01:04:44 · Ben Thompson, John Coogan, Rodrigo Liang, Jordi Hays
[01:04:44] S8: GTA six is like the last great game. [01:04:47] S1: Yeah. [01:04:48] S8: Like, you think about every it was built boastably all made pre AI. [01:04:52] S4: Yeah. [01:04:52] S8: Like, it is the pinnacle of this triple a Yeah. Craftsmanship years and years and years of blood and sweat and tears. [01:05:02] S1: Yeah. [01:05:02] S8: To the extent where you have, like, the Twitter analyst, like, counting cigarette butts outside of the offices to see, like, how much crunch are they in right now? I don't even he's trading [01:05:11] S1: the stock. I don't even think he's trading the stock. I think he just wants to know what GTA six. The love of the game. Literally, the game. The the GTA six. [01:05:18] S8: Are insane. Insane. I always tread in this water, like, very, very carefully. But no. So I feel compelled to buy GTA six [01:05:26] S1: Yes. [01:05:26] S8: Just in honor of it existing I like that. Even if I don't know if I'm ever gonna play it. So I'm definitely gonna do that, and I'd be happy to pay yes. I have $200. Like, $80 is ridiculous. They should charge more. Anyhow. Yeah. We had one [01:05:38] S0: of the youngest person on our team was commenting on people online complaining about the price and said something like, you didn't have you had ten years, you couldn't save up $80? I know. Seriously. It's like Whoever whoever you are, like, but like, I know kids that do lemonade stands and they clear, like, a $100. [01:05:57] S1: Yeah. You know?
01:05:57 · John Coogan, Ben Thompson, Rodrigo Liang
[01:05:57] S1: Yeah. You know? [01:05:58] S8: Oh, absolutely. I want you know, the old $20, I'll keep the change. Nothing will make a kid's day better than that. Exactly. Although, unfortunately, with inflation, I think now it's sort of like expected. It's unbelievable how expensive things are. It's bad. [01:06:10] S1: It's bad. [01:06:10] S8: Anyhow, I my GTA six. [01:06:13] S1: But we're [01:06:13] S8: we're back oh, so the the the console the console. So the way I think about Xbox Yeah. Is you go back to Microsoft, and Microsoft had this whole thing. This is pre iPhone. [01:06:23] S4: Mhmm.
01:06:23 · Rodrigo Liang, Ben Thompson, John Coogan
[01:06:23] S4: Mhmm. [01:06:23] S8: This is idea of their corporate strategy was three screens in the cloud. Mhmm. And the idea that we're going to we already own the desk Mhmm. Via the PC. We're going to own the Pocket via the phone. Mhmm. And people always used say Microsoft missed mobile. Microsoft did not miss mobile. They, like, they came out with a Windows CE in, like, 1999. Like, they were in mobile. They just had the totally wrong conceptual model because they were basing it around, you know, as an extension of the PC. Yeah. But then the third screen was the living room. How do we get in the living room? Well, people have consoles plugged in their TVs. If we can get in and own the console, we can own sort of the gateway to the living room, and we need to earn permission to be in the living room. We will do that by creating a the Xbox, the game console. And what's interesting about this is this is a strategy that totally failed. And it failed for a kind of an obvious reason in retrospect, which is first and foremost, people buy consoles to play games, not to have a portal to the Internet in their living room. [01:07:29] S1: Yeah.
01:07:29 · John Coogan, Ben Thompson, Vincent Weisser
[01:07:29] S1: Yeah. [01:07:29] S8: And so you're selling a multi $100 sort of console to people who want to play games, but people who don't want to play games aren't gonna randomly start buying consoles. What actually ended up taking it over was things like the Fire Stick or, you know, Apple TV beta played this. I still think it's, like, probably the the best solution, but it's way too expensive. Now the Apple TV's poor price got jacked to the moon with this recent memory increase. But the Fire Stick is probably a big one. You had the Chromecast. You had Roku TV. [01:07:57] S1: Yeah. [01:07:57] S8: You had, you know, these which ended up being it's not that it's a classic Microsoft thing. They were actually right. There was this new front page to online services to be built. They just took totally the wrong approach with Xbox. And what's funny is that this approach actually became this uberose of self mutilation because the Xbox didn't succeed in achieving this because the games console is way too expensive to achieve this. But then also, they killed the Xbox where Xbox three sixty was pretty competitive. Yeah. And it's that generation is actually the most interesting console generation. I'm happy to expound on that if you want to. But they come out after that with the Xbox one, I think. [01:08:39] S3: Yes.
01:08:39 · Vincent Weisser, Ben Thompson, John Coogan
[01:08:39] S3: Yes. [01:08:39] S8: Which was super expensive because it had the Kinect built in that sort of like wave your hands around sort of thing. And it had all much more like restrictive DRM things. It's gonna be more digital. It was basically that console was designed around we're gonna realize our vision and own the living room. And gamers hated it. So they rejected it. So their vision, which they didn't achieve, also killed their console. And so and the so my I wrote over a decade ago. And the whole Xbox saga is filled with regrets, I think. First and foremost, for Microsoft, but also for me, because I, from the beginning, is like, they need to kill this program or they need spin it out or get rid of it. Mhmm. The stated goals, which made sense from a corporate perspective Yep. Were not achieved, and it is continuing to exist because it exists. [01:09:34] S1: Yeah. [01:09:35] S8: And I was actually sympathetic to that. I worked at Microsoft from from 2011, 2013 when Microsoft was in the dumps. And, you know, they were still had a great business, but their stock had been, like, $40 for, like, a decade. And and the one thing the employees has, like, well, least we have Xbox, all the cool kids over there. Like, it was such a important thing to corporate culture to have Xbox. Mhmm. Even though this was a totally failed division in terms of achieving corporate goals and also was sort of self immolating because it was trying to achieve corporate goals that it was not going to achieve.
01:09:35 · Ben Thompson, John Coogan
[01:09:35] S8: And I was actually sympathetic to that. I worked at Microsoft from from 2011, 2013 when Microsoft was in the dumps. And, you know, they were still had a great business, but their stock had been, like, $40 for, like, a decade. And and the one thing the employees has, like, well, least we have Xbox, all the cool kids over there. Like, it was such a important thing to corporate culture to have Xbox. Mhmm. Even though this was a totally failed division in terms of achieving corporate goals and also was sort of self immolating because it was trying to achieve corporate goals that it was not going to achieve. [01:10:09] S1: Yeah. What do you think the naming scheme says about that project? I always found it very odd that they went from Xbox to Xbox three sixty. That sounds like the third. It's actually the second. Then Xbox one is the third, but it's one. And then now they're on series x, which feels like the tenth, but it's the fourth. And then they have a bunch of subnames. It feels like they just didn't they never leaned into just like Xbox two, Xbox three, Xbox four. [01:10:37] S8: Yeah. Well, you're ask I mean, maybe it shows I worked at Microsoft. You're asking the wrong guy about naming things, I think. But yeah. Total mess. They called it the three sixty because it was coming out the same generation as the PlayStation three. [01:10:47] S1: And they wanted [01:10:48] S8: to jump wanted to well, they wanted to be on the same level. Like, we both answered them a three and [01:10:52] S1: a name. Yeah.