Is subscription gaming still a good deal? Can Microsoft finally seal the deal with Activision Blizzard? Vertical Hold Ep 438

Adam Turner 

So I gotta admit that I totally misunderstand, misunderstood when I first saw this, and I thought the point was that they dropped the basic add support package for like the 6.99 sort of deal which

Alex Kidman 

they make what monies but

Adam Turner 

I thought it’s a bit odd because people are, you know, cutting back on expenses and stuff. And you think that what that tear would appear to people. I think Netflix is problem though is they’re already the most bloody expensive by far, especially if you want to get like 4k out of them.

Alex Kidman 

Whereas little service called Foxtel. You might have heard of them.

Adam Turner 

But like if you go to Disney or some of the others, there’s none of this. You got to pay extra for f4K. You got to pay extra for more users, right? So Netflix is already if you’re crunching the numbers go on something’s got to give. Netflix is already on the shortlist or something that’s got to go. I think they’ve just made maybe made more pupils shortlist at that point.

Alex Kidman 

Yeah, it’s interesting that they’ve chosen the US and the UK for this. They’re big markets, you’d almost think like we might be the ones getting product with the pointy stick, because we’re a good test market. But Netflix is going to do what it’s going to do. But subscriptions aren’t very much our topic for this week. We’re also joined once again by Kotaku Australia’s freshly minted Managing Editor, David Smith. David, does the presence or absence of ads or that basic tier on Netflix bother you all that much?

David Smith 

Hello, boys. I mean, a little. Yeah, well, I mean, I would prefer to have a basic tear that doesn’t have the ads in it. You know what I mean? If I’m, if I’m moving to an ad supported tier, I get bothered by ads on YouTube, as it is they play me to ads and it takes 30 seconds. And that makes my teeth Ah, so the idea of Netflix with ads, it’s just doesn’t, it doesn’t sit right to me, it feels like going back to free to add I’d rather not.

Adam Turner 

So they’re forcing you off rather than forcing you down. So because what you’re saying if you’re on the $10 tier, you wouldn’t go back to the six, you’d either go up to the Yep, 14, or you’re telling the stick?

David Smith 

Yep, pretty much, I would rather go up to the option that’s got more screens on it or 4k or whatever it is they used to justify the higher price point I’d rather go up to that, then go back down to the ads.

Alex Kidman 

Which could will of course be the entire point creating that point of separation. However, we are not in fact here to discuss Netflix, we’re here to discuss games, David to you, because the big week in the gaming world and certain members of my household would be exceptionally happy if we turned it all into the Pikmin four show. But I have to disappoint them, which probably means I’m not getting dinner anytime soon. Because instead we’re actually gonna be talking mostly about games, subscription services, and how that markets been changing recently, and not always for the better. But first, a business story which is STORY Adam not a supply chain story. And it’s a business and gaming story that feels like it’s been going on forever now. This is Microsoft buying out Activision Blizzard which it first announced what to say more than a year ago, first over $69 billion will be. But despite the presence of that incredibly large sum of money, it’s still not quite been able to actually close that deal. David, what’s the latest on this one? So

David Smith 

the story that never ends? This week, it seems as though X Box has finally crossed this what I would say is the second to last hurdle to closing this deal. It has successfully convinced to the US courts, the US federal courts, I should say that the deal is sound and that it should be allowed to move head the FTC the Federal Trade Commission in the states I was not able to mount a sufficiently convincing case to prevent the deal from moving ahead, at least in the United States. And Microsoft’s path to getting the deal over the line, at least in the US is now clear getting the deal over the line in the US is exactly what they want. Many other territories will fall in line with that. At this point, it seems as though the path is clear. Yeah, they could more or less proceed with the deal. Until and this just came over this morning. Or well, very, very late last night 10:47pm July 19. From Xbox head, Phil Spencer, Microsoft and Activision Blizzard, have extended the merger agreement deadline to the 18th of October. We’re optimistic about getting this done, and excited about bringing more games to players everywhere. So if they’ve got the path clear, why are they delaying again? Well, this is sort of the final hurdle in the story, they still have to deal with the CMA the Competition and Markets Authority in the UK, the UK regulator, who notoriously swatted them down just a couple of months ago, this this looked like it was going to drag on possibly into next year because of what the CMA decided its first ruling. And that was back in I want to say May, I believe, not all that long ago. Now, with the FTC being beaten out in the courts, the CMA finds itself in an interesting position. Microsoft has gone back to the CMA to say we have more information, similar to what we presented to the courts with the FTC that we think you should see, maybe it’ll change your mind. The CMA has said, Okay, we will look at it. And its original deadline for looking at this information was, I believe, the 18th of July, which was just a couple of days ago. We love deadlines as they blow on past. And now it has said, we’re actually going to make that decision in August, the 29th of August. So this explains Microsoft, moving this deal along. The idea was that it basically promised Activision, we’re going to have this deal done by the 18th of July, or we’re going to have to pay you a $3 billion, fine. But because the CMA is now going to drag its feet into August, they have to change their date, everything’s got to shuffle down a little bit. That thing goes on longer. The story goes on longer. Yeah, this is where we find ourselves now Microsoft giving us a little bit of extra breathing room to make sure that it can actually close this deal in October and have everything done the story told and Call of Duty, most importantly, under its roof top just the way it wanted.

Alex Kidman 

Well, it’s going to say on the call of duty front it’s been running around signing deals to say we promise you’ll get Call of Duty I think Sony was the last big hurdle there to fall. But is this still really just about Call of Duty players? I mean, the Activision Blizzard portfolios pretty wide is huge. It’s

David Smith 

huge call of duty as a significant part of the deal but you’re absolutely right like the the blizzard portfolio, the other side of the business is just as massive. In in it’s sort of, it’s a legendary collection of games. The three of us are sort of older guys. As far as gaming goes, we all we all sort of we know and love many of the Blizzard games like the original Warcraft Warcraft, who StarCraft the first Diablo game. These are all legendary titles and that those franchises will all fall under Microsoft roof as well including some of the newest stuff that was it’s been working on like World of Warcraft, which is a big one for them. X box does not have an MMO it will become x boxes. MMO Overwatch is another big one that goes hand in hand with Call of Duty, an impressive online multiplayer shooter that a lot of people love. There’s a huge amount of value in it for Xbox.

Adam Turner 

So is that why Microsoft wants Activision Blizzard not so much just because it wants to own it. Because then it’s got nice content to feed to its gaming

David Smith 

plant right into Game Pass. That’s the idea. Yeah, all of it is gonna go straight on Game Pass, all legacy stuffs gonna go straight on Game Pass. And there it will stay. Because Microsoft owns it. They don’t have to cycle it off the platform. We’ve seen it do this with Bethesda as well. They purchased Bethesda because it wanted that massive back catalogue of games to feed right into the hungry beast. That is game paths. And we’re going to see them do it again with Activision Blizzard. Are they going to continue? Are they just going to keep swallowing up larger publishers to feed this hungry beast we will have to see but at 69 billion US dollars when would hope this might slow Microsoft’s roll for a little while.

Alex Kidman 

See I’m just hoping that this means that they’ll announce the Lost Vikings three. Oh, come on. I’m possibly only one.

David Smith 

I would take that I would take that to heart.

Alex Kidman 

But this also puts Moe and Microsoft right outside again. This also puts Microsoft into a few other games spaces because Activision Blizzard Don’t king so they own Candy Crush, Microsoft will own Candy Crush as well. They’ll be in that mobile IAP space as well, which is not exactly Xbox centric, is it?

David Smith 

Definitely not. This is I think this is probably the Microsoft’s first major push into mobile and that is another major consideration the mobile of what we say Activision Blizzard, but it is indeed Activision Blizzard king. The mobile arm of that company is incredibly lucrative as we know. And that has got to be on their minds. 100% Candy Crush is obviously massive. But King have plenty of other games that they make quite a lot of money out of that will absolutely be one pathway to Microsoft trying to make a bit of this money back for sure.

Adam Turner 

Microsoft’s got a long and glorious history of paying stupid amounts of money for businesses that have already jumped the shares, right? I’m looking at you Nokia. I’m looking at Skype. I’m looking at a quantity of maybe maybe LinkedIn, depending on how generous you’re feeling. Is this another one where they might look back and regret it?

David Smith 

How does a very good question. It was certainly like, as far as corporate takeovers go, this one certainly had like the had the the moat of a lot of opportunity. Microsoft very much saw a wounded Gazelle on the plane. Activision Blizzard was really going through a tough moment in the public sphere a couple of years ago. And that was the moment Xbox was like, Oh, we get a deal on that. Is it going to come back and bite them we will have to see. We will see what it inherits when all of a sudden done, what it keeps what it throws away. There was some talk, it is at a certain point about divestiture whether it would have to start breaking up this massive company and the IP that it controls in order to complete this deal. It doesn’t seem that that’s the case. So now the ball is very much in Microsoft’s court as to Yeah, what it keeps on what it throws away here. And I suspect that a lot of what it is going to throw away will probably be people that work within these companies. How is it going to restructure them? How is it going to absorb them? And yeah, how many of those staff that are still at Activision Blizzard? Are they going to hold onto a desk CEO Bobby Kotick is not coming along for the ride.

Adam Turner 

So what does history tell us? Because normally, when when big companies make big acquisitions like this, you can look at what they’ve done in the past, I have a stab at what might happen to the thing they’ve just snapped.

David Smith 

Yeah, that’s true. I mean, you mentioned Skype before. That’s kind of a perfect example. That was a really wonderful programme that an awful lot of people were using and where is it now?

Adam Turner 

How did it not succeed in the pandemic?

Alex Kidman 

I don’t know. It makes no sense technically sort of

Adam Turner 

exists, but like, do they tend to go through and gut them and, and sell things off? Or do they go through and shut down all the things that aren’t doing very well? And just keep the big things? Like if, if you love one of the little games that Activision makes you you should you be sweating right now?

David Smith 

Maybe? Yeah. And that’s like, a part of me wonders like Activision themselves, tend to only deal in heavy hitters, they only want safety nets. Now they want stuff that’s going to make money. So it’s called duty and at least the last couple of years, it’s been called duty and it’s been Crash Bandicoot remakes. Ex Xbox is gonna get some other stuff out of that as well. Stuff like Tony Hawk Pro Skater, I can absolutely see them bringing that back in whatever form I don’t know, but I can see them doing something with it. Because it’s popular, right? They, I have to imagine that there’s going to be a lot of stuff from the archives, like the really, the really old school stuff from when Activision was a very new remake. This is the thing. This is the thing. If x Xbox One’s an uncharted competitor, what do you think they’re going to pull out of the vault? They’re going straight to Pitfall, like you’re gonna see this old Atari stuff coming back out of the fall, you know what I mean?

Alex Kidman 

Well, I was gonna say though, in terms of the acquisitions, I think Microsoft’s done a fair bit better with the game stuff that it’s bought than anything else. It’s been maybe so so with rare beat up it down through too many Kinect games, but but Bethesda it’s done pretty well out of it paid a lot of money for Minecraft, but it seems to have made pretty much all of that back and then some just in Minecraft plushies alone. So its track record there. I think there’s a little bit better than its track record of buying other tech companies

David Smith 

it seems so don’t don’t forget, they did have a bit of a stumble with Bethesda this year with red four. Red four was the four player vampire Co Op shooter that came out only in April May. And it bombed. It tanked hard. It’s hard to know how that game sort of ran. Went went so wrong, basically. But it certainly seems as though there was meddling for management at some level, trying to produce a game that the people who made it arcane are not. Then it’s not the kind of game that they would ordinarily make. Multi pleasures are not something that that company has made before that developers made before. And it felt like, there may have been an element of X Box and leaning on them and being like, we need one of these. And you guys are going to be the ones to do it.

Alex Kidman 

Is that the sort of shadow run all over again? Yeah,

David Smith 

pretty much. Yeah. Like it’s, it’s it’s an unfortunate situation. Certainly, there is. I mean, Kotaku just read a story the other week about how there was a small but dedicated group of fans, it was still playing that game a couple of months on, even though everybody seems to have moved on. But I mean, is that sort of like a grim portant for the future, for what Microsoft could start to do with these really important franchises that it is now paid an awful lot of money to secure from Activision.

Alex Kidman 

So we’ve been talking about Microsoft buying Activision. And it’s doing that on the back of the revenue, it can raise out of primarily Xbox gamers, and especially the revenue, it can rise out of subscriptions. Because subscriptions are big for Microsoft, you want office, we want you to subscribe to it. Eventually, you want Windows, we want you to subscribe to it. And for a number of years now, it’s offered various subscription packages under the gamepass banner. And this week, it it launched gamepass. Core, which sounds like it should be something out of a carry on film gamepass core. But it isn’t David know what is gamepass core at its heart.

David Smith 

gamepass core is essentially just a redressed version of an older subscription service called Xbox Live Gold. For people who’ve been around since the early 2000s, I guess at the very least when this service launched, it’s one of the resemble that remarkable. It’s one of the oldest gaming subscription services out there. came about in about 2002. I don’t know that it launched in Australia, probably motion Australia a couple of years after that, because broadband was not obviously not very big here.

Alex Kidman 

It didn’t take long. Yeah, it was it was in the it was in the States.

David Smith 

Yeah, it definitely in the States first, and then they rolled it out. Elsewhere, I remember it being a bit of a bit of a curveball for gamers at the time, because we weren’t used to paying monthly at that time, gaming was very much something that you you bought a game once and then that was it. And here was Microsoft saying, well, we need a way to fund this online platform that we’ve caught, we need a way to keep the servers for the games that you want to play together online, we’re gonna have to, we’re gonna, we’re gonna send that on to the consumer, we’re going to pass that on to you. And for a certain amount you could pay for I believe it was a month, three months or a year and a year ranu, about 90 bucks at the time. And I think it stayed about that for the duration. And this got you online play. It got you access to deals on the Xbox games store, they discount games that were that were sort of popular at the time, if you had a subscription, you get them cheaper. And eventually, they also implemented a programme called games with gold games with gold basically gave you two or three free games every month, as long as you kept your subscription active, and you could access those for as long as the subscription stayed active. PlayStation actually nicked that it was such a good idea. They’ve been doing it themselves for several years. And they’ve been giving away really like top tier titles every single month. Great way to drive subscriptions. All of this is ending, but it is also going nowhere. Because Xbox is going to repackage it as gamepass core. And it’s going to get you basically everything that you’ve got with Xbox Live Gold sands games with gold, they’re taking that programme, and they’re doing away with it. Because what do you need the free games for if you’ve got a basic subscription to Game Pass, you won’t get the full game pass library with core, you’ll get a sort of cut down version of the library, I would imagine you’re probably gonna get a rotating roster of greatest hits. And this I believe, is all set to kick off in August.

Alex Kidman 

And they’re doing because that you’ve mentioned gamblers gold, and I’ve done that for years and years and years. And I think I think it’s fair to say the past couple of years has not been really stacked with the heavy hitters. Some some questionable choices, but speaking questionable, they’re doing this weird thing with games with gold. If you’re a subscriber, and you keep on with gamepass core gonna be arriving. It’s if you’ve got X Xbox 360 games, which are still forward backward compatible, that whole kind of good thing that Microsoft does. If you’ve got those, you get to keep them. They’re just yours that Microsoft’s just going yeah, okay, fine, whatever. But if you’ve got Xbox One games, through games with gold, you’ll only be able to access those if you keep at least gamepass core up and running, which is absolutely identical to what PlayStation does with anything that’s ever given away. If you don’t have an active PlayStation Plus subscription of some sort, then anything you’ve got there, you just don’t have access to it. That’s right.

David Smith 

That’s right. Yeah. And it makes sense. Like, at this point, Xbox Live Gold has become, I mean, even in terms of branding has become kind of vestigial, it’s just sort Have a throwback to an older version of the company and older version of the brand. It makes sense that they’d want to roll it into Game Pass. And just keep all of that together, keep all that united, so that there’s less confusion about what you get with your sub.

Adam Turner 

Subscriptions work differently across different types of content in terms of what you do and don’t get. I mean, Spotify would be a good example because you could argue, okay, I pay for Spotify, because it saves me money, because then I don’t buy albums at all pretty much, but that’s okay. Because when a new album comes out, it comes out pretty much the same day on Spotify. The good thing is that music doesn’t tend to disappear. The annoying thing with Netflix, you can say, Okay, well, I pay for Netflix and those and go and buy those movies on disk or whatever. But then they may disappear from Netflix, with these streaming streaming game services. Are they saving me money? am I likely to buy fewer games? Or when a new game comes out? It was always like, well, that’s the big exciting game everybody wants so there’s no way you’re gonna get on the subscription service. So you still got to pay 100 bucks right? Anyone? Yeah,

David Smith 

it’s it’s Microsoft defend themselves in an interesting situation with this one, and it comes back to this acquisition spree. They’ve been on all of these major studios and publishers that they’ve bought their games all go up on Game Pass day one, like Bethesda’s big game Starfield, which will be one of the bigger games for the back half of 2023, that’s a day one title for Game Pass, you pay your 12 bucks or whatever it is to get access to Game Pass. And you can play one of the biggest games of the year for that small amount of money. And that game is going to be on there permanently, it’s not going to be rotated off the way Netflix rotates movies off. It’s just going to stay there because Microsoft owns that game owns that publisher, and can keep it there. There are other games, third party publishers and things like that, that do get cycled on and off the platform that you don’t necessarily get to keep. And it will tell you once it’s been cycled off the platform, if it’s still installed in you try and play it, it will say hey, listen, it has left the platform. But because you played it on Game Pass, and you’ve still got it installed, we’ll give you a discount if you wanted to buy it. So there’s there’s ways and means of him still being able to get up even after even if it’s outside the realm of the subscription. There’s yeah, there’s a lot of different facets to the way Xbox runs this platform for sure. Well, what

Adam Turner 

about Call of Duty? Because that’s the big one. Yeah, the day it comes out in the shops, online shops, physical shops. Yeah. Can I get it through one of these game pass things the same day? Microsoft’s not

David Smith 

been terribly clear, but it seems like no, this was the one this is going to be the sticking point. This will be the one that Xbox says, No, this one, you’re still going to have to buy it even though we own it because it wouldn’t. This was the crux of Sony’s argument to the to the regulators, particularly in the states that x box would gain an unfair advantage in the marketplace. If you could simply put Call of Duty brand new hold duty up on Game Pass day and date, and people still had to buy it on PlayStation. Why would you buy it on PS five, if you can just grab it for 12 bucks on Xbox and hang on to it. I have to imagine that in in its rush to make peace with as many third party publishers including PlayStation as it can. Around Call of Duty that yeah, it’s going to have to surrender, that ground is going to have to have seated that you will still have to pay for Call of Duty.

Alex Kidman 

So in terms of paying for things, though, this gets kind of complicated. Because you’ve got like a Game Pass, which again, basket was 12 bucks a month, something like that. You’ve then got the PC version, which I want us to talk maybe it’s 15 bucks or something like that. And then you’ve got ultimate, which is both PlayStation has like two or three tiers. I mean, even Nintendo and they’re offering is significantly paler, shall we say, compared to what Sony and Microsoft are doing. Even though you’ve got separate tiers, depending on whether or not you want their Expansion Pass, which gives you n 64 games and various bits of DLC bundled in, then it gets kind of confusing, it can get kind of expensive. So I mean, two questions here. Firstly, a very expert specific one is that whole dodge deal where you could do the $1 a month and concern up a bunch of usage still actually a fading. And who’s actually got the value here, in your view, out of all three platforms.

David Smith 

That’s a good one. As far as the $1 deal goes, the $1 deal went away. And now it’s come back. Because they sort of rearranged their pricing. They had to bump up their pricing a couple of bucks across the tiers. So they took the $1 away. Well, they did that and now it’s back and I believe if you’ve done it right, yes, you can still stack it. So there you could do at that going for you if you if you’re still on Xbox Live Gold, and you haven’t rolled your subscription over to a Game Pass sub of any stripe. Yeah, whatever you’ve got left of your Xbox gold. So I’ll begin to be converted into Game Pass and then it will start a fresh sub once that runs out. So you do have that option available to you in terms of who’s got the best One. Oh man, I’m

Alex Kidman 

presuming that you had access to all three consoles. But obviously, somebody’s only got a switch or a PlayStation or an Xbox card isn’t likely to subscribe to the other ones.

David Smith 

I feel like when the Playstations version came out, I did think it was the weaker of the two options. But it is made up pretty significant ground in in areas that Xbox hasn’t made up where x boxes bought a bunch of publishers to pad out that library and it’s got a lot of great games on there. Now, Playstation has been making inroads with other publishers as well. Take Ubisoft for example, like a whole heap of Ubisoft back catalogue of Assassin’s Creed games that Far Cry and things like that are all part and parcel of the PS Plus deal but they’re not on game paths, you’ve still got to pay an extra fee for Ubisoft plus, because Ubisoft got its own subscription as well. Guess what? Guess what, guys, the publishers have got their own subscriptions as well. You got to pay extra for Ubisoft and get all of those games on Xbox X. Xbox has its own version of this, strike a deal with EA to combine EAS subscription service into the game pass ultimate platform so you get access to all of EAs library over on game paths. It’s I feel like it’s a wishy washy answer. But in terms of where they’re both at now it does feel like they’re on a more even keel than they were perhaps 12 months ago. There are still confusing aspects. I absolutely agree. Playstation has one big problem in Australia where it has its three tiers the essential extra and Deluxe. Deluxe is kind of an Australia only thing. If you’re elsewhere in the world, particularly in the States. That’s called premium, I believe. And the difference between the two is we don’t have cloud streaming, they had a cloud streaming app that was built into PlayStation called PlayStation. Now it’s now defunct, but that was the platform they stuck all their old ps3 games on, we don’t have that functionality. So they changed the name and called it deluxe and charged us only slightly less for it. That does mean when PlayStation puts ps3 games into its classics library because it breaks its rollout of games every single month into here’s the banger titles that we’re going to give you a really big triple A UBoot stuff. And then we’re going to put in some classics as well, some older titles from previous generations. If there’s any ps3 games included in that. Sony just don’t give them to us. So you kind of lose out on classics for that month if they do it if you live in Australia. Yeah, there’s still those confusing aspects to it that our piece explaining all of those breakdowns on Kotaku, Australia last year, was one of our most widely read, because people needed a way to like, sort it all out and try and figure out where the value was.

Alex Kidman 

And meanwhile, if you’re a switch gamer, you can pay them five, Mario’s Picross.

David Smith 

Yeah, yeah, it’s great. Like, I mean, the value for me in the the Nintendo one is strictly in the retro catalogue, Nintendo released a bunch of emulators that go along with the Nintendo Switch online platform. And they’ve been updating them semi regularly, this stuff from the Megadrive era, the NES era, they recently added Gameboy and Nintendo 64 stuff to it, there’s a lot of really good gear on there, and Nintendo kind of gets to curate what goes on it. But for me, that’s kind of where the value lies on that one. If you love retro games, great platform. Otherwise, you can probably save your money.

Alex Kidman 

While it gives you on it, I take the exact opposite view. But then, to be fair, there’s very, very little of added to that retro library to right. It’s really good. That isn’t already physically sitting on my shelf, right? Yeah, definitely. So I’m a bit of an edge case. Whereas I take the view that it’s not terrible because it’s considerably cheaper. And does the online gaming and cloud saves thing I’m happy enough to, to kind of cover that, I suppose. The question is, though, so we’ve now seen this position where everyone’s scrambling to buy big studios, Activision Blizzard, obviously, but Sony has not been immune to this either. And we’ve got these complex plans out there is this the point where instead of having, you know, really nice $1 deals and really consumer friendly stuff, that they start to put the screws in on us and start charging more and more and more and more.

David Smith 

It kind of feels like we’re reaching that point, doesn’t it? Like $69 billion if you got to make this money back? So I mean, I don’t know like, sure your market caps in the trillions, but like $69 billion, or $69 billion, whereas

Adam Turner 

They’re still paying off Nokia

David Smith 

Yeah, it’s it’s certainly does feel like we’re reaching a point where like, the ones gonna turn and they’re gonna have to start charging more for this stuff now, like we’ve just been through console price increases and yeah, gamepass did just rise by a couple of bucks. But could it go up again? Like, I mean, anything’s possible. It’s a big library. It can’t be cheap to maintain. It can’t be cheap to continue to, to buy new licences to put up there even though they’re time limited. Like, yeah, yeah, it’s a tough one. I can absolutely see the price continuing to go up. And that’s true of PlayStation as well.

Adam Turner 

So you mentioned cloud gaming earlier. And it was the big thing. And then we just don’t hear about it anymore, maybe mostly in Australia, but Google, did Google give it away altogether, like what’s happening with Cloud Guy, Google, hang on, maybe we should explain what’s the difference between a subscription library and cloud games.

David Smith 

I mean, in terms of in terms of like the Game Pass offering the Xbox offering there, if you’re on the Xbox ultimate subscription, the top end, most expensive version, they roll X Xbox cloud gaming into that package. So you’re basically rather than running the game directly on your Xbox console or on your PC, you’re basically streaming that game, to your monitor remotely, there is a PC in a server farm somewhere, probably nearby in your nearest capital city, that will spool up and we’ll play that game at the highest possible settings on that computer. And the vision from that machine will be streamed to you at low latency so that it feels like you’re playing it live, you’re actually not, you’re playing it a couple of milliseconds later. But the effect is pretty good. You do have to have really strong internet for some of the more competitive stuff stuff like Call of Duty, which is a good example of a game that just doesn’t work very well, on cloud gaming, at least in Australia, you still want to be able to have that installed and on your console right now. Playstation in Australia, no cloud gaming contingent whatsoever. Google, you mentioned, they’ve pretty much given it up. They made a go of it with Google stadia had never really made it out of the US. It was an interesting product, maybe a little bit ahead of its time, Microsoft, interestingly enough, came in and kind of made that space its own did really, really well turn the full, fully armed and operational battle station of Microsoft with Microsoft Azure on it, and kind of solve the problem that way just brute force it with low latency.

Alex Kidman 

When you actually physically have local servers which they need for this. That’s

David Smith 

right, that’s right, they can scale them up and scale them down and and do all the rest of it. So they’re basically just using that as their as their platform for it. I found it to be useful on holiday. And it’s again, I only really play like indie games on it, I played a little game called Spirit Farah on it, which was very sweet little game about death, funnily enough, it’s very cute. It’s about mourning. And it’s very like two day pixelated, kind of retro style graphics. And that’s easy enough for it to pass and get onto your system and play at low latency. If you go any more complicated than that, like if I jump into Sea of Thieves or something like that, it doesn’t work, it gets too laggy and it becomes unplayable. It’s interesting tech, and I’m glad that it’s part of the game pass solution, I can see it becoming a bigger and bigger part of Xboxes business model as internet infrastructure evolves over time, to the extent that we may not even have I may not even wind up with an Xbox or a PlayStation in front of my TV anymore. They just get rid of the box. So you’re the controller and a subscription. And you’re away.

Alex Kidman 

Well, that was sort of the study of mobile, I was gonna say, what does all this mean for those of us and by those of us, I mean, me, who still likes to own games, who still likes a thing on a shelf, a thing that I’ve bought a thing that I can control the access to? I know I’m a dinosaur in a lot of ways. Am I particularly a dinosaur? In the sense

David Smith 

I think so no, let there’s there’s plenty of people, a lot of our readers on gotsoccer feel the exact same way they would prefer. This feels like there’s a sense of ownership over like you have that console that is a real tangible objects that you have in your home and you can go out to EB Games, or JB Hi Fi and you can buy a desk that has a real tangible object that you own, they can’t pull a desk down off the sofa, you know what I mean? They can’t take it away from you. There is that fear, I think of the Digital Library going away, or licenced running out and the game having to be pulled from sale and you can’t have it anymore, that kind of thing that plays into it. As far as like that changeover from having a physical console to an all cloud model. We’re years away from it. It’s not like it’s going to happen. It’s not like we’re going to have the Xbox series X and the PS five, and then that’s it consoles go away. We never see them again. That’s not the case. There will be more there will be others. And I expect they’ll probably continue for another decade at least. And then you’ll see them tapering off and tapering off as things begin to change.

Alex Kidman 

Well, I’m just going to stock up on beans and shotgun shells if they come if they try and come. That’s all I’m saying.

David Smith 

I feel so cold dead hands right

Adam Turner 

out of his cold dead hands.

David Smith 

That my dog can’t have my coffee don’t get good country. It’s mine.

Alex Kidman 

Well, that just about wraps up this week’s episode of vertical hold. Thanks to David for joining us this

David Smith 

week. Of course. Thank you for having me.

Alex Kidman 

And now it’s time as it always is for the vertical hold three questions of doom. I will ask all three of them in order. You can answer them in any order you’d like. Where can people find your work online? Where can they find you on whatever social media you choose to inhabit these days? It’s far too complicated to name just one. And this week’s special contentious question. Imagine you’re in charge of this Activision Blizzard buyout. And you personally, David can be given the rights of ownership of any one game they ever made any of those companies. Which game is that and why?

David Smith 

Oh my God, that’s such a good question. Oh my god. You can find me at Kotaku Australia. It’s a video game website at kotaku.com.au Every day, we’re talking about video games hanging out with my friend Emily. Yeah, come and see us over there. You can find me on the social medias at Rhunwords. That’s R h u n wo r d s I have to think twice about how to spell that every time I say it out loud. And that’s across every social media platform because I couldn’t be bothered coming up with a different name for each one. As for what oh my god, what can we bring back? Ah, I know what it is. I’m gonna have to look it up. But it’s a blizzard one. Oh my goodness. It was on the Super Nintendo.

Alex Kidman 

It was rock’n’roll racing by the chair. It was this muscle.

David Smith 

Well rock and roll racing is a good one. But no, it was Blackphone Oh,

Alex Kidman 

very nice. Yeah.

David Smith 

I’m bringing back Black Swan. We’re gonna we’re gonna bring that back we’re remaking it it’s triple A baby we’re going for it

Alex Kidman 

adds an excellent excellent choice. You see I was thinking where it may I would actually take over Call of Duty just because I want that filthy

David Smith 

money. Also money yeah.

Alex Kidman 

Oh yeah. But while I dream about what could be you can catch us at vertical hold online at vertical hold. Are you on Twitter, on Instagram, the vertical hold Facebook page and at verticalhold.com.au.

Adam Turner 

And thanks everyone for dropping by and drop us a line and let us know what you think about the Microsoft Activision Blizzard deal. Let us know what you think about gaming subscription services. Just let us know what you think about things in general. Vertical Hold is proudly brought to you by Uniden Australia.

Alex Kidman 

You don’t know how many copies of Donkey Kong Country I have.

David Smith 

Why don’t we all have multiple copies of that game and like everybody’s got like three or four copies of DKC

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