The PS5 Pro made us sit closer to the screen

25:56Amazon seems to have, uh, kind of freaked out at this. Like if you look at the Kindle Colorsoft page right now, the reviews are really bad. ad. There's a ton of them. People hate this thing. And there have also been a couple of other issues like it was supposed to ship with a dark mode. And then Amazon just didn't ship it with a dark mode. Uh, there was like a feature that was advertised that just doesn't exist on this thing. And they had to delay shipping. Like this thing has actually turned into kind of a mess in a way that for Amazon, which has basically like ruthlessly executed on slight improvements to the Kindle for 15 years is very strange.

26:32Uh, and it's super weird because I'm sitting here with like the new paper white, which I love to bits like that. That thing is, it's excellent. It is everything you would want like a super simple Kindle to be. And the color soft kind of just looks like a swing and a miss. Yeah. But I mean, the paper white is an incremental improvement, right? They made the page turn speed a lot faster. Yeah. But it's the same product. And this point you're making about Amazon sort of relentlessly improving the same tiny iterations. I think people buy them and they just expect them to work. Like you expect 99.9 % similar functionality out of any Kindle.

27:09A hundred percent. Yeah. Like I asked Becky, I was like, do you want a new one? And she literally, she looked me dead in the eye. She reads her Kindle every night. She looked me dead in the eye and said, stop buying me Kindles. Cause it's the only gadget I can buy her. She's like stop it like i'm good i will let you know when this one catches fire and that was the end of that conversation and i think like the that's the the new paperweight is that but slightly better in a bunch of ways which is to some extent like it's what becky and what a lot of people want from a paperweight right like go faster when i press the thing to change the picture the color soft is the big change it's supposed to be the new thing yeah and you have to get that right yeah especially if you're going to come out and be like oh we we took a long time to do this but we think we've gotten it right.

27:53There have been all these - Also, you're in our DRM jail, so you'll only eat when we feed you. Yeah. Yeah, it's a tough look, and I think it's going to be really interesting. There's this new scribe coming out in a few weeks with a bunch of, like, flashy AI stuff. Like, they pitched this as the biggest rev to the Kindle line ever. Yeah, Panos was here. He was like, I set him free. Yeah, and if your big first swing goes like this, that is tough. Have they said why? Is this a manufacturing error? Did somebody step on them? They haven't said, they've essentially just acknowledged that it is a real problem.

28:31Our review unit has one, Andrew Leschewski's been using it and has seen the yellow bar. His stance so far seems to be that it is worse in photos than in real life, but it is still very much real and there. And Amazon has acknowledged to lots of people and according to people on Reddit, which take with a grain of salt, Amazon has actually been calling people who have had, who have left bad reviews and bought the thing to see what's going on. Like you get the sense the company is scrambling that this has been such a big problem, but Amazon has acknowledged that this is a real thing and is an issue and that they are trying to fix it.

29:07Is it a hardware issue or a software issue? Unclear. Wow. Yeah. It's a bad look. I mean, right now I'm just going to, I'm going to open, I'm going to open the Kindle color soft page. And I'm just going to like, so the reviews are truly, truly, truly brutal. In a way that like the Kindle is every, everybody is like, it's a Kindle. I like my Kindle. The Colorsoft, which I would remind you is$280. Way more expensive. Currently at 2.6 stars on Amazon. Oh, it is a hardware problem. It is. We have a quote. The company is making adjustments so that new devices will not have a yellow band. People who already own a unit can contact Amazon for a refund or replacement.

29:50And the statement from an Amazon spokesperson to us, we take the quality of our product seriously. Customers who notice jail ban can reach out to customer service team for a replacement or a refund. Could be either way. Maybe hardware, maybe. Yeah, who knows? But yeah, Amazon claims there's a fix. So we'll see. Right now, you also can only get delivery. I'm seeing delivery for two weeks from now, which is a thing that has started showing up. Amazon seems to have frozen shipping on this while they try to fix it. I feel so bad for them. They're such a struggling company with so little money. I know.

30:19It's awful. Hopefully, hopefully they get it together. Real upstart ebook company. Hope they can get it together. It's funny because this was, this really was the first like revitalized Amazon hardware. Here we go. And there was so much enthusiasm for it. Like I, I was actually really surprised at how excited people were about the color soft. Um, because on the one hand, it's not the giant sort of leap in functionality for most people. It's just like now your book covers are in color, but a for people who like carry these things around and have them sitting on their night table, like that alone is meaningful.

30:52But also I heard from a lot of like comic book fans and people who love graphic novels and people who are like, this actually changes the kind of thing I can do on this device. And, uh, again, it's, it's 80 or$90 more than the paperweight. Like it's not a small choice to buy this thing instead of a different Kindle. Uh, and it, it just, I feel for all the people who have just like thought this was the thing they'd been waiting for and it turned out it wasn't. This is why you gotta stick with a Bukes Palma, man. Do you want one? I have a Palma 2 right here. What do you think? Can I just quickly preview my Palma 2 review for you?

31:26Yes. I picked it up to do some testing and play with it and do some reviews and an hour later realized I had picked up the original one instead of the second one. That's perfect. Yeah, that's where we are. That's very good. Well, I picked up my Bukes Palma 1 and then put it down and then have never picked it up again. So I'm doing great. All right, we got to take a break. We'll be back with Sean Hollister talking about the PS5 Pro. We'll be right back.

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34:29We're back. Sean Hollister is here. Welcome, Sean. Hi. It's the voice. The voice of a new generation has returned once again to the Vergecast. I'm almost 40. Sean, you're not supposed to admit this. I don't know. This goes on YouTube. You have to say you're 18 years old and you can't read. It's good because look at my complexion. It's just fine. I have a lot of additional YouTube jokes to tell, and I'm just not going to tell them. If you sponsor the lightning round, I will call you personally and tell you the jokes I was about to tell. They're not, they weren't about Sean, they were about YouTube.

34:57That's the worst argument you've ever made for sponsoring the lightning round. No one is going to sponsor it now. We're going to have more incoming now than we've ever gotten. And we still will not know how to accept the money. We're going to figure it out one day. It's not today. All right, Sean, you're here because you reviewed the PS5 Pro, which the review, the embargo of which was the day after election day. So while everyone else is like glued to the screens watching counts go up. Sean, I believe you were just moving back from your television one inch at a time to see when you could stop telling that the PS5 Pro had an increased resolution in Bloodborne.

35:35I want to tell you that you're incorrect, but that was literally exactly what I was doing. I was walking up really close to my TV to see all the glorious pixels and then continually walking backwards until I couldn't see the difference anymore between a four-year-old PlayStation and a brand new PlayStation. I love this. This is what we do here. First, tell people what the PS5 Pro is and then explain why you are doing exactly that. Okay. The PS5 Pro is Sony's new game console, which is basically a PS5 with more storage, a little more memory, and a substantially faster GPU. The GPU itself, 62 % faster by teraflops.

36:16You get rendering performance increases of like 45%. So it's not quite enough to take your games from like, they weren't 4K before to suddenly they are 4K, except there's also AI upscaling on board because of course everything has AI in it now. and so with that you can theoretically get a best of both worlds experience where if previously your ps5 game was running at 4k but only 30 frames per second now you can run it at a smooth 60 or if your game was previously lower resolution at 60 frames per second you can now get higher resolution and more detail at the 60 frames per second and so you put your existing games in this and if they've been patched to ps5 pro enhanced then all of a sudden they look better or they run smoother that's great right it's it's it's ps5 but better it's also 700 that's a lot of dollars it does have the little like rib on the side it does look nice yeah it's got like a little racing stripey thing i'm i'm into that but wait sean this is the thing i've been trying to figure about the ps5 pro it feels like there there could be three different kinds of games for this one is like game that is not aware of the existence of the ps5 pro it's just it's just a game it's ps4 game it's ps5 game the other one is like a game that already existed that has been like upgraded in some way to be ready for this and then there are like theoretically games made with the ps5 pro in mind?

37:49Do all three of those things exist in the PS5 Pro world? Like if I put in a game that just does not care about the PS5 Pro at all, is it going to look better? In many cases, it won't look better if it doesn't know that you've got a PS5 Pro in there. But there are so many edge cases here. This is a very difficult review to write. Okay, so let's start off with the obvious. Are there new games that are only for the PS5 Pro? Will there be exclusive games that only run on this? Probably not. Sony has not said anything to suggest that that will happen. They will probably save those for the PS6 whenever that comes out.

38:29And even those theoretically, maybe they'll let those run on a PS5 and a PS5 Pro as well. You could theoretically now be in a place where games are like PCs. You get your new PlayStation, they look a little better. You play the old PlayStation, they look worse. It's all x86 under the hood now it's possible it's all amd chips under the hood now it's possible has sony actually done that not quite they would of course like you to buy games again and again and buy the updates for those games so to some degree that's not happening i mean there are barely even ps5 only games right i mean i'm i'm looking at the list of ps5 only games and it is just not that many there aren't ps5 only games but there are a lot of ps5 only versions of games so you put the PS5 disc in, like you were getting a different and better experience than the PS4 version.

39:15Absolutely. A hundred percent. Like that is a much bigger difference also than the difference between PS5 and PS5 pro. Okay. So the second question is, uh, you've got your, no exclusives, no exclusives for this, but then you do have games that do not necessarily need the patches. They don't necessarily need to develop or put in the extra leg work to make a game run better because some PS5 games have an unlocked frame rate. Now, most of the time, you're like a console experience. It's going to be a smooth 60 or it's going to be a smooth 30 FPS. The developers decided we're going to lock it there so you don't have up and down in terms of the performance.

39:54You get a reliable frame rate. But because there's so much difference in power between PS4 and PS4 Pro and PS5 and now PS5 Pro, some developers are like, well, no, if we leave our games in this PC-like state, where if you just throw more performance at them, they'll be better. There are a handful of games like that. Digital Foundry tested, you know, Cyberpunk 2077. And it's like, oh, okay, that works. But there's this other wrinkle in here, which is that if you have a TV with a variable refresh rate on it, especially one that can go all the way up to 120 hertz, you put a game on this with that unlocked frame rate, And now your game that was only running 30 frames per second could run 40 or 47 or something like that.

40:42If you play this exact same game on a TV with a locked number of hertz, a locked refresh rate, you're only getting the 30 or the 60. If you can't hit the 60, you're at 30, you know? So we're in that place where if you have the best TV and you have an unlocked framerate game, then you don't need a PS5 Pro enhanced patch to get some excellent enhancements out of it. Most of the time, though, you're going to want these patches. Is the market for what you just described 11 people? I don't know. I'm not a guy with a variable refresh TV. But that's your fault. That's a personal failing of David P. Don't disagree.

41:24Nobody should buy this unless they have a 65-inch variable refresh rate, HDR, probably OLED TV, that they sit at least, no more than eight feet away from. They are sitting close to this screen. Preferably like five feet, maybe three. Three would be good. I'm sitting in front of a 32-inch 4K monitor. uh that that OLED monitor it's a beautiful alienware monitor and I I like the PS5 Pro a lot on this screen so but that's that's actually I I think a good point because you and you you make the same point in the review which is that you basically find yourself using it like a gaming PC this is not like a plop it in the TV entertainment center sit back on the couch and game kind of thing this is like sit three inches from the screen until your eyes bleed kind of quality.

42:22This is the same argument we had about the Steam Deck. I mean, people love the idea of a gaming PC, but they don't want all of that hassle. And the Steam Deck is like, here is so much less hassle. Take it with you. It just works for the most part, even though it's running Linux under the hood. These Windows games just work. Just start them up. We guarantee that these ones will work. And Valve doesn't always guarantee them properly. PS5 Pro, plug that into your desktop monitor. Pick up your DualSense controller. It's an amazing controller. And these games just work. And they look beautiful. Right.

42:54This is why I bring this up, because I think if you look at it that way, you're no longer competing against a much cheaper, almost as good PS5. You're competing against a way more expensive, way more fiddly, way more complicated gaming PC. Wait, so Sean, you mentioned this in the review. You said this is like the power of a mid-range gaming PC, right? It's somewhere in there. Is that so much more complicated and expensive? a mid-range gaming pc yeah you have to run windows exactly that that's really it that's really that and and and and ports i mean sony has ported a lot of good games to gaming pcs now it's various port studios like nixies have done this and some of them are great and some of them are really really not great i booted up the last of us part one on both my ps5 pro and my gaming pc And trust me, the gaming PC has more oomph under the hood.

43:52The graphics card in there, you're going to get more frame rate, more textures. I proved that out by playing Alan Wake 2. But with Last of Us Part 1, it is not a good port on PC. The little girl's hair in the beginning of the game, it looks like Medusa-like tentacles on my PC. Because there is some kind of bug. She is also a vampire, apparently, because she has no reflection in any of the mirrors on PC. On the PS5 Pro, the mirrors show the entire world, including her. Also, it took like a minute to load the game fully on, less than that, maybe 30 seconds to load the game on PS5 Pro. I spent 15 minutes compiling the shaders for the game on PC, after which point it still didn't work properly.

44:35Yeah. So is it worth it? Look, I have a PS5. I play one game on it. I throw Interceptions in Madden. I do that for about an hour every night. On your frame TV, which it feels important to say out loud at this point. On my 77-inch Sony Master Series OLED, which does have VRR, actually. Okay, there you go. No one in my house enjoys when I do this. There's a lot of swinging TV. But this isn't a game I doubt they're going to update Madden. The only thing they're going to update Madden is with more interstitial advertising to buy their weird cards. Those are the only updates to this game. Is this worth it for me?

45:07It feels like not at all worth it to me. No. No, wait for a PS6. Oh, Max plays Astro Bot. My six-year-old plays the hell out of Astro Bot, which is the best game in the world. And the Astro Bot Dual Suns controller is actually delightful because the light around the touchpad glows in different colors when you play the game. The whole thing's a delight. We played the hell out of Astro Bot. I did not notice a difference. All right. Are there games that you feel like it's worth it? Is there a game that it's like, if I play this game for hours a day, this upgrade is that meaningful all on its own?

45:39you would have to be an uber fan and it might need to be something competitive and this is one place i did i didn't get to try like call of duty on this with like in like intensive multiplayer i don't even know if there is like a fast refreshment mode but let's imagine for a moment you have like imagine call of duty or or or really competitive fighting game comes out with an 120 hertz mode and all of a sudden this is like the best way to play outside of a pc because you actually have like lowered latency from the from your inputs into the thing or if they also like let you use a mouse and keyboard maybe that's what they need to do if they take this thing they're like it is your gaming pc uh every game you throw it will be better because we are issuing a mandate that every developer has to have unlocked frame rate and resolution and graphic setting options on all of their games and we're going to let you plug a mouse and keyboard into it and it basically is a pc except it's a really cool and quiet and compact.

46:38This is like Microsoft's dream of the PC for years. You're describing the world's wildest Surface RT.

46:47If you're a Final Fantasy VII Uber fan and all you wanted for your entire existence since 1997 or whenever it was, was to see Final Fantasy VII come to life around you. This still isn't that because it's not VR, but it looks better than PS5 for that. It's pretty muddy on PS5 in the 60 hertz mode. Yeah. I do like the idea that this is a weird incursion into gaming PC world. It makes it make more sense to me. Whereas when there was a PS4 and the PS4 Pro came out a little bit later, there was just some obvious reasons that I would want to upgrade my console at that time because that's what got you 4K back then.

47:30Did you upgrade, David? I only got a PS4 Pro. I still have a PS4 Pro. I bought that just because there was like a Black Friday sale, so I ended up with it. But again, I played that on a 1080p computer monitor for a very long time. Do you have eyes? I say these things primarily just to piss off me. This is, it's great. So I asked because all of this means all of us are PS4 pro owners. All of us bought into this last gen when the, when the pitch was like, now you get HDR and now you get like 4k, which is like, but it was like fake four. Contrived checkerboard rendering. But like, but the, the thing about the thing about that you have to be a certain feet amount of number of feet away from your PS5, like not see the difference.

48:15You have to be within eight feet to really see the difference with PS5 Pro. That worked in the favor of the PS4 Pro. Because at the distance you were away from the screen, you could tell that it was 4K, but you could not tell that it was contrived checkerboard rendering. At least I couldn't. Maybe you could, Neil. I could not. But this is not my – as everyone knows, evaluating video games is not the thing that I do because I play two of them. And I'm horrible at one of them. And so, like, it's – don't take my word for it. But, yeah, I agree with you broadly that the PS4 Pro made sense to me because it got me the two features I wanted to use on my TV.

48:56Right. Right? I want all the lights on my TV to be lit up, as everyone knows. And so it got me the 4K and it got me the HDR, and that was great. This one is like, I don't know, whatever. It's more pixels. Like, I always play in higher resolution mode versus higher performance mode because that's the tradeoff I'm willing to make, and I'm not willing to make this tradeoff. The idea that the PS5 Pro is actually meant to go up against a mid-range gaming PC and be simpler and faster and have a better library of more optimized games kind of recontextualizes the whole product. I agree. And makes it way more – like$700 seems a lot less wildly expensive.

49:33Is that how Sony is talking about it? No. Absolutely not. Well, maybe they should start. uh uh alright so that's PS5 Pro anything we missed Sean anything that like stood out to you apart from that how's the weird detachable disk drive thing the detachable okay so it doesn't it does not come with the disk drive which is like how do you call it the pro when it doesn't have this feature how do you how do you release this console to an audience of nitpickers who are going to care about those graphics and that frame rate but you think they magically don't care about about physical media like yeah people care about physical media if they're nitpickers and so i did have to special order the disc drive and put it on this thing it was so easy yeah they're hard to find right the drives are not easy to get your hands on yeah i went i looked at gamestop i looked best buy i looked at sony's site i looked a bunch of places eventually found one at walmart uh not a close walmart but i did i did order it it got to me uh next day so good good for you walmart and uh i guess i'll scalp it now no i'm not gonna you probably could i really could uh they are hotly in demand um sony did not make enough of these things but um but yeah it it it clips on really easily once it's on there it looks like an original ps5 uh and it's and it's it's smaller you know it's it's it's and it's and it's fairly quiet and not that warm like i'm using it it's under the desk right now i'm using it as a foot warmer while we do this it's it's currently ray tracing allen wake too and uh it's it's enough to warm up my feet a little bit but it's not they're not super toasty and i would say it's this is how we're measuring heat and thermals on every product from now on like did it make my feet super toasty under the desk it's very good and it's quieter than the original steam deck was the original steam deck had a really noisy fan this is quieter than that.

51:29Have they added Dolby Vision to the PS5 yet? If you want to play Blu-rays on it? I don't think they have. All this extra processing power and I just want Dolby Vision support. And then I would buy a new PS5 Pro with this disk drive and I would use it as a Blu-ray player. I bought the Samsung OLED TV this time so I don't have Dolby Vision either way. Oh my God, Sean. Sorry. Can everyone just check in with me? Just send me a note and I will help you out. I'm doing my best out here. Neil, I have a 42-inch P-series TCL I'm looking at. Can you give me a once over? I walked into a new neighbor's house the other day and he showed me the TV above the mantle and he goes, it's not, it's a different kind of frame TV.

52:09And I was like, I have to get out of this house. Cause he hadn't bought it. Cause there's a bunch of competitors to frame TV now. And I was like, I gotta go. I gotta get out of here. I don't know you well enough to react to what you just said to me the way that I want to. and I don't have control over my emotions so I have to just leave. That's good. Other gaming news, it seems like everyone keeps expecting Nintendo to actually announce what should be called the Super Nintendo Switch. Hint. But instead they've announced an alarm clock and then I believe it was on election night announced that the forthcoming Switch successor would be backwards compatible.

52:48You forgot one. There was also the music app. There was like Like 24 hours of excitement of people being like, oh my God, I keep hearing there's a Nintendo thing happening. This is going to be it. This is it. This is it. I am in Slack with Andrew Webster being like, we have to have a plan. This is the biggest thing. And then they announced the music app. Some guy was like, I had this leak that it was going to be the Switch the next morning. And Andrew Webster, he was like, my heart can't take it. Our game's entered. He was so ready to write about the Switch too. And then the next morning, the leak guy was like, I just got used by Nintendo so hard.

53:22It is my favorite. I have come all the way around. I hope Nintendo does this for five more years. Just don't ever launch the new Switch. Just keep doing silly stuff. There was also a museum launch in there somewhere. Andrew got an invite to go to Japan, and it was about a museum and not the Switch 2. It's so funny. Do you think they know that everyone's expecting the Switch 2, so every other team at Nintendo is like, let's do our announcement first. They have to know. And this is now the funniest bit from a tech company in a very long time, and I love it so much. but this week we got actual switch news not the switch news we were expecting but actual real switch news but it was like but and this wasn't an announcement right this is like this was like in a briefing like buried information i think it was like a financial briefing and then and then nintendo was like i guess nobody noticed so we'll tweet it now and they did on election night in the middle literally i'm sitting on my couch talking to people during election night.

54:20We're tracking the returns as they come in. And somebody just drops this tweet and is like, did they just announce backwards compatibility for Switch games? Right. Can I read you this tweet? As Vergecast listeners know, I like explaining how the journalism sausage is made. And this one is particularly good because at 8.26 PM on November 5th, the Nintendo account just tweeted, this is Furukawa, which is the president of Nintendo, Shantoro Furukawa. But But it just says this is Furukawa. No other names. I'm going to start all my tweets like that from now on. Does it not say I am the president of Nintendo?

54:55It just says this is Furukawa. It's very good. You know who it is. What time is it? At today's corporate management policy briefing, we announced that Nintendo Switch software will be playable and the successor to Nintendo Switch. What is the corporate management policy briefing? They had an offsite. That's what I'm taking away from this. They had an offsite and they distributed some pamphlets and they're like, shit, this is going to leak. Furukawa, get on the horn. It's either that or like an internal company newsletter that like only goes to the accounting department. And they were like, ah, I hit all staff instead of accounting.

55:30Like, I guess we'll just share this with everybody now. It's very good. I, from now on, I'm signing every tweet from the Verge accounts as this is Patel.

55:41It's very good. It is good. But wait, Sean, if I understand the news correctly, basically what they announced is that whatever is coming after the Switch will be able to play Switch games, which is a big and somewhat unusual deal for Nintendo. Do I basically have that right? Let's talk about the impact of this for a moment. So this could be one of two things. Let's go optimistic first. The Nintendo Switch, the original 2017 Nintendo Switch, launched with like 12 games, all of which were basically like Zelda and everything else. We had a headline on the verge the nintendo switch launch games lineup is disappointing and needlessly confusing that is where the switch began before it became the juggernaut that it is today which has one of the biggest libraries of any console ever released it is amazing and so that switch 2 having that lineup on day one would be phenomenal the thing is we don't know if this means it will have a cartridge slot or not.

56:43So if it doesn't take the Switch cartridges, then you're going to have to own these games digitally or buy them again or whatever you have to do there. And now we're back in the PS5 Pro. Why don't they think we like physical media space? I don't know which it is. They didn't say. I mean, I buy the games digitally because I'm lazy. right like Astro Bot is available I'm just gonna download it I've started doing that like that see see at Luigi's Mansion I got Echoes of Wisdom digitally but I have so many cartridges the Bluey game is on the Switch at our house because no one was letting me drive to the store I was like here and now we're doing this right so I I think more regular consumers have these like hybrid libraries and I think it's important from them and say, like, you can just keep using this library.

57:36Because once it's digital, it's just there, right? I mean, there's a million, and don't get me wrong, there's a million other problems with this, including preservation and emulation, which we will talk about in a second. But I think from just a pure convenience or your library will be here with your new switch, I think it's starting to become an expectation, just like apps and iPhone are expectation. Like, I bought all this stuff. I'm going to get the new device. It's just going to be here. I want that so much. And I want it to be portable and preservable. And it's nice. You know, it's nice when you fire up your PS5 Pro and you're like, all these PS5 games are there and all your PS4 games that you bought in your digital library.

58:11But it's what's extra nice when you can take all those discs that are on your shelf and also stick them in there. Why not both? Hopefully both. I mean, it's Nintendo. They're going to do some weird stuff. That's, you know, it's true no matter what here. Historically speaking, Nintendo has kind of gone on both sides of this, right? Like if I remember right, the Wii U played most, or at least some Wii games, but then like you're talking about complete break to the Switch. Like, yeah, just, and like, you know, you go all the way back and like the N64 was very much its own thing. It's not like those giant ass cartridges went on to the next thing.

58:47So I guess it would be hard to put odds against what it seems like Nintendo might actually do here. Yeah, like the portables. It's been pretty good in the portable space. It's like if you bought a Nintendo DS Lite, you could play DS games on that. You could also play Game Boy Advance games on that, which was basically an entirely different system. You couldn't put original Game Boy cartridges in there or Game Boy Color cartridges. But you go back a generation before that, the Game Boy Advance, you could put Game Boy Advance games, Game Boy Color games, original Game Boy games into that. They would all work.

59:19You go up to the DSi, all of a sudden you've got just DSi and DS. You don't get Game Boy anymore. so they kind of like they try to do like one to two generations usually of backwards combat and then occasionally like you said with this n64 they're just we're done but even like the gamecube you could stick a gameboy player onto the bottom of that and stick your cartridges in so maybe there'll be some offbeat solution that's the most nintendo possible outcome here where they're like we here's the thing but we'll also sell you this weird arm attachment that lets you play all of your other games it's made of did you ever have the nintendo robot for the nest this just made me think about the original Nintendo robot.

59:54No. They made a robot and it pushed the buttons on the... Really? You should go look it up. Yeah, it was ridiculous. I wanted one so bad and I finally got one and it was so disappointing. Like so deeply disappointing. Shocked. We are talking about emulation. We're talking about all this stuff. Sean, we should end by talking about your story. You wrote about Nintendo going after YouTubers who are streaming games, talking about game preservation. There's a lot of action in this front lately, and that's all right next to, I don't know, companies like Amardek, which are just selling hardware emulators free and clear on Amazon with apparently no repercussions.

1:00:34Talk about this story, and then let's talk about that bigger picture. What is going on with Nintendo on YouTube right now? Yeah, so Nintendo, and I've written one story, but there's more in the works, I think. Nintendo seems to have decided it wants to make an example out of one particular YouTuber, and it may be targeting others as well, though we think there may be a copyright troll on the loose. And that's what a future story is going to get into. But this one guy is named Russ Crandall. He runs a YouTube channel called Retro Game Core. And the weird thing about Nintendo targeting him is that he is known for advocating against piracy.

1:01:16He shows up all kinds of genuine Switch cartridges in his videos to show you that he's not just like ripping games off the internet, although he maybe does some of that on the side, but he wants you to know that you can do this somewhat legally, or so he says, by making your own backups of your games, putting them onto flashcards if you want to, and then taking around your entire library of Switch games with you that you have on genuine cartridges. This is possible now through a particular device that Nintendo really does not want the world to know about and so in a uh in a new example of the streisand effect uh they decided to target this guy um he is not somebody you would necessarily want to target if you're nintendo though because he's a uh very interesting and likable person i would say who has who has a audience uh that understands him as an educator who like teaches them how to use things rather than boasting about how he pirates stuff.

1:02:17He also happens to be a New York Times bestselling cookbook author, a 22 veteran of the U.S. Navy, and all kinds of other things that you can read about in my whole story. Yeah, it's a good story, but it does seem like if you're Nintendo and you want to go like full scorched earth on this kind of thing on the internet, like you can use copyright to pick that fight, But that doesn't seem like what Nintendo is doing here. It has instead picked a small series of very specific fights with a couple of emulators. And now with this one YouTuber, it's not like the stories we've heard over the years about, you know, companies that just go and issue mass copyright strikes for everyone using footage of any of their stuff, which is a thing that has happened a few times on YouTube over the years.

1:03:08that's not what nintendo is doing here and it and i it's hard for me to figure out what it is doing i want to say that the common theme here is nintendo is just ridiculously less tolerant of people cutting into its current gen console profits you want to talk about old games you want to talk about you know you want you want to play show off emulators with game boy games or snes games or N64 games, you want to build emulators for those things, Nintendo's generally going to leave you alone. But once it started, once we started seeing not only Nintendo Switch emulators and Nintendo Switch games all over YouTube playing on Nintendo Switch emulators, but the very latest games, the Zelda that's going to come out this week or just has come out this week, here it is running in, you know, at a high resolution on a PC.

1:04:01Look how much better it looks than it looks on the actual Switch hardware. Maybe you should be playing it here on a PC instead, or maybe you should take your whole library of Switch games and play them on a Steam Deck, which is not only looks better than it does on the Switch, but is portable, like a Nintendo Switch. Is the Steam Deck better than a Nintendo Switch? Wouldn't want people to walk away with that idea in their heads. this is where nintendo started stepping in and so we saw a while back um before before before it fought against yuzu and ryojinx the two big switch emulators before it did that there was a while i want to say maybe about a year ago uh where a bunch of folks showing off switch games on steam deck started getting little notices from nintendo that maybe they might not want to do that and some of the uh some of the folks um who were you know um the the youtubers who were more uh wanted to stay on nintendo's good graces just went ahead and voluntarily started making some of those disappear but they told other creators in their sphere hmm nintendo did this thing to me and word got around that this was happening i think linus tech tips did a video at one point where they were like we're going to call out this trend and here we're gonna we're gonna blur out all of our footage of switch games we're gonna be like hey look you know look what we can do nintendo you're not going to go after us right and i don't think they did but after that kept on a pace on youtube we kept seeing more and more here's how you emulate your switch games on steam deck nintendo went after the emulators the software that's making all of that possible and yuzu was the biggest emulator um and there were whispers in the community that they were testing their emulator on games that had leaked out early games that were not even out yet a new a new zelda um tears of the kingdom allegedly they had it and were making sure the game was ready for it before it launched at retail and so that regardless of whether you know nintendo could pin them that on them or not seems to have inflamed nintendo's fury for to to go after them legally and so um yuzu uh went down rewjinx went down there are lots of forks of these emulators floating about the internet but they are more in the in the in the in the dark regions of the space now they've slunk back into the shadows for the most part they're trying to keep a way lower profile yeah it's funny one of you know a verge trope a thing the verge believes uh is that copyright law is the only law on the internet, especially when you have a platform, because it's the one law everyone agrees can restrict speech.

1:06:46And so you've got a process on YouTube where a big company can, can just say like, remove this speech and you can fight it. It sounds like from your story, uh, Crandall retro games is going to go fight it. Uh, but it's expensive and hard. Actually, I think, I think he's not, I don't think he's going to fight. He's not going to. you? Yeah, we started out in my story. I say that he's waffling. And as of my last communication with him, he was waffling. But I re I rewrote this draft a few different times. Originally, when I spoke to him, he said he was 70 percent, 5 percent likely to fight this. He talked to he talked to lawyers like, yeah, I've got a fair use case.

1:07:25I don't think he wanted to go to court over it, but he can at least submit the counter notice to the DMCA takedown, which lets YouTube off the hook and then, you know, puts the, what's the spotlight on him and then wait and see if Nintendo sends him a cease and desist or goes ahead with a lawsuit. He was in that place where he was like, maybe I'll try my life 75 % likely. I was talking to him later and he was like, well, maybe it's 50, 50. I mean, it's expensive and complicated. Yeah. Right. Right. And you got to be buttoned up. I mean, this is a thing we talk about with independent creators all the time.

1:08:01Go be successful. But then there's a whole universe of infrastructure that you don't have because you don't have like a media company. Like we have lawyers, like we get letters like this all day long. And I'm just like, cool, our lawyers will see you now. And then our lawyer is like, Howard, do you want to fight? I'm like, fight all the way. Because, you know, you get to say that sometimes. And that's fine, right? Like that's the infrastructure of having a big company around. and like having a reputation and like a lot of the lawyers on the other side are repeat players. So now everybody has relationships.

1:08:32Solo creators on platforms are just sort of at the mercy of whoever wants to go after them, including Nintendo. And then they have to make big, meaningful decisions about whether they want to like fight for emulation software being displayed on screen as fair use. Like, this is very confusing. Well, and this is what the emulators themselves have gone through too. The question of like, even if we think we're right and we would win at the end, can we literally afford the fight? And I think the bet a lot of companies make, not just Nintendo, but one of the bets it seems like Nintendo is making and has been right so far is that the emulators are going to decide they can't afford the fight.

1:09:09Right. I talked to a lot of emulator developers for a previous story about what happened to Yuzu and what was happening to Ryujinx. And every one of them told me, no, I would have to roll over if Nintendo came after me because there's no way in hell I'd have the resources to fight anything. Or, and honestly, litigation is exhausting, right? Like Nintendo's going to, fine, I'm going to fight. I'm going to spend the money. I'm going to hire the lawyers. Nintendo's going to come after you and say, give me every piece of email that has ever mentioned anyone involved in the development of this emulator.

1:09:45Show me all of your history, your DMs on GitHub. Like whatever it is. Like, I don't know if GitHub has DMs, but you understand, like, show me, like involve all of these other people because these are all almost all volunteer projects in one way or another with lots of different contributors. And it's like, Oh, this is going to be exhausting and not everyone's going to play ball. And it's all like, yeah, I feel for these communities when they come up against this stuff, but it's also just very true that the only mechanism we have in the United States to, to handle anything is copyright law and copyright law is like the bluntest instrument.

1:10:17And, you know, YouTube's approach to copyright strikes, like you get three and you're dead. Like that's it. Yeah, I think a lot of people need to know, like a lot of people don't know, Nintendo does not serve you with a copyright strike. The copyright strike is a YouTube platform feature where YouTube can make it easier on themselves so that they don't have to face down any lawsuits from Nintendo. They can say, hey, creators, we're going to make this three strikes and you're out rule so that you police yourselves. That way we don't need to get involved very often. We'll automate it as much as we can.

1:10:55Come to us if there's a problem, and maybe we'll reach out to Nintendo on your behalf, like they did in this case. YouTube did reach out to Nintendo, according to Russ Grandel, and to see if they would pull their strike willingly once they knew who Russ was and what Russ stood for. And Nintendo was like, no, we're not going to pull. That sounds about right. By the way, that entire system is called notice and takedown. It's in the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. and every platform has it. YouTube just has one expression of it and YouTubers running into that stuff, when they make the video about it, is like when they get their wings.

1:11:33More people are familiar with copyright law because of YouTubers complaining about copyright law than know the speed limits in their own towns. And this is all just a thing. Anyhow, it's fascinating. Sean, you're going to be writing about this more because it feels like emulation is a real crossroads. It really is. while I cannot personally write about the Apple aspect of it, it is fascinating, utterly fascinating, that this was the year that Apple said, hey, you can go ahead and put retro game emulators on our iPhone platform. We're going to explicitly carve out something in our App Store rules for that.

1:12:11Despite the fact that as far as most of the lawyers are telling me are concerned, And putting games, your own retro games, onto an iPhone is probably not technically legal. Well, that sounds like a long story that we should publish and we should come back and talk about. Let's take a break. We'll come back with a lightning round. We'll be right back. Let's be honest. Are you happy with your job? Like, really happy? The unfortunate fact is that a huge number of people can't say yes to that. Far too many of us are stuck in a job we've outgrown. or one we never wanted in the first place. But still, we stick it out, and we give reasons like, what if the next move is even worse?

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1:14:41All right, we're back. The lightning round. Unsponsored, although there might be some news on this front. You can sponsor David's mobile repair van. David will come to your house and take any iMac you have and turn it into a monitor. David's iMac mobile is still very much up for sponsorship. Have you seen the little board? I think Wes Davis heard about it. There's a little board that lets you turn the Sunflower iMac G4 into a monitor. and he did it to his 20-year-old iMac G4 and I immediately went on eBay and looked at 20-inch iMac G4s which are 20 years old and they are so expensive. Really? They're crazy expensive.

1:15:19I mean, they're just beautiful furniture. They're one of the only gadgets that old that I would happily just put up on that mantle behind me. Yeah. We'll link Wes's write-up and he was like, why did I do this? Because it looks awesome. Yeah. It's good enough. It's just an honor. It's great. All right. Lightning round. We promised some hot domain name chat. David, what you got? I'm so excited about this. So the other day, this week, Sam Altman just tweets chat.com. You click on it, it goes to chat GPT. It turns out there is a whole fascinating story behind the fact that if you go to chat.com, it leads you to chat GPT.

1:16:02And the story in a nutshell is Dharmesh Shah, who is the CTO of HubSpot, bought chat.com for$15 million, $15.5 million, like last year. And then two months later sold it for, we don't know exactly how much, but he said a profit and enough of a profit that he was able to give$250 ,000 of profit away. Do with that what you will. My guess is it was substantially higher than$15.5 million. I cannot prove that, But based on what I know about domains and the fact that chat.com would be very highly in demand to a large number of people, I suspect that was very expensive and that he made a tidy sum of money in two months on his 15 and a half million dollar domain name purchase.

1:16:50Anyway, it is now the domain name that leads you to chat GPT. just to clear up a thing that has gotten very confusing on the internet chat gpt not rebranded still called chat gpt still a thing a lot of people know i still hate the fact that gpt is like a term that has entered the public lexicon that we all just say now hate that but it's still called chat gpt but chat.com now goes there and i think that is going to be the kind of product domain for that thing going forward, which is fascinating in a bunch of different directions. It says something about how important websites still are in the world.

1:17:30It says something about how important.com domains still are in the world. It says something about why OpenAI raised six and a half billion dollars because domain names are expensive. There's just a lot going on in this one purchase. But this all happened about a year ago and it just rolled out this week and I think is now going to be one of the bigger domain names for a pretty long time. It does seem like Dharmesh also got shares of OpenAI, which is fascinating because it's not a public company, but it's about to become a for-profit public company. There's a lot here. You should read it. He put up a tweet being like, it's everything, here's the whole thing.

1:18:07And there's a long prompt for ChatGPT that helps you. He's like, it's a prompt that GPT-01 does a really good job of reasoning through. and that ends with, how much do you think he sold the chat.com domain for? What percent of that was in shares of OpenAI? Provide an approximate range and share reasoning. But he doesn't show the answer. So it can just hallucinate whatever you want. It's very good. So, I mean, that's wild all the way around. It's not like chat GBT, the most successful consumer product in a long time, was struggling for brand recognition. It is also now baked into iPhones or will soon be baked into iPhones.

1:18:47So the idea that they need a domain name is just like pure vanity, it feels like. Like they have the distribution that they want. But it does seem like as they go towards being this new kind of for-profit company, that they're just going to become more consumer-friendly in a variety of different ways. Yeah. I mean, I've been saying this on the show for a while now, but I think the thing that is happening right now is that OpenAI is being lapped as a product organization by a lot of other folks. Like Apple is building better products around ChatGPC right now than OpenAI. Let's not be. No. You sound drunk.

1:19:22That's what I'm, that is the lowest bar in history. And it's still the case. Like this is, this is where we are. Give me one example of Apple building a better product around ChatGPC than OpenAI. It's easier to get to chat GPT on an iPhone. But that's just a pure distribution advantage. But that's my point, right? The better example is Google is doing much more interesting stuff on top of Gemini. If you had said that first, I wouldn't have accused you of drinking on the job, David. This is why you got to lead with the hot take and then pull it back. This is what we do here. No, but I think the actual real example is Anthropic and Claude.

1:19:57Anthropic is just building vastly better consumer products on top of Claude. more quickly than OpenAI, even though OpenAI typically has been first to a lot of the underlying technology. But you're starting to see this shift where, like you said, chat.com becomes just a more understandable way to get to this thing than anything else. Like one thing somebody said to me a long time ago was that just being able to put a simple domain name on a billboard goes a really long way. Like just to be able to just, like you can imagine the billboard, right? That it's just like a pure white billboard and it just says chat.com on it.

1:20:32Like that's powerful in a way that like openai.com slash chat GPT is not powerful. And there's just a bunch of little things like that. They've launched this new set of models that are starting with 01 instead of GPT-40 Turbo. Like they're getting slowly better at putting this in front of people in a way that is slightly understandable. That only goes as far as your products go. I will say chat.com 100 % sounds like a 1990s dating site. that's me and that's just what that's I mean it does great and I met my wife there to be honest rename Chad GPT to plenty of fish and we'll be good to go shout out to Casey for the wife joke wait do you want to know by the way I plugged all of this into Chad GPT all the stuff Darmesh said to do I just did yeah and the it gives a lot of thoughts and then the conclusion it draws is Darmesh likely sold chat.com for around 20 to 30 million with 25 to 50 % of that amount in OpenAI shares.

1:21:32Ordinarily, that's based on nothing and I wouldn't believe it, but that's what he told us to do. So I think, yeah, you can take that as something like the truth. And if that's the case, and he did it a while ago, which it sounds like he did, that man has made a ton of money on this domain name. Because what happened to the valuation of OpenAI with this new fundraising? This was a damn good domain name purchase. If indeed it is what ChatGPT says it is. It's so much better than Tobacco.com, which I simply let expire. You're missing out. Do you think they're going to rename ChatGPT to just chat? No, I don't.

1:22:10I think ChatGPT is actually against all odds a very good brand. People know what it is. I think it actually explains itself better than like Claude. And so there is a, it is sort of Kleenex-y in the AI world right now, where people know it better than any other AI product. And if you can make Google work for 25 years, you can probably make ChatGPT work for 25 years. Is that a problem for them? I thought the famous thing about Kleenex was that Kleenex did not like that Kleenex was the generic order. Oh, you were saying Kleenex. I thought you were saying clean.exe, and I was like, I don't know what David's talking about.

1:22:50Kleenex, that's what you've been saying. Oh, boy. we all need to go outside has it been a weird few days is my brain mush yeah i had to earn unearth stories from 2016 to 2020 like oh i used to know a lot about this yes clean.exe yeah it's a classic it was a defrag program that everyone loved yeah no but sean to your point i think i think there is something to that i think it is that's like real sort of champagne problems stuff when you become so big that other people start associating knockoff products with your product. Like everybody wants to have that problem, even though that problem is kind of annoying.

1:23:27And I think, and even though that, but just to be clear, that problem is also fake. Uh, Kleenex owns its trademark. They have not lost the rights to the word Kleenex, but the idea that you go see any tissue in the store by any brand and you're like, Oh, it's Kleenex is like, you can see how that's a problem for Kleenex, but I don't think Kleenex is upset about it. I think they're doing fine. There's a, well, a fine. There's a, they made like a musical about it or one of these companies with one of these names like this made an entire musical about how you're not supposed to say you're supposed to say something else which is why they all say facial tissue that there's a this is a horrible tangent and now it's time to talk about the matter smart home standard which is my lightning round matter 1.4 is out we're two years into this i will tell you that i needed a smart plug for our halloween decorations and i bought uh just the regular Miros HomeKit ones and the Miros Matter ones.

1:24:17And the Matter ones were so finicky that I just sent them back. And I was like, well, this still isn't ready. And that's kind of where I'm at with Matter. But Matter 1.4 is out. Jen Toohey wrote about it. She's been tracking every ounce of changes to the standard. As always with Matter updates, there's more devices. So there's heat pumps and solar panels. They did robot vacuums. This stuff is all happening. They still don't have security cameras. The reason I want to talk about it is, one, the vocabulary is amazing. and I need to explain the vocabulary to explain the thing that is good about Matter 1.4.

1:24:49So in the Matter standard, every smart home ecosystem is called a fabric. Are you following me on this? So Apple HomeKit is a fabric. Amazon Alexa is a fabric. I don't know why they picked fabric. I'm guessing it's because the radio standard is called thread. Yeah. But they don't all run on thread. It's very confusing. They're all called fabrics. And the big thing, the big, big thing in Matter 1.4 is multi-admin across fabrics, which is yet more vocabulary. But all it really means is that when you set up all of your devices in Apple Home and then connect to Alexa, they all just go over there. So you don't have to set them up in two places at once, which is a thing you would have thought they would have figured out from the beginning of Matter.

1:25:39Yeah, I just assumed that was how it already worked. None of this worked at the beginning of matter. Like the border routers between Wi-Fi and thread weren't incompatible. The auth was incompatible. Like none of this stuff worked. So they've had the standard on the market, which is, you know, Apple kind of like really pushed this. They've worked with Amazon. They've worked with Google to get the standard out. It's built on HomeKit in a lot of ways. And the idea is all of these smart home devices should be compatible with everyone's ecosystems. And for about two years, what that has meant is there's more devices, but they're really only compatible with the one you choose to make them compatible with.

1:26:17Right. If you have Google Home stuff and Alexa stuff in your house and HomeKit, you kind of like pair your smart plug to one. So you have more choice because the matter accessory makers can just make one thing, but you don't actually get more compatibility. What you just described is directly against the whole point of matter. Right. So they have finally done the thing. They did matter now. They did the thing. They're calling it enhanced multi-admin. It lets the thread border routers. Thread is the low power wireless signal that all this stuff is supposed to run on. So the border routers that bridge from thread to Wi-Fi are now compatible.

1:26:55So you can have an Eero and a HomePod mini and all this other stuff. And they will bridge to thread and make one big thread network instead of multiple thread networks, which is what they've been doing up until now. they are doing a better job of managing wifi routers that have thread routers in them all this stuff needed to exist but the main thing is bridging multi-admin across fabrics which is just platforms and that means you can set it all up in HomeKit and then you can buy an Amazon Alexa and be like I already have a matter I already have all this stuff and it will just figure it out now is any of that going to work will it import your rooms and your device names and all the stuff that you need to like really make that work uh unclear uh jen is a very good reporter she asked the matter people this and they uh did not say i really really like jen's whole quote in this story i i'm hearing it in her british accent right now matter will make everyone play together nicely this time promise yeah bluetooth is gonna work great next year that's that's where matter is it's in the zone but i forgot to mention by the way the reason i've been pointing out it's called fabric this entire time is this is called fabric sink which is nothing this thing should be called like needle or sewing machine like there's a bunch of there's so many things we could do here but if you're going to commit to this stupid bit you have to commit to it correctly and the quote from the uh call it like color match like listen i have ideas and the quote from the connectivity standards alliance spokesperson here is if a new device shows up on fabric a it can automatically be added to Fabric B.

1:28:31However, it is unclear whether the correct name and location of the new device will automatically go to the other platforms if you have to enter this manually. That will be up to the platforms to implement. So another year. Matter 1.5, everybody. Bluetooth is going to be great next year. But this is the thing. We're so close. It's all coming into focus now, right? You buy a smart home device, you just add it to one system, suddenly you can just talk to your Google Home and access that device. This is the thing everybody wants. so close we are in that funny moment now where it's like if we could just pretend that every smart home gadget that had ever been made didn't exist and start from scratch we could build the good things so quickly but because we did the good things so late everybody is having to back their way into making this make any sense in a way that is just going to make it worse for everybody for a long time like every every story about matter getting better makes me want to buy smart home products less because I'm like, this all sounds great.

1:29:28And I have absolutely no belief that any of it is coming to anything that I own ever. Look, David, you just keep looking at your garbage TV and I'll let you know when it's time. All right. By the way, I want to say thank you to the dozens, if not two dozens of people who wrote to me and Joanna about smart garage door openers and the people in particular who mentioned the Rat Go product, which stands for rage against the garage door opener. Amazing. Incredible hobbyist project name. It is a hack that gets past the Chamberlain Security Plus protocol, which it is true that Joanna stood on a ladder and installed one of the Miros things, and she has a Chamberlain thing, which DRMs the button.

1:30:06The button on a Chamberlain. This is the power of a monopoly. The button is DRM'd with the security protocol. It's awful. It's all ridiculous, but there's a hack called the Racco, Rage Against the Garage Door Opener, and now she's ordering one of those, I believe. Love that. This is our community. You're our family, all right? No matter what happens out there, we've got your back. And Joanna is literally texting me photos of herself on a ladder. It's very good. All right, Sean, what do you got? I also have a mayor house in my garage that I need to install and hopefully get around the Chamberlain TRM button.

1:30:37But I've also got a story about NVIDIA, a company that made$16.6 billion in pure profit last quarter, has decided to cap the game streaming hours on GeForce Now, its cloud gaming service, for its whales. I don't know why they're doing this. They are doing it in the best way possible. Believe me. I will tell you all about it. So first off, it's a 100-hour cap per month. So you have to play more than like three hours every single day of cloud gaming, which is a lot of cloud gaming to get to this cap. And they're not going to instill that monthly cap until January 1st, 2025 for new users. And I think it'll be, yeah, 2026 for existing users before they lose their playtime.

1:31:27So if you get in now, or if you've already been a user, you don't have this monthly cap until an entire year from January. In addition to that, while some people were worried that they would lose their founders' memberships, that they would suddenly have a cap on their founders' memberships that were promised to have a certain quality of streaming for the rest of their lives as long as they maintain their monthly dues. And videos come out very recently in an FAQ and they says, founders, as long as you keep paying, you won't have a cap either. So founders are taken care of, existing customers are taken care of for a year, new customers can get taken care of for a year if they start early.

1:32:04They've gotten out ahead of this, they're telling everybody, It's clear. Their messaging is clear. They're doing a good job compared to most of the companies that we needle for this. But I don't understand why they're doing it at all, because the only people they're going to hit with this are the whales, who I would assume are their most vocal and passionate supporters of this service. Once you got a whale, man, you just keep going after him. Yeah, just keep raising prices. That's what it goes. You've never owned a casino? know but they're not they're not charging more like why don't they why don't they want to say hey you know well well you can pay more for the unlimited but they don't have that as an option they're just like no we're capping it for everybody so i actually in a funny way i think doing what you just described ends up being a worse pr move to basically say oh you want the unlimited thing now you have to pay more for it you're going to piss people off more that way than doing what nvidia did i still i have two thoughts on this one uh maybe nvidia should make better chips that do all this stuff more efficiently this sounds like an nvidia problem not an anybody else problem uh you got a bunch of money maybe you should make better chips nvidia that's just thought thing number two uh and this was everywhere in the comments on this story and it was my reaction too is just like oh god another really great reason to not bet on cloud gaming is is like everywhere you turn it feels like something about this deal is not living up to its potential.

1:33:31And it's, I mean, it goes back to the same stuff we're talking about with even just downloading digital games. Like there, there is this sense that all of this could be ripped away from me at any time. And none of these companies are doing anything to make that not feel like the case. And even this, I agree with you that this is a relatively small thing and it will not hit that many people, but it's just another one of those things that's like, maybe don't bet too much on this being a good thing for you forever. I wrote a piece three years ago that the only way cloud gaming is going to succeed is if it removes all of this friction.

1:34:05And it theoretically could. Like once upon a time, you could just press a button on a web browser and you'd be playing a game instantly in your web browser. No problem. On a Chromebook. Still a thing you can do. Assassin's Creed. Yeah. But I wrote, I just laid out a list of bullet points. These are all the things that go through people's minds before they sign up for cloud gaming. What if my connection isn't good enough? What if my home networking gear isn't good enough? What if I live too far away from the servers? Will it actually have the games I want to play? Will there be enough of them to justify the fee?

1:34:33Will developers bother to port new games over? Will they run as well as if I just bought a console or PC? Will I need a special controller or dongle? Will I go over my data cap? Will I be able to play with my friends who are on different platforms? Will I lose access to my games if they lose a distribution deal or shut down the servers? Will I have to wait in line to play the games? Can I get my save games? What about the outages? Are they hiding how well these games will run? And what if the company decides it no longer wants to be a game company, which has happened to several of these platforms now?

1:35:01There's just so much uncertainty going in. And just one more piece here from NVIDIA. You've sold me. I'm buying a$700 PS5 Pro. I'm sitting two feet away from it. Yeah, every time we talk about this stuff, I'm like, I'm all in on Blu-rays again. I'm all in on game cartridges, and I'm buying a console. It's the only way. Turn off all the internet and just let me play games offline. It's going to be fine. Yeah, homesteading, but for video games. I'm going to grow them myself outside. It's too bad, though, because it works so well, and those people that NVIDIA are capping know it. Yeah. Is GeForce Now a success?

1:35:37I mean, you mentioned how much money they're making, but they're making money selling H100s to Meta. Is GeForce Now a success for them? We don't know. I'm guessing it's got to be a cost for them, you know, because they have massive hardware investment and infrastructure investment to stand this thing up. Theoretically, they could say, oh yeah, we've got a data center that can do this AI thing or it could also do that GeForce Now thing. Maybe they're starting to build it that way. But last time I looked, there were special cloud gaming specific data centers for this thing laid out in a particular way with particular chips.

1:36:15It also kind of makes you wonder if they're capping it at 100 hours a month, what are the whales playing? Like the top 1 % of GeForce Now users, like how many hours a month must they be playing for NVIDIA to decide that it has to have this hard cap? It's gotta be a lot. Like if you have a bunch of people who are at like 102 hours, you're not introducing this cap. They're like, they found somebody who is just like, has the thing on 19 hours a day, 31 days a month. And they're like, we have to make this stop. I wonder if people are just like leaving it on to, I don't know. Maybe they've figured out some workaround to mine Bitcoin through this.

1:36:53I'm not sure. That sounds right. I mean, that's the sort of thing I would use GeForce now to do. Yeah. If I knew how to do any of that. And I think we're all worried about NVIDIA's ongoing survival as a company. So I hope this works out for them. Yeah. Data caps are back, baby. You wait. They're coming. This FCC, they're going to do it. All right. We got to wrap up. We're way, way over. Sean, thank you so much for coming on. There's just a lot on the site this week that isn't politics. Go read it. We had a good week on verge.com. And we're back next week with even more. That's it. That's the show.

1:37:28Back and roll.

1:37:33And that's it for The Verge Cast this week. Hey, we'd love to hear from you. Give us a call at 866-VERGE-11. The Verge Cast is a production of The Verge and Vox Media Podcast Network. Our show is produced by Liam James, Will Poore, and Eric Gomez. And that's it. We'll see you next week.

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