Razer CEO on AI in game dev, Grok, and anime waifus

23:59And I would say that the guiding North Star for us is just about the gamers. and we've been consistent in respect of that despite the fact that I think very early days gaming or gamers it was not considered a big industry or demographic but we've been laser focused in terms of that and as we've grown even with the industry growing at this point of time the opportunities for us to go like hey why don't you do productivity also at the same time why don't we go into this other area and stuff like that we've just said look we know what we're good at. We remain focused about it. We align the team members all the time.

24:34And that's how we are structured. How many people are at Razor? About 2 ,000. And when I say structure, I mean literally organized. Does everybody report to you? No, no. So we've got, you know, in the traditional structure, we've got our operations, supply chain, we've got legal, so on and so forth. But we've got a pretty flat, I think, management team structure. And we don't have multiple layers, I think, from that perspective. And we consistently keep a very, you know, single-minded focus to say that, look, the product's always the most important. The customer, in our case, the gamer, is always the most important for us.

25:07And pretty much, you know, we ask ourselves the question, right? If there's no direct, you know, like direction or management mandate when it comes down to this, just figure it out. Like, what would the customer want? What would the gamer want? That's what we do. Yeah. And you're primarily based in Singapore. I know you come back and forth a lot. Where's most of the company based? Well, we're everywhere, right? So a third of our business is in the US, a third in Europe, a third in Asia at this point of time. So we've got team members spread out. We've got about close to 20 offices worldwide. We're dual headquartered in Irvine and in Singapore.

25:40When I think about the market of gamers, you know, we're here, obviously, in the United States, it's very obvious to focus on what this market wants. Gaming is growing in China at like higher rates, right? You're adding more gamers in other places. When you say we're focused on the gamers, gamers in different regions want different things. How do you make those decisions? How do you decide which needs are going to drive your roadmaps or your design ideas? Exactly that. You know, the gamers from the needs from every country or region that we've got. So we've got team members from design in each of the various regions.

26:13And we do focus on pretty much two kind of constituents, right? The way that we see it. First of which would be the game developers. That's who we work with very closely with. And then on the other end of the spectrum, we've got the gamers. And what we do is that we focus on what do the gamers want, what the game developers want, and we see ourselves as the layer in between, and we keep both as happy as we can. Yeah. This brings me to the other question I ask everybody. How do you make decisions? Do you have a framework? Do you have an organized way of making decisions? I think we're dictated by what we feel the customer wants.

26:44That's what dictates our decisions at any point of time, right? We talk to the gamers. And when we say talk to the gamers, it could be directly through social media. It could be through our customer base. It could be through our sales and marketing team and things like that. And anecdotally, we figure out, is this what they want? And if this is something that they are keen or passionate about, we then take decisions and say, okay, cool. And we have a very quick, flexible, and we're very nimble, I would say, at Razor. We try to do as little as possible, but scale as fast as possible just for our customer base.

27:20So this is going to lead me to the big decision, right? You have announced you're investing, I think,$600 million into AI over the next few years. You're going to hire 150 AI engineers, I think. The gamers hate it. The gamers, I think, are an open revolt against AI coming into their games, into their platforms. Certainly developers are very worried about what's going to happen to software development. We've seen game studios rocked by AI. That's a pretty big disconnect. Even, I think, in the announcement of the CS tagline for Razor at CS, which is AI is the future of gaming, I looked at the Instagram comments.

27:55If you're listening to the gamers, you'd be like, well, we're done with this. How are you reconciling that gap? So I would say that the question is, what are we unhappy with? When I say we, I mean us as gamers. I think we're unhappy with Gen AI slot, just to put it out there. And that's something that I'm happy with. I'm unhappy with, like any gamer. Like when I play a game, I want to be engaged. I want to be immersed. I want to be able to be competitive. I don't want to be served, you know, character models with extra fingers and stuff like that, or, you know, shoddily written storylines, so on and so forth.

28:34I think for us, we're all aligned against Gen.AI slop that is just churned out from a couple of prompts and stuff like that. What we aren't against, at least from my perspective, are tools that help augment or support and help game developers make great games. I think that's fundamentally what we are talking about at Razer. So if we've got AI tools that can help game developers QA their games faster, better, weed out the bugs, I think along the way, we're all aligned and we love that. right if we could get um game developers to create to to have the opportunity to create better to to check through typos and and things like that to create better games i think we all want that so i think that's the way that we see it so one of the things that we're building for example at razor is what we call the qa companion so qa tends to be an expensive endeavor like the gamer doesn't see it at the end of today but you know um it it can take up like 30 40 percent of the cost or delay games for the longest, longest time.

29:41Now, so what we've done is that we've created Companion, a tool that works with the human QA tester to be able to automatically fill in forms to say, okay, if this is, I say form is a Jira ticket, right? This is a bug that is identified. There's a graphical bug. There's a performance bug. All that's logged very quickly. So it's sent to the developers at the same time. The developer then can go in and say, okay, this is how I go fix the bug or these are suggestions of how I fix the bug. So the way that we see it is that AI is a tool to help game developers make better games. And then in this case, rather than it replaces the human creativity in this case.

30:18And that's something where I personally feel very passionately about, that we want to figure out how do we use for the gaming industry to get AI to do things better. But in the broader scheme of things, I think that's what we have been focused on. But, you know, there are other reasons why I think gamers are unhappy with AI in the sense that, and I agree with them. I don't like slop either, right? That's one. Two, it's like, is it raising the cost of RAM? You know, it is also raising the cost of RAM. I don't like that also at the same time. And back in the day, the GPUs versus crypto and things like that, same thing, right?

30:55So I do think, however, that all gamers would love better games, more fun games, more engaging games. And, you know, if AI can help create that by doing better QA, I mean, I'm all for it. I want to poke on that a little bit harder, but let me just ask you, is Razer feeling the RAM crunch and the GPU crunch like everybody else? Oh, yes. Yeah, absolutely. And because you make laptops and things like that. How badly has that affected you? I mean, we haven't announced the prices for the next round of laptops, for example. and this is something that concerns me, right? Because the RAM prices are going up and we want to be able to make sure our laptops remain affordable and being in the reach of gamers out there.

31:42But it has been moving. I mean, it is such a volatile situation at this point of time that it's hard for us to even figure out what's the pricing at this juncture. Yeah. Do you think you'll be able to pick a number and be confident in that number by the time that laptops have to come out? I don't know if I can pick a number right now as I speak with you and by the end of the podcast. Yeah, that's bad. It is bad. It is bad right now. Is the industry doing it? You have competitors in the PC industry, like Apple and Microsoft and others. They can move their margins around, right? They have services business and stuff that attach to these laptops.

32:17Maybe they'll take a hit on the RAM because you're going to have to pay for iCloud for the rest of your life or whatever it is you're going to do. You don't have that kind of secondary business. Is that more of a danger to you? Well, we do have a secondary business of sorts. So hardware is a big part of our business. We have actually a services payments business that we do payments for a lot of the game companies out there. And that's one of the strategies that we've got to be able to try to make our products more available to everyone. So, you know, and that's the way that we kind of see it. We are an ecosystem of sorts.

32:45We do great hardware, I think, for game developers and the gamers out there. But we've got a software platform that we're able to bring, you know, across to all the gamers out there. And of course, with services business at the same time. But the RAM situation at the end of the day still is an evolving situation right now. Do you think it will cap out? Do you think we'll have enough data center capacity and things will go back to normal? I wish I knew. I really don't. Yeah. Is there a point at which the price of RAM or the price of a marginal NVIDIA GPU becomes too high for you to sustainably do laptops at your scale?

33:21I would say I'm hoping that it doesn't come to that, right? Right. I think in short, and we've seen this happen with the industry multiple times in the past before, spikes in terms of pricing. What's great is that as long as manufacturing kicks in and we are able to kind of keep up, it's just economics, right, at the end of the day. There is a spike in terms of pricing. We believe that at some point it will come down. What goes up must come down, and what goes down at some point goes up too. Yeah. Let me come back to what you're saying about AI and development. AI is the future of gaming. You've announced products here.

33:53We've talked about Ava, the headset with the cameras and the AI stuff in it. That's consumer AI products, right? Those are consumer products. And you're saying your bet is on AI helping developers make better games faster. There's a gap there, right? AI is the future of gaming is an all-encompassing tagline. It means a lot of things to a lot of people. But it sounds like your bet is very specifically on sort of the more enterprise side of the house, helping developers do games better. Is that correct, that it's much more narrow than what people are perceiving? Well, I think the tagline is very broad.

34:25But it's easier to do a catchier tagline when it's a broad tagline as opposed to it's hardware we look at or software and stuff like that. But in short for us, we run an ecosystem. We've got hardware, we've got software, we've got services. And starting with the hardware, I think we do see that AI is going to be part of the whole kind of a conversation in terms of hardware. where the way that we look at it would be things like whether it's AI companions or whether it's making smart headphones like with Motoko, right? We see all of this as augmenting what's happening today, not replacing it. So it's not a Gen AI conversation that we've got.

35:03It's about how do we bring the smarts when we design product and bring additional value across to our users. For example, using our gaming headphones, all of a sudden we provide additional AI capabilities. Is that great? Absolutely. So that's one of the things that we're looking at from a hardware perspective. Now, from a software and a services perspective, as we work with the game developers and publishers, so on and so forth, we look at additional tools that can make their games better. We can work closely with them from a QA companion basis, for example. And then some of these core technologies, as we provide for it, can then make better games, right, over and above.

35:43So I believe that, you know, at some point, it's not just games, but AI is just going to be so prevalent or ubiquitous that, you know, every single vertical, healthcare, you know, gaming, entertainment, it's all going to have some elements of AI there. And we are just, you know, just going along with it. I've heard this pitch a lot. I have a lot of reactions to it. But I guess the simplest way of asking this question is, what have you seen that makes the bet worth it? because I've evaluated a lot of these AI products. So the Verge team has reviewed a ton of them. We have literally just tried to do the things that Microsoft says you can do in the ads and the products don't work, right?

36:23There's this massive gap between what everyone says is going to happen or should be happening and what is actually happening in the products. And to be cynic about it for the sake of getting a laugh out of this audience, I will tell you the products are best at convincing you that you should love them and doing crimes. and they're not so good at identifying what's on your screen and helping you get a task done. They're really good at that in the domain of software development. I can see why you're pushing there with game developers. It's obvious that Cloud Code is ushered in some kind of revolution, that Cursor is ushered in some kind of revolution, and in your vertical, you have something to offer there that's different.

37:02But in the broad sense, this belief that it's all just going to happen, I think has come up against the reality of what the product's going to do today. So what have you seen that suggests we will overcome that gap that makes you so confident? Well, you know, occasionally I go on podcasts where the guy is more concerned that someone's going to fall in love with my product, you know, in the long run. So, you know, and I think maybe there's something there. No, but you see, it's early days. It could completely be the worst possible idea. It could completely go off the rails and become off the spectrum where it's just the most phenomenal product that somebody completely falls in love with the product, so on and so forth.

37:44And I think the reality is going to be something in between. And the way that we see it, it's probably closer to bringing more value to people. And that's what we want to be able to do. We want to be able to get to the point where AI is going to be helpful to our customers, our users. And that's also one good example where at CES, you know, I was just looking at some of the stats and they said, what's the biggest buzz at CES? And there was a lot of like Ava, Motoko and things like that. And for what it's worth, we've literally just put vision capabilities, audio capabilities on a headphone and combined it with AI.

38:27And, you know, for what it's worth, it's not a quantum leap from a hardware design perspective, but it's captured so much imagination at this point of time. People are going, oh, wow, now I can bring AI on the go with me at any point of time. It's truly something revolutionary at this juncture. So the way that we see it, and maybe that's something that - Wait, can we just hit pause on that? What specifically do you think is revolutionary about having the AI and the cameras in the headphones with you all the time? Well, I would say that first up, we are really looking at being able to have an unobtrusive universal form factor to enable AI smarts.

39:06We're not, I think with - I think the whole industry is looking for this form factor, right? But this is like when I hear about the platform shift, you suddenly have this massive input device paradigm shift, right? We're going from touchscreens or mice to voice and vision. I get that. Sure. No one has sorted out that form factor. So you're about as headphones. I'll bet as headphones in the sense that we don't necessarily have to retrain human beings as a whole with an entirely new form factor. I don't have to change any behavior of sorts. boom, tomorrow we can get you AI smarts immediately. And that, I think, is a promise.

39:44There's a disconnect today with the possibility of AI and what it could be. And that's where we see ourselves as designers having that responsibility or the opportunity, so to speak, to be able to design in such a way that we don't necessarily have to change the entire behavior. For what it's worth, in the very early days, it could be, for that matter, maybe it's a mouse. It's just a mouse. Why is a mouse so important that today we've brought it from a mouse all the way to a gaming mouse? And now the gaming mouse is a broader category than productivity mice, right? Gaming mice right now dominate all of the mouse category at this point of time.

40:26And right now, we can call it a smart headphone. And that's the way we see it. And we don't necessarily have to retrain everybody to say, oh, you've got to put on new glasses, you've got to be able to bear with the weight and things like that. So that is one of the things that we're doing with Motoko. And a lot of the work that we do is actually on the software side of things, right? How do we ensure that we get context faster? How do we ensure that we are able to do all of that? So it's both hardware, software fusion and sensor fusion at the same time that we are really focused in terms of bringing the experience over.

40:59And that's something that we believe is the reason why people go and say, oh, I absolutely get it right now. Why I would want something like that? So the model in the Motaku that I saw is ChatGPT. It's ChatGPT. Why did you pick ChatGPT for the headphones and Grok for Ava? So ChatGPT for the headphones was primarily more from the premise that we think it's a good assistant in terms of, you know, CV capabilities, identifying things, being able to give, you know, very quick feedback at the same time. But, you know, we could very well run Grok also at the same time. And the way that we are kind of presenting this is that whether it's for Ava or whether it's for Motoko or any of our other products, we are multi-model.

41:42You know, and that was one of the things that we wanted to be able to do that. And we believe that, you know, at some point of time, we see Gemini doing really well. We see Grok doing really, really well. We see ChatGPT having advances in various aspects. And this race to intelligence is just great for all of us as consumers, right? And when I mentioned that Grok has great conversational AI, I think they're the best for conversational AI at this point of time. ChatGPT is doing great, I think, in terms of it as an assistant for reasoning and things like that. And that's what we see ourselves. We see ourselves as owning the vertical from a gaming perspective, being able to work with all the best intelligence or the AI out there, and then bringing and designing a product or service designed and tailored for our users and within the gaming vertical.

42:29So the vision is I'm wearing the headphones. It's got cameras. It's got microphones. It's got speakers. And I'm walking through the airport. I'm just asking, where is my gate? And it's telling me the answer from ChatGPT. Or is it more I'm sitting at my desk playing a game and it's helping me through the game? All of the above. You can literally do that with Motoko at this point of time. So with Motoko... But this is what I mean about the capability gap. I think if I walked through the airport and asked for HGPT where my gate was, it would not get that right at this point in time. Like there's a model capability gap there.

42:58I believe that if today you use ChatGPT and you're providing snapshots, you know, in some context of, let's say, location, to a certain extent, you could. you know like I would be messaging on my phone with chat GPT for example and it could give me the reasoning to be able to bring me there to a great extent. I'll give an example right. You know I would literally use chat GPT for a whole bunch of kind of day to day tasks and stuff like that. It's got great reasoning. It's able to do that and now we are layering on vision capabilities and that's one we ingest another level of input. Over and above, we've got far few mics.

43:42So audio capabilities also come to bear. So with all of this, we're able to give a lot more information across to Chad GPT, who does all the reasoning, I think, for us. And that's where we see it coming through. So constantly, the smarts of intelligence is part of how we see us designing AI hardware at this point of time. We need to take another short break. We'll be right back.

44:50We're back with Razor CEO MinLiang Tan, discussing his company's major investments in AI and how that puts him on a direct collision course with the broader gaming community that is embroiled in fierce AI backlash. It seems like you have a pretty big reliance on the models themselves, right? You're obviously not training your own models. You want to be multi-model. You want to let people choose. Are you thinking of yourself more as being best at the hardware, the form factor, and having the best microphones and cameras, and that will let people use the models more conveniently? Well, you know, we are an ecosystem, I think, for gamers, where it's not just, I think, in terms of the hardware, But most of our work is actually done on the software side.

45:35A good example for the matter, if say, and I use maybe CS as an example, right? If I've got Ava when I wake up, you know, it's giving me information, like what's happening in the day and what's my day going to be today, so on and so forth. When I get out from my apartment and I go onto the street, to the subway, etc., then I've got Motoko at the same time. But with persistent memory, it also will know exactly what has been happening at home. So Ava is somewhat following me everywhere, right? In my day, I'm not going to fall in love with it yet. But in short, it's following my day. I'm going around.

46:13I'm looking at it. I'm asking for directions. When I get to the office, I could literally be still with Motoko, which is another form factor. So the way that we see it is that the intelligence is persistent. And it follows you. The form factors are presented, our hardware form factors. It's a little bit like how we've designed our product at this point of time. We have a singular software platform that we are able to give you a great gaming experience over and above. You could be using one of our mice, our keyboards, so on and so forth, our laptop. These are just representations at the end of the day.

46:44And that's how we design it. And there are particular problems that we need to solve that the models don't provide for us. You know, context. So that's one of the things that our AI scientists do really well. We've got advanced RAG, we've got context, we really focus on it. Persistent memory is something that we are very good at also at the same time. And these are fundamental problems that AI scientists need to solve. So these are the things that our team does, so we work with the best models out there. And we also have the capabilities of creating physical representations, And that's something that we've got a huge advantage at.

47:22Doesn't a lot of the value here just accrue back to these models? Even if you're building all the stuff above the models and around the models to make them work the way you want, it seems like, okay, my AVA is going to be ChatGPT no matter. If I want that unified experience, I'm just kind of at the end of the day talking to an instantiation of ChatGPT all the way long. Because I have Grok over here and ChatGPT in the headphones. You can't unify that. So at the end of the day, it's all Gemini or whatever model I choose. can you provide enough value to charge a premium on top of the chat GPT subscription to make that work?

47:55That's I think where our angle is I think from a software perspective that we believe that we can bring enough value of persistence across to the user and progressively we will see even more users that will say, look, this is what I want to be able to go from one model to another, for example or if I'm happy with just a single model and if I'm a techie and I'm happy to just go directly and play around with it, we provide that open platform. So being open is one of the things that we truly believe in. Yeah. One of the things that, you know, we cover AI enough, the idea that the AI startups are just wrappers on open AI, and then eventually open AI will just eat them as the models get more incapable.

48:35We've seen that play out already a little bit. You obviously have hardware. Razer's a different business. But you can see that dynamic here, right, where the core model capability might start to get the memory you're talking about, where the core model capability might start to get the persistent personality across devices that you're talking about. OpenAI is making hardware, we are told. There is a competition with the core provider that is coming in different dimensions. How are you thinking about that? Well, I think the entire tech industry has always been, you know, wrappers, you know, for that matter.

49:05Not necessarily from an AI perspective, but it's the question of when you build a wrapper, do you provide enough value from the wrapper that you build, right? And that's the thing where it's also very hard for anyone to be all things to all people. And I don't think OpenAI wants to be all things to all people. I don't think Grot wants to be all things to all people. For us, we tend to be very focused on our vertical. We are not tempted to try to do something else different at any point of time. And our vertical is really for the gamers. And this is something we've got huge domain knowledge in terms of what the gamers want, what the game developers want.

49:42We've got distribution. You know, we've got about 70 ,000 game developers using our SDK. We've got 150 million gamers on our software platform. We've got distribution, I think, across to that, which, you know, can the models go out there and try to build the distribution? Yes, but do they prefer to partner? And I think, you know, the answer is they do prefer to partner. And fundamentally, we have a huge amount of data, I think, on the gamers, their preferences, what they want, what they like, that we can bring across to the models also at the same time, which is our IP, you know, for that matter.

50:12So I think with that in mind, as I say, having all these verticals, you may call it building wrappers of sorts, but these are very deep wrappers that we have to build. A lot of customization, a lot of building, and it's more than just hardware, right? It's not hardware. As I say, the hardware is just part of the equation. It's the software work that we need to do. It's the R &D work that we need to do, for example, to get persistence in the space and context. So to get the context for our users, that's where our data comes in also at the same time, to be able to kind of pivot and focus on that.

50:48I think one of the reasons people like companies like Razer and like dealing with products that Razer makes is you just buy them and you're done. Like you can just buy the mouse and then you own it and it's fine. You can just buy the laptop. I'm not in an ongoing subscription relationship with you unless I want to be. one of your competitors Hanaki Faber from Logitech came on the show a year or two ago and she's like I want to build a forever mouse and what she meant was a subscription mouse and that was she's never coming back on the show again I think based on the reaction to that um it's just that's my understanding of how they felt about that interview um all the things you're talking about are ongoing relationships ongoing development cost I I hear it I hear the promise I also hear I'm gonna have to pay a fee every month.

51:32Like this is where that comes from. You need to pay the developers. You need to pay for cloud uptime to make the AI system alive. How much are you going to charge for all of that? Well, you know, we've always had an ongoing relationship with our customer. You know, that's the thing, right? The way that we see it from Razer is that when somebody buys a Razer mouse, he tends to buy another Razer mouse. In the future, he expands the devices that he owns from us. So we've always had a long-term relationship with our customer from that perspective. At some point of time, I think as we think through the whole AI uptime, so on and so forth, I mean, we've had cloud costs also in the past, right?

52:14Maintaining profiles in clouds, so on and so forth. So for us, I think that's one of the things that we want to figure out. What can we do to ensure that we bring the value? And I think that's our obsession. If there is no value, our customers won't pay for it. We won't pay for it ourselves, right? So to that end, that's our focus, I think, in respect of it. And it could be through we build it into a hardware cost, for that matter, if that makes sense. And I'll be candid. We have literally not thought through this in great detail. But the way that we see it is, how do we identify that value to the user?

52:48And from there, we are very clear. We message this. This is the value that we see out of this. and we'll see how we let the market decide. I look at that reaction from gamers broadly to AI in the industry. There's slop. I think there's a lot of reaction to slop. I think there's a lot of reaction to game studios being in whatever amount of crisis that game studios appear to be in. There's whatever reaction to consolidation. And then there is the relentless fee seeking from the games industry, right? That everything is going to be a subscription. Everything is going to be free to play with DLC. Everything is going to be ongoing, recurring costs over and over and over again.

53:22And the industry has really moved that model across the board. And I think people are feeling that pain. So then they hear AI and they say, okay, someone else is going to ask me for$10 a month or$20 a month. Can you avoid that? Is that you can just price it into the hardware or is that going to be inevitable? So as I've mentioned, I don't know if we're going to price it into the hardware. We're still figuring it out. But I would say that at the end of the day, the question is how much value you're getting out of it, right? So, I mean, I pay for Spotify because I see the value in terms of paying for Spotify.

53:50I get a whole library of music and so on and so forth. Game Pass, you know, so on and so forth throughout. There's times of which I would prefer micro... I mean, I look back and go like, oh, I wish I could just pay one time for this title, right? There is microtransactions. There is subscription fees. But at the end of the day, I think myself as a consumer, myself as a gamer, I would say, I would just look at anything. And, you know, I would say if it's worth that amount of money to me, I would pay for it. Otherwise, I'll vote with my wallet. You know, that's... Are you seeing signs that the AI stuff is going to be worth paying for that way?

54:27I mean, this is the bubble, right? Is that we're going to spend all this money, forward invest in all this infrastructure, we're going to skyrocket the price of RAM and GPUs, and then at the end of the day, people are going to be like, that's not actually worth the$20 a month. I don't necessarily see it as AI per se, but I see the kind of value that I get out of it. So, for example, a ChatGPT subscription, right? Or a Grok subscription for that matter. I do see value out of it, and that's why I pay for it. And that's the way I see it. I don't see myself as paying for AI per se. I see it as, you know, what am I getting out of a chatbot, for example, that can advise me on travel matters, health matters, whatever it is, my day-to-day, and stuff like that.

55:08Is that worth$20 to me? You know, and in the case for this. You're a billionaire. I just want to be, right? Sure. I'm just saying, like, the marginal cost is, like, meaningless to you. 20 bucks is still 20 bucks. I'm just saying, I think for a lot of people, that is meaningful, especially stacked on top of all the other money. Basically, I'm saying, do you see that critique of AI as a bubble? That the investment has not yet delivered the value that will make it so obvious that the investment is worth it? So I see that, I mean, a huge amount of investments are going to, we are investing into AI, I think, as we speak.

55:45But I do see the potential, I think, at this point of time. I mean, in many cases, you know, in terms of, I mean, look at the number of paid subscribers for ChatGPT, for example. So people do see the value in terms of whether it's a chatbot, AI, so on and so forth. And, you know, I do think the potential is going to be realized. Now, in many cases, I think there will be AI slot that we will go some, I mean, I've paid for subscriptions at the start where I thought it was going to be great, but I've canceled them, for example. But I do believe that in many cases, and in some cases that we have not even envisaged yet, the potential will be realized.

56:27Yeah. Let me ask you broadly. I mean, you obviously talk a lot to game developers. You and I backstage were just talking about the nature of art and the age of AI and the nature of craft. That industry is going through an enormous amount of turmoil right now. What do you think the outcome looks like? What do you think makes that all feel good at the end? I would say that the outcome that we see, and I think it's going to be the likely outcome, is that AI tools are going to be helping human developers develop faster and better. and I think that's the natural outcome, right? Where we're talking about graduating, whether it's an analog kind of way of creating art versus digital and I think it's going to be the same thing.

57:17We're going to see human artists use AI tools to kind of really bring their vision to life and we'll see new forms of artists, artists of whom may not necessarily have been so adept in terms of using a paintbrush or using Photoshop, now being able to kind of wordsmith and craft great pieces of art with prompts throughout. So that's, I think, what's going to happen, where we will see even more human creators, now with the help of more tools. Maybe I'm an optimist, but I really truly see that, that AI tools will come to fore, because at some point in time, we're going to see so much slop out there that we're going to crave for really great art, you know, really great design.

58:04And that's what's going to happen. And we've seen that cycle go over and over and over again. So with the amount of slop out there, we're going to see some level of art rise to the top. And that kind of art may still be created with the same tools that created the slop. But with great care, with great discernment, to be able to do something truly different. and that the difference will come from human ingenuity not from countless prompt uh you know mashing so to speak so i feel like i have to ask you this now what games are you playing right now oh uh it depends you know what what meets the bar what meets the bar uh you know i i play a lot of you know uh single player games at this point of time also like civilization and stuff like that I still do a lot of that.

58:57I do play some MMOs of sorts, you know, FPSs. I still play a lot of the Battle Royale genre. So, you know, things like that. You're just saying genres. What games are you playing that meet the bar? That meet which bar? The bar. You're talking about human ingenuity and creativity. What games are you playing right now that meet the bar? Oh, well, I play random stuff even like if you talk about human ingenuity and I even play some of the Roblox games at this point of time, right? But a lot of the games, and maybe I talk broadly in terms of genres, primarily because I appreciate the human ingenuity that's gone into the genres itself, right?

59:38A hundred people dropped on an eyelid with a circle that comes through. That is what, I mean, while I enjoy the game itself, I also appreciate the mechanic, the thought that has gone into, and the premise that the designer has figured out in PUBG, for example, that it's this primal instinct of humans to be the last man standing, so to speak. So it's things like that that I appreciate, and I think it's art. Okay. What's next for Razer? What should people be looking for? More of the same, I would say. In the sense, when I say more of the same, I'd say nothing has changed from day one for us. And that has always been our mantra.

1:00:21And we used to say it all the time that, you know, the mantra for us, our for gamers, by gamers mantra has really followed us from day one, where the gaming industry didn't really exist as an industry, even the hardware industry or software and so on and so forth. we believe that we design products for ourselves that we enjoy that I enjoy using at any point of time and that tomorrow when the game industry did grow dramatically we were still focused on games even though there were multiple opportunities for us to kind of expand out there and even now where we talk about the gaming industry and somewhat of doldrums at this juncture I believe that we're going to see the next great genre come through right whether it's MMOs and early days MOBAs and then battle royales.

1:01:09We're going to see the next great genre. We're going to see, you know, hopefully GTA 6 at some point of time. Right? So all that we look forward to, but we're just pretty much laser focused. It's just that the demographic has really changed. The word gamer has also changed through the years. The games have changed through the years, right? And for us, we're just sitting here very focused, designing great product for ourselves. Yeah. Min, this has been great. Thank you so much for joining us on Dakota. Thank you. Thank you to this audience. Thank you.

1:02:06is production of the verge and part of the boxing podcast network the show is produced by kate cox and nick stat it was edited by ursa wright our editorial director is kevin mcshane the music is by breakmaster cylinder we'll see you next time