Streaming Down From the Clouds☁️🕹️
Microsoft made a surprise announcement😨, Stadia leans on the crowds 👩👩👦 and NBC peacocks around 🦚
The Stream of Games
Tucked at the end of a long announcement about ‘the future of gaming’, Microsoft announced they will be packing in their game streaming service Project xCloud with the existing Xbox Game Pass subscription at no additional cost to players. This means that each of the 100+ games currently on the service —plus the ones coming after September when this goes into effect— will be playable across current-gen, next-gen and mobile devices with shared saves between them😧
This is a smart approach of doing things for a few reasons…
First of all, bundling xCloud together with GamePass and all the products available there will mean that Microsoft’s cloud gaming service will hit the ground running come September. The biggest problem Google had with Stadia was not only the lack of exclusive content but the lack of content overall, a lot of the games were temporary exclusives for the service but then there was not that much there most of the time. If you’re running a service with any entertainment content, that content library better be large and the titles diverse across all genres.
Microsoft is off to a good start with this strategy, but, like everyone else, they’ll need to keep the content treadmill going and expand on the number of games they’re offering players as time passes.
Secondly, with the current climate where mobile storefront owners are banning APPs left and right, with this approach Xbox is trying —consciously or not— to preempt such actions from the likes of Apple and Google going forward. With xCloud being presented to players as a free ‘perk’ of their GamePass product, there will be no price on that APP within the storefront, ergo, no cash cut will be going to Apple or Google.
While I see this as a brilliant solution, there’s no telling how the gatekeepers of said stores will react once they’re put in front of this new reality. There’s also no way to predict what the social and political climates will be like at the time of launch and beyond. At the moment there are several regulatory bodies around the world seeing the behavior of these companies as anti-competitive, and whether Apple/Google want to pick a fight with Microsoft is hard to predict. Stranger things have happened…
Finally, if you’re here after reading last week’s version of this newsletter, you might remember me saying that I doubt Microsoft will launch xCloud at the same time as the fall lineup of Xbox Series X devices for fear of cannibalization. Needless to say, I was wrong. The announcement last week did go to great lengths to assure gamers that their ‘games will look and play best on Xbox Series X’ so the message from the company is clear: the flagship console provides the flagship player experience, anything else is a compromise.
Giving the cloud gaming service away for free was the move I, and many others were not expecting but it’s a sound strategy, at least for the short term. Many new people who would have not entered this ecosystem otherwise will purchase this Ultimate version of GamePass for the new functionality, making for a good mechanism to start the network effects flywheel that any such service needs. In the long-term, however, as the number of new xCloud players —hopefully— increases so will the need for server compute, a cost that’s not negligible in the slightest.
We’ll need to wait and see for how long will the price of GamePass be maintained at this level, while Microsoft has deep pockets, every business unit needs to be profitable sooner rather than later.
Google presented a host of new games at their Stadia Connect last week and ‘instant’ was the word of the day, on the day.
With many publishers reluctant to make their game exclusive for more than a few weeks on such a nascent platform —or Google being reluctant to pay the fees required to achieve that, it’s hard to tell what the case is right now— Stadia is pushing their main attributes front and center: instant play with little-to-no hardware required.
Whilst the long-awaited ‘Crowd Play’ feature that allows players to join the same game their favorite streamer is playing is being added to the service now, the titles coming to Stadia in the near future continue to be old products with very few timed exclusives sprinkled on top. I have the impression that Google is well aware they have to prove themselves to both players and game developers and that, while this process is ongoing, heavy financial will have to be taken on the chin.
Let’s just hope that, as the hardware currently lying in gamers’ living rooms is aging, they will be pushed to at least try out Google’s cloud gaming solution and be sold on the quality of the experience enough to push back that hardware update for a few months; or, hopefully, years. The fact that we’re in the middle of a switch in console generation will help and the company is reaping the benefits of the lockdown with various offers, so we can see this as the best shot the tech can possibly be given at the moment.
TV Streams
When NBC announced they were joining the crowded streaming service sphere after everyone else already has, many viewed it as more of a stab at trying to remain relevant with few chances of success, but there might be some hope still in their attempt.
NBC’s service proposes a radically different business model from that proposed by the likes of HBO Max, Netflix, Disney+ or Apple TV+. Peacock is a free, ad-supported streaming service at launch, with the option for viewers to subscribe to the $4.99 Premium version that has more content or the $10 Premium Plus version that’s completely ad-free. The free version offers you 13.000 hours of programming while the paid versions throw in exclusive channels only found on the service, exclusive series made specifically for Peacock, access to blockbuster movies and live sports, the crown jewel being Premier League matches, for a total of 20.000 hours of content.
So, in essence, the service is regular broadcast television but instead of being delivered through the almighty US cable networks, it’s offered in a direct-to-consumer manner through the internet. While the service still offers deals to those using providers like Xfinity or COX and the preview version of the service being offered to Comcast subscribers, there’s no reason for this to continue indefinitely. Sure, transitioning from traditional cable to this new model will take a while for the less-savvy, but TV-centric hardware like that coming from Roku, Amazon, Google, or Apple will make this transition increasingly easier over the coming years.
With this new direction, it’s becoming ever more clear that multiple operational theaters are opening up as we progress in the streaming wars. While content library and diversity remain the more important aspects in the long-run, aspects like pricing and accessibility still remain a factor at the top end of the funnel, especially in the post-COVID economical environment.
When they’re not trying to revolutionize gaming distribution, Google is finding new methods of detecting earthquakes by using their submarine fiber optic infrastructure. I don’t have much insight on this apart from what you can read if you follow the link, this is just one of those ‘save the world’ ideas in a sea of new Zoom clones, and also an idea that should be next to A.C. Clarke’s third law 👏🎩
New week, new TV series based on a videogame IP. This time it’s Dragon Dogma and it’s coming to Netflix on September 17th in anime form. Dragon Dogma is a fantasy hack-and-slash role-playing game developed by Capcom eight years ago, and, with it, Netflix are trying to establish themselves as the main player in the gaming-to-TV space after taking on the ‘Witcher’ and ‘Castlevania’ franchises in the past. Read more of my thoughts on this in previous editions of this newsletter 📺🕹️
Netflix is having a gaming competition promoting their ‘Old Guard’ original movie with the prize in tune with the idea of the IP: a Netflix subscription for the next 1000 months, i.e. 83 years. This is an interesting promotional tool targeting the gaming generation but it also generated quite a few hype-generating news articles, I just hope Netflix won’t lose this side of them in the future, advertising, in general, has become quite boring in the past decade 👴🏾📺
While the newly announced, fully 3D-printed frame Superstrata brand of bikes is pretty innovative in terms of tech, what stands out to me with eBikes of late are the changes made in the industrial design part. Advances in battery tech and material science are unleashing interesting designs that appeal to more and more potential riders, and companies like Byar and Gogoro are making visually appealing products in the space, yet admittedly at high price points. For now. Once the standard is set and industrial design becomes a must-have feature, this will trickle down to more entry-level products for everyone to enjoy and value. It’s about time bicycles become beautiful objects of desire instead of the A-to-B workhorses they have been for the past few hundred years 🔋🚴♀️
Sony decided to give one of their friendly reviewers access to the PS5 hardware and cleared a high-level review of the new DualSense controller. It looks like the folks at PlayStation are softening as we get closer to the release and, to some extent, following in Microsoft’s footsteps by getting in front of gamers. It’s hard to tell much from this short overview and the interview that followed, but, at least on the surface, it looks like the many minute additions to the controller might translate into a vastly superior user experience🍏➡️🍊
If you’re like me and have seen mentions of GPT-3 in social media but had no idea what it was, here it is, explained in detail by its makers. After reading the article, I still don’t know if I should feel scared on intrigued. Leaning towards the latter though…🤯
I wonder how the original NES compares to the Mario figurine in terms of computing power…
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