all of this is happening while hauling ass vertically through the air soup
If there’s one reason you update to iOS 14.2, let it be this new emoji:
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