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Get the CFO's Guide to AI and Machine Learning at netsuite.com slash vox netsuite.com slash vox From the Vox Media Podcast Network, this is Channels with Peter Kafka. That is me. I'm also the chief correspondent at Business Insider. Today, we're talking about video games.
Yes, video games, the thing that everyone knows is a huge part of the tech and media business, but few people cover very seriously. I pay attention to this stuff, and I definitely pay attention to what Matthew Ball says about this stuff. And what Matthew...
he's an investor and an analyst, also my friend, has been saying for some time may surprise you, which is that the video game business, which was supposed to keep growing and growing and growing, has stopped growing. And not just for a year, but for several years. So what's going on, and what does that mean for video games, and what does that mean for the media business and the tech business? I asked all of those questions to Matthew Ball myself. Let's go listen now.
Matthew Ball, I was going to say welcome back to Recode Media, but of course this is not Recode Media, this is Channels. Welcome to the first ever Channels recording with me, Peter Kafka. Excited to be here. You and I are friends. You and I also talk about gaming and many other things. You've written about gaming several times. I wrote about one of your pieces about gaming last year, basically pointing out that the games industry...
was not growing the way people expected. In fact, it seemed to be shrinking. You put out, that was like a 16,000 word essay that I summarized. Then you put out a 200 plus slide slideshow recently saying mostly the same thing, but with more emphasis. And I wanted to chat with you about that because my big picture takeaway is that I'm confused why video games are not growing in the way that everyone expects them to be. So you will explain why that is.
You're right. I covered this for the first time one year ago, and that was after two years of stagnation. It was at the time already shocking. This is an industry that grew 10% a year for more than a decade. Everyone assumed. There would be more money, more players, more player hours, year after year after year, as it had been for
Honestly, 70 years. And this made sense if you either didn't know anything about gaming and just sort of heard that it was growing. It sort of vaguely made sense to you. And especially if you gamed yourself or if you were in any kind of digital media, you understood that gaming was growing because...
or actually any kind of media, because it was competing for your customers' time, attention, and money. You'd say, oh, they're not going to the movies, they're playing Fortnite or whatever. So you expected this to keep going and going. That's right. And it was common to hear two different points in the entertainment industry if you weren't in gaming. Number one was that gaming was going to eat your lunch. And number two was if your core business was stagnating, the solution.
was either launching a gaming division or buying and merging with one. We heard this in Hollywood. It's what's the future of Disney they have to acquire. What should NBCUniversal do? Yes, launch Peacock or streaming service, but most importantly, get into gaming.
Reed Hastings from Netflix would always say there's different threats to his business. One he kept coming back to over and over was gaming, that people who were watching Netflix might one day spend less time watching Netflix because they were going to spend time playing other games.
And Netflix has now sort of made incremental moves into gaming. But this seemed pretty smart for a long time. Now it seems less smart because it seems like the game business is atrophying. What's going on? Well, so that's one of the reasons why I wanted to do this update piece and why it became... longer rather than shorter which is after one or two years especially after the pandemic it was kind of easy to explain
the stop or cessation, stagnation, even marginal decline in gaming as a post-pandemic pullback. Maybe we oversaturated. During the pandemic, we had the rise of TikTok and everything else. And so there was this assumption that maybe we're just... resettling.
which we saw in other industries right as well like e-commerce shot up during the pandemic and then slowed down and now looks like a normal growth curve video consumption sort of say lots of things that you could do at home on the internet accelerated quite quickly during the pandemic and then once
we could leave the house and go back to our normal-ish lives, those growth curves started to look more normal. But gaming didn't have a growth curve. It started going down. That's right. And in fact, some of the... fundamental signals are actually much worse. And the United States has one such example. There are actually fewer people playing video games every week than in 2019.
And so that's one of those updates where you actually start to understand, no, this isn't about a rebalance after the pandemic. This isn't just the response to three accelerated years of growth. Actually, we are smaller in a participation rate than we were. Four years ago, five years ago now. So again, I just want to underline this. There are fewer people, less people, I'm not good at grammar, playing games today than in 2019. In the United States, yes. In the United States.
Now, this is also true of people going to see the movies, right? But that makes sense. You'd make sense that fewer, less people are going to theaters than they were in 2019 because the way we consume entertainment has fundamentally changed. We're not going back.
to sort of where we were. But again, games are delivered digitally. They're supposed to be something that appeals to people of all different ages. In theory, there should be more kids every year playing games for the first time, becoming gamers. Older folks who don't think of themselves as gamers. are picking up phones and playing Candy Crush, etc. It really is counterintuitive. How do you understand the decline?
Well, so I'll tell you the statistic that was most shocking to me, which was taking a look at the number of quarterly mobile downloads of a video game. And most people, again, as I was mentioning, assume that this was a post-pandemic pullback where you would say, OK, it makes sense in 2024 or 2023. There are fewer downloads in the height of the pandemic in 2020 or the Omicron wave in 21.
They're actually at a decade low. I'll repeat that. There are fewer mobile games being downloaded in the United States in 2024 than there were in 2014. In 2014... 55% of Americans had a smartphone. It's now 90%. The games that those devices can play are way more diverse, way more sophisticated, and to your earlier point, a lot more culturally relevant than they were in 2014.
The explanations as to why are manifold, but I will say that the audience's first guess does seem to be the most important one, and that's TikTok. In 2021... Mobile game downloads, mobile game time, mobile game player participation rates, mobile game spend peaked in the United States. Since that time, the American...
adult population has increased its daily consumption of TikTok by 35 million hours. You might come away with that and saying, okay, that makes sense. It's eaten time from everything. Streaming's getting eaten. Going to the movies, it's getting eaten. Social media time is getting eaten. In truth, if you add up social video time on Facebook, on Instagram Reels, on TikTok, on YouTube Shorts,
The average American over 18 has increased their daily consumption of short form social video by 32 minutes a day. That's 100 million hours. And so whether you're talking about someone playing Fortnite during lunch break or playing Candy Crush when they're bored on the tube, that's the first and it's seemingly the greatest hit. So we can chalk this mostly up to...
Either one app or a category of sort of social video, short-term video, addictive video. It could be that simple. It's time you're spending flipping through Reels or TikTok is time you're not spending on anything else. That would be an... easy and comforting answer, but the truth is a lot more complicated. As has been covered, Apple's privacy changes in early 2021, so-called app tracking and transparency, coincident with what they call the IDFA.
deprecation, which is when they made it harder for independent networks of advertisers and apps to target the individual user, that had a pretty firm impact too. Why? Because it made it harder for every mobile gaming company to find new users. It made it more costly to find that users. And that meant that revenues went down, that advertising efficacy went down, and that also caused more players.
to see fewer ads generally and download fewer games which meant they played less which means again they saw fewer ads which means again they found fewer games and it cascaded from there But when you get into explanations like that, I pause and go, all right, I understand that this would be a problem, you know, when you're talking about the way that Apple sort of blew up mobile advertising and thus mobile gaming.
That makes sense that it affects people who are trying to sell new games, people trying to sell ads on those games, etc. But if you're someone who like playing Candy Crush or whatever it is on your phone as a time waster...
That doesn't affect you. You've already downloaded those games. You're already playing them. If you wanted to find a new game, you could find one. Just because Coke or Pepsi are spending less money on advertising, or if they were to do that, wouldn't decrease your consumption of soda, presumably. what am i missing there well i think there's two things you're missing number one is how consequential all of these marginal hits have been which is if you say that
15 minutes of every day has gone to one alternative medium. If you're saying that 10% of revenue growth has gone away, you're saying that in general, people are playing less even. If they play as many games as before, these have just summed up to something really consequential. And what has been really tough for the industry overall is they are used to the preceding decade where. Everything was combining in the other direction.
More of your friends were playing mobile games, your devices could play more mobile games. The medium overall seemed to be advancing in a way that few had experienced before. We had new genres coming out all the time, the Battle Royale most famously. midway in the last decade. The most popular games in the world, like Roblox, weren't even on mobile phones until 2015. In 2016, you had Pokemon Go. And so what we've actually seen is two sides of this equation.
Since 2021, a bunch of new obstacles emerged. And since 2021, we've actually had very few tailwinds. We'll be right back with Matthew Ball, but first, a word from the sponsor. Adobe Express is the quick and easy create-anything app. It's my go-to for making my business stand out. From videos and social posts to flyers and logos. Search for Adobe Express to find out more and use it for free.
And we're back. One of your charts that's really striking shows that while gaming has been slowing or even declining, lots of other stuff has grown, not just video. The books business is up. Music. businesses up, all indicating that people are spending more time doing other things. Are we saying that gaming is losing out to books and music? It's really hard to compute. That does seem to be the case. There's very little to add beyond that.
the importance of this chart was again to rebut some of the criticisms that i received last year which was again The pandemic's over. We're outside more often. We have other uses of our wallet. And the answer is, yeah, that's certainly true. But for some reason, every other...
alternative media category is still growing, both in terms of spend and participation, and in many instances, time as well. It's just really gaming that has now gone through three consecutive years of decline or stagnation. And by the way, That's true in the United States. It's true in the United Kingdom. It's true in South Korea. There are very few exceptions.
So this essay and then now your more recent slides, they're very well read in the gaming industry. You've been telling me you've been talking to individual executives in the games business who want to know more. What's the tenor of those conversations? Is it. holy shit, how do I fix my business? Is it, holy shit, should I be in this business? Or is it, actually, Matt, your data's wrong. Our business is really growing and doing well.
There's always a separation between what's happening at the top line and what's happening for the individual market participants. Everyone would prefer to be fighting for share of growth. It is distressing to believe that the only way in which you're going to grow is taking a dollar out of your competitor's pocket. That's true. Let me put it in the following context. If this is an industry that grew 10% per annum for a decade, that meant that had that sustained...
2022 would have added 20 billion to the market. 2023 would have added another 20 billion, so 40 billion incrementally versus what it did. And then 2024 would have had another 20 billion. So you're talking about $60 billion in shortfall revenue just last year and in total $120 billion in lost revenue or close to that. No one's happy to find that out, but they are a little bit comforted.
by the reality that their hardships, their sales forecast being missed are much more structural than it is specific to their same product. But that still becomes challenging in and of itself. Are there people clinging to the idea that, well, our new iteration of whatever game is going to turn things around? There's a Grand Theft Auto 6 comes out next fall. It's going to be a huge event, you know.
There's a lot of folks who are hopeful that not only does that make money for Take-Two, which publishes Grand Theft Auto, but it'll reignite interest in the whole category. Does that sound right to you, plausible to you?
There are certainly people who believe that they're going to continue to outperform the market. I'll give you an example. Supercell, which is one of the most successful mobile gaming companies, announced that their revenue was up 77% last year. They make games like, what, Clash of Clans? Right. Yep.
And so they had an outstanding year. And so it's certainly true that in a market that isn't growing, it's harder for you to grow. But there are still many examples of companies that are seeing strong results, but everyone is still being hemmed in for the top line problem.
So that gets to this question you and I have been talking about for a little bit, which is, is the games industry... a bad industry should people not be investing in this industry even though there are individual companies like you just mentioned that are doing well is this a bad category for people to put money into well let's start with the venture
community video gaming became incredibly hot during the pandemic we had a year where worldwide revenues grew something like 20 and so as a result you saw venture capitalists private equity shops Retail investors, family offices started flooding capital into the market. At its peak, there was three and a half billion going into content development every quarter. There was a game made by literally a Stanford college kid that wasn't finished.
that became basically funded at a billion-dollar valuation at one point. that's right and often i don't know about this specific cap table but in many instances it was what you would call tourist investors they had no experience in the gaming industry they might not have even played games themselves but they knew the category was hot their kids played games
And so they flowed money into it. That has all essentially ended. At its peak, there was between two and a half and three and a half billion a quarter going into video gaming startups. That figure is now half a billion. And so to answer your question, is this a bad category? It is clear that when you had an all time record.
for companies being started, an all-time record for mergers and acquisitions in the category, an all-time record for budgetary growth that happened alongside zero revenue growth for three years in a row, that became painful. But the market is starting to heal, as tends to be the case. I just showed you that there was a roughly 80% reduction in startup funding. Many of the largest game makers globally have shut down studios. They have performed layoffs. They have canceled.
in some instances, as much as half of their pipeline. And so if this was a bad category for the last three years, it was because there was too much money being invested and too little growth. Now the reverse has happened. People have reduced their investment. and it has become less competitive. It doesn't solve the growth problem, but it is probably going to help the margins.
And what do you think? We talked at the beginning of this conversation about the idea that the media companies needed to get into gaming. This was, again, sort of an article of faith a couple of years ago and still seems intuitively like something if I'm running a big media conglomerate.
I'd really want to think hard about because I know that my customers, many of my younger customers at least, are playing games and they're competing directly with the products I've made. And wouldn't I want to participate in that in some way? But no one really has been very successful at it.
One, do you think media companies should be trying to figure out a video game strategy or do you think they should stick to doing what they know how to do? And well, let's start with that question. Well, I think we can start with a somewhat more interesting one, which is...
If all of the M&A that began in 2014 through to 2018... which was all under an expectation that you needed more scale to compete in a business that was getting worse right we all believe that cable was coming to an end and cable had some of the best margin profiles of all time and that streaming was the future and it was going to be less
less profitable and remunerative. There's basically no acquisition that any of the major media companies could have made at that time in the gaming space that wouldn't have been a better use of capital than the acquisitions that they made. probably produced several fold of value just by sitting on that asset. And most importantly, the most profitable and most valuable parts of their business today would have been gaming companies, Electronic Arts.
just had its largest ever stock decline, and it's still more valuable than nearly every major media company, save for Disney. And so that ship has sailed, certainly. And now when we ask this question of... should Hollywood buy a gaming company? The answer is probably the reverse. We are more likely to see an interactive company scoop up some of these assets than the reverse.
What would the value for a gaming company be in buying a slow growth to no growth media company? Well, this is where we get to the second and perhaps the most interesting aspect of your business is now when you ask that question. We're actually talking about two different companies that sit in a very similar position where the growth has stopped. The margins are winnowing. Five years ago, they said, how many new franchises can we have? And now they're saying.
geez, how many franchises do we have that are profitable? You're talking about movies or video games or both? Well, I'm talking about video games, but that looks remarkably similar to the Hollywood side. And so this is where... The bankers in particular get excited because they say we have two different sectors of the same industry media that have comparable problems.
And therefore, we are more interested not in which new customers we can get, but how we can get more from our existing customers. And so then you start to say, okay, if you're NBCUniversal... How many more Fast and Furious movies can you make? How many more Jurassic Park movies can you make? But might those work as gaming properties? Certainly. If you're a gaming company, you don't really make that much money by licensing your IP out to a motion picture.
But if you co-finance it, co-marketed it, if you also own the direct consumer streaming platform, it becomes a little bit more interesting. But again, we're talking about bullet points on a slide. The much bigger problem is who runs these consolidated groups? Is there much evidence that those who are the best at the gaming space are also great at running a movie studio? And the reverse. We'll be right back with Matthew Ball, but first, a word from a sponsor.
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Presented by Smartsheet. Hello. The Vox Media podcast stage at South by Southwest is open to all South by Southwest badge holders. We hope to see you at the Austin Convention Center. enter soon you can visit voxmedia.com slash s x s w to learn more that's voxmedia.com slash s x s w And we're back. I mentioned Netflix earlier. They are the winners in streaming. They are spending some money on gaming. I remain flummoxed by what they're trying to do.
I think part of it is because it's going to be a long-term play and they may themselves not be sure what they're doing. One thing you'll hear them sort of say is, well, one thing we can do is we can take our Netflix IP, Stranger Things, et cetera, and turn those into games.
That seems to be incredibly uncompelling to me because it seems to me like what you can do is license that IP to someone who's in the game business and then what you can benefit from having a Stranger Things game without having to build up a gaming division. am i seeing that the wrong way i would start from what we know to be problems in the mobile gaming category i mentioned a moment ago that in the united states there are fewer downloads of mobile games than a decade ago
There are two other really terrifying corroborating data points. Number one is there are fewer mobile games in the App Store than there were a decade ago. That's stunning. There were 1.5 billion worldwide smartphone owners in 2014. There's close to 5 billion now. How does it make any sense that there are fewer mobile games? I'll give you the third data point. There are fewer mobile games even being launched.
in 2024 than there were a decade ago. Think of how many mobile game developers there are. Think about how many people have mobile game development skills. And so if you said the audience for mobile games is at an all-time high, roughly, That the spend on mobile games is nearly at an all-time high. But people are trying fewer games than ever before. There are fewer games than ever before. And most people have stopped even trying to succeed. And then you said...
We are a platform with between 750 and a billion monthly users, which ranks among maybe four alternatives globally. And you said that we can use that. what the industry would call surface area, the app, your eyeballs opening that app, sometimes several times a day. Yes. Several times a day on multiple different devices. And you said, by the way,
We generated $5.5 billion in cash flow last year. We're going to do $8.5 billion this year. We might do as much as $12 billion in 2026. And the entire rest of the industry is starting to do layoffs.
and canceling titles, I can certainly understand where you would say, putting aside that this is an important category, overexposed to young people, you can say, we actually may be one of the few people who can grow in this avenue. We have a giant... super effective what should be a giant super effective marketing platform that we own and control we should be able to use that to distribute and monetize games
And my point is, if this were a market that looked top-line healthy, competition was becoming more vigorous, more numerous, that audiences were not struggling to find new games, that value proposition would actually be harder than it is today. And the clearest point of that would be how do most people get mobile games today? The App Store. Now, of course, the App Store is still a part and parcel in how Netflix distributes games, but it is simultaneously clear again.
fewer downloads, fewer games total, fewer new games launching, that the App Store as an actual discovery platform has been de facto dead for years. So I can understand why Facebook, or Netflix rather, would say, we can be that place.
Microsoft recently completed, I guess probably a year ago, completed its acquisition of Activision. $70 billion deal should have been a huge deal in the news. And most people didn't pay attention to it for the reasons we're discussing now. People don't pay attention to games generally. Do you think...
Satya Nadella does that deal today, if he could do it over again? I don't know. What I would say is a little bit different, certainly, is the fact that the Activision Blizzard deal was announced in January of 2022. That means it was probably negotiated throughout the fourth quarter of 2021, and this is of course before the AI boom began. I think it's very difficult to take a look at any investment case that predates generative AI.
and compare that to what would happen thereafter. So connect the dots. You're saying if you knew you were going to be spending tens of billions of dollars on AI and data centers and power and all the attendant things you need to make a living in AI. then that changes how you spend money on a gaming division. What I am saying is that the most important thing that Microsoft can do is it sits on a several hundred billion dollar investment pile is it's the game of capital allocation.
Without getting too wonkish, it's just a question of we have all the money in the world. It's just a question of what do we want to focus on. And I think a world in which AI was a hypothetical. right? People would talk about AGI being a this century kind of thing, not a potential three to four year race. It's very difficult to talk about what that would or wouldn't look like, especially because I'm no AI or AI infrastructure expert.
What I do think is important here is that when you take a look at Microsoft's strategy for the Xbox and its strategy for Activision Blizzard at large, it seems to be a response to the lack of growth. Microsoft has taken a lot of flack for a new ad campaign that says everything is an Xbox. And their point is...
There aren't that many people who buy consoles. It's a relatively niche business. They're also saying this is an industry that is not growing players or playtime. And their response is we need to make horizontal investments. That is to say. non-specific to our hardware, our operating system, which has really been how Satya ran the entire company, and find new technologies, potentially cloud gaming, new business models, such as Game Pass.
distribution system. New platforms, they've announced their plans to launch a rival app store on all mobile phones where regulators will permit it. This is the EU and soon to be the United States on Android. That strategy seems to be a direct response to the market's overall challenges in gaming. Before I let you go, I want to take a small pivot because it is gaming related to AR, VR, glasses, headsets, goggles.
A lot happened in the last year in that world. It's the world you cover closely as well. Apple unleashed the Apple Vision Pro a year ago. No one seems to commemorate the anniversary. Meta sold a million units of their Ray-Ban. They showed off this very cool Orion demo that sort of...
Supposed to be the glasses we all sort of imagine we want to wear one day that really do do sort of very cool AR stuff. But it actually looks and feels close to what glasses are like. Snap had a vision of that that they released. year as well you put out a chart saying you know we've been predicting the rise of ar and vr for years and years and years it never arrives
Do you think we're any closer to it really happening now? Or do you think this is still a future that could show up five to 10 years from now? This remains one of the most interesting questions, I think. Everyone going into AR and VR has long understood the enormity of the technical challenge.
And they have usually been pretty long range about their forecast. It was in 2014 where Mark Zuckerberg provided the first forecast for their AR, VR, and he talked about a decade. But I'll tell you what's wild about that. In 2014, he said within a decade, there will be billions of people with augmented reality glasses. That decade has passed and they haven't even shipped the first pair of glasses. This is literally what he was predicting.
like a month ago during his earnings call we're going to be in a world where billions of people are going to wear these things right but i'm saying he said this in 2014 yes i'm saying and we're saying the same thing which is this is something he keeps coming back to but the timing he keeps predicting it um without actually selling the units
Yes. And at the same time, anyone in this field or anyone who has had the luxury of using in-development prototypes, which you and I have done, the progress is obvious and it's very significant. The question remains, how close is that to something that hundreds of millions of people will ship? And you and I have talked about this, but Silicon Valley is incredibly wrapped up in this idea that...
Smart glasses are now upon us. They're the hot new platform. And if you go on Twitter or X, certainly everyone's convinced that everyone they know is wearing meta Ray-Bans. And I love my meta Ray-Bans. But it's pretty likely that Meta sold six times as many VR headsets last year as they did smart glasses. These are the Oculus goggles, right? The nerdier things.
the MetaQuest virtual reality headsets. And most of the estimates for the Vision Pro suggest that it sold between 300, 400, or 500,000 units last year, which basically means that the Meta Ray-Bans, which cost literally One twelfth the price, only outsold by 2x, a device that most people think didn't take off. And so again, most people believe that this is the future. Google just acquired nearly all of the virtual reality business from HTC, largely considered.
a stressed out catch-up response to the progress that Meta and Apple have made in the category. But that question of timing, it still remains 5, 10, 15, 20 years out. And there are some who believe... that it is literally a dependency of new scientific discoveries, not iterative improvements in battery life or displays.
new science there's two questions there's there's what's the science what physically are we capable of creating at scale at a price that makes these things usable affordable and then there's a second question is do people want to use these things
even if you can create them under those specs? I think you believe that the answer to both those questions is yes, right? We do have the science and the tech. And if we can get them to match up with reality, people will want to actually use these things. Am I summing that up? Most people believe that the mass medium...
For mass market form factor is lightweight glasses. Roughly 75% of people in most modern economies or Western economies wear glasses every day. The argument of if you can get them relatively lightweight, that is to say 25 to 60 grams, and add a...
bunch of additional functionality that is optional, which is when you want speakers, you can listen. When you want augmented reality displays, you can see them. And when you don't, they're just like glasses. If you can do that right, and provide greater access to the digital world and require less of head down, hand in your pocket typing, I think it's reasonable to conclude that that has some role in your life.
Meta, when they ship their Orion demos, they give you a neural interface that's basically a watch band that allows you to control digital infrastructure without touching a touchscreen, without typing a keyboard, without touching a button. If you can pull that off, the impact that that can have for the disabled or the differently abled, the ways in which it can allow anyone who models in 3D, a car designer, an illustrator, that's all pretty self-evident. The question of...
How useful and popular are goggles going to be that you strap to your face that block out the rest of the world around you remains. debated, but most people believe it's going to be like the PC is to the mobile phone. There's still a billion PCs in use. There's roughly 200 million that sell every year. No one would say that's an iPhone-sized business, but it's a pretty healthy and meaningful one.
Zuckerberg in his earning statements said something akin to, this is the year we find out if the glasses that we're selling become a big mainstream hit. Or if this is another slog and we're looking at another five to ten years before these things catch on. Any idea why he thinks it's this year as opposed to two years from now?
Based on reporting, I think Alex Heath in particular has reported that they plan to do their first real ship of augmented reality glasses. And so what everyone is trying to figure out is that quote unquote minimum viable product. What's the bare minimum that you can ship that's still going to be successful in market?
Apple, as one example, clearly believes that it's not worth shipping a VR headset that doesn't cost $3,500. Meta has long believed that anything you could have shipped at $300 for the last decade was good enough to start building. What we haven't yet seen is someone actually ship augmented reality glasses. And so Meta seems to believe that they can put out something.
that will lead many millions maybe as many as 10 million to say I want to integrate this into our life and so the test here Peter is if they don't see a material uptick with this display they will conclude We can't even ship something until it's much better than this. And that would, to your point, mean that the start of that curve, that start of a new wearables platform.
He's years and years away. If I forced you to bet today on whether this is the year that Meta cracks augmented reality glasses and it turns out they work, what do you think? Is it happening this year or is it not happening? It's a, I mean, look, it's a sales figure thing. No, I don't think we are going to, honestly, I think that this is mostly about internal confidence building.
There's no device that's going to ship that tens and hundreds of millions of people are going to wear. It's just a question of whether or not you put something out that tens of millions of people want. And that's going to be hard to see still. Matthew Bell, look at this. We started talking about gaming. We ended up talking about goggles and glasses. Did you do the asteroid game on Orion?
The AR game with the spaceship. I think I played like a Pong game, right? I can't remember. I was least impressed with the game. I know you were pretty impressed with it. Honestly, the gaming thing was the first time that I actually felt I could see what people would be doing in 2035, where I could imagine people sitting on the bus and instead of having Candy Crush in their phone with their...
you know, looking at their lap that I could imagine someone sitting there and just playing Pong in the air or playing Space Invader down the subway car. Yeah, that seems real to me. That's right. I had the exact opposite reaction, which is...
If we're just going to play sort of crude video games, I can do that on my phone and putting it on my face doesn't make it any better. I want other things where putting something on my face is more meaningful. So that's an inspiring answer. Why? Because like...
These things are never going to be particularly mainstream if all they do is appeal to gaming use cases. The way in which they do go mainstream is when a bunch of different people are saying, I see a bunch of different use cases. So in some sense, that's positive. You and I think different things will work.
I always enjoy talking to you. Thanks for doing it in recorded fashion today with me. See you later, Peter. See ya. Thank you again to Matthew Ball. The only way I get to see him is to call him up and do a podcast with him. Otherwise, I've got to hang out with him on Fortnite. Thanks, Matt. Thanks to Jelani Carter.
for recording and editing this show. Thanks to our sponsors who bring this show to you for free. Thanks to you guys for listening and for all your feedback. I was going to say almost all your feedback, but I'll take it all. Anything you've got to say, I'll listen. Keep it fairly polite, if you don't mind. See you next week.