gaming

The Last of Us Part II

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Some notes on the controversial blockbuster sequel.

***Spoilers warning*** I’ll be liberally discussing all aspects of the game, so please do not read further if you want to avoid spoilers.

First a quick note about my play experience – I got the disc a week after the launch date, by which time there was already a massive storm online. Despite my efforts, I did have some key story points spoilt, so going in I was somewhat prepared mentally.

I could only afford to play a couple of hours a day, a bit more on weekends, so it took me a good two weeks to get through. My final session was a 5-hour binge on a weekday night, ending at 3/4am (that day at work wasn’t very productive).

I started the game late, was armed with some knowledge of the drama, and had the play sessions paced out – I felt all these were positive factors that helped me enjoy the game. To me this game is a flawed modern masterpiece, that deserves to be remembered as one of the most ambitious narrative games of the decade.

Narrative structure & theme

TLOU2 follows a very rigorous structure, which I’d break down as follows:

TLOU2 acts

The structure showcases the game’s risk-taking ambitions. In my view there are 2 primary risks taken: 1) the story decision to kill off the predecessor’s protagonist, Joel, as the inciting incident; 2) in a surprise switch at the half-way point, forcing players to play as Joel’s killer, Abby – and revealing that this is a game with dual playable protagonists on the opposite ends of a revenge plot.

In retrospect, to me the game’s real theme is about how people deal with trauma, via a story of hate-driven vengeance. The game delivers a traumatic event to players (Joel’s death), then forces players to go through the stages of grief (both in the game as Ellie, and in real life with their own feelings towards Joel). The perspective change to Abby is an experience in forced empathy, which to me is a secondary theme.

The perspective shift is not new as a literary device – Game of Thrones clearly leveraged this to great effect with memorable characters like Jaime and Tyrion Lannister. But this feels like the most ambitious example in a video game I’ve played, and the effects were fascinating. In the climatic fight between Ellie and Abby, like so many players, I did not want to hit the attack button. But, just like the predecessor’s climatic surgery room scene (which you revisit so many times in this game), the game does not offer you a choice. Thankfully, the game ends the fight mercifully.

I’m not going to go deeper on the narrative and theme – that would be a huge endeavor, and many people have already offered lots of great content. I’ll link here one video I particularly enjoyed.

Game loop & “level” pacing

The game’s narrative beats (the bullet points structure above) serve the long-term and mid-term motivations. At times this can feel ham-fisted: I felt Ellie’s 3 days in Seattle was a bit repetitive in its use of “go to point X to find the next clue about Abby’s whereabouts”. Anyhow, if we zoom in 1-2 levels further, we get to the layers of the “core loop” below:

  • Long-term goal, e.g. find Abby
    • Mid-term goal, e.g. go to Hospital
      • A series of “levels”, or set-pieces

My loose definition of a “level” here is a 5-20 minute section of gameplay made up of elements from the following:

  • Combat, stealth or non-stealth (sometimes forced non-stealth)
  • “Walk and talk”, the most basic way to deliver the story
  • Exploration, which is a lot of ambient storytelling (reading notes etc.)
  • Scavenging and crafting
  • Environment puzzles (some light platforming gameplay)
  • On-rails set pieces, e.g. car chases
  • Mini-games, like guitar simulator
  • Cut-scenes

From a player perspective, I wouldn’t say there’s any crazy systemic design innovations – these are the proven gameplay elements of Naughty Dog action adventures. The craft comes from the thoughtful sequencing & arrangement to create great pacing, and the insane polish (and the vast technical investments to deliver that polish).

What I thought the game did particularly well for pacing, was keeping players on their toes with surprises. Examples:

  • Have you grabbed by an enemy (either transitioning into combat or a cut-scene) as you go through a level transition (“squeeze through this space”, exit this door)
  • Give you a clear environment puzzle, then as you are moving towards the solution, have the floor collapse under you into a mini-boss fight
  • Give you a workbench (for equipment upgrades), as you start reviewing your upgrade choices, have enemies rush you and grab you from the bench

The game does these surprises very sparingly (like only once) – but they are very effective at making you second-guess yourself and stay alert. Is there going to be a jump-scare at that next workbench? (No.)

Also, they are done in a fair way – in the workbench example, these enemies didn’t spawn out of nowhere; they came out of a locked room in the apartment. So if you had planted some mines in front of that door before you engaged the workbench, you would have had the jump on them instead. This is the level of detail and polish that surpasses player expectations.

Transitions – in my view, any time where you go through a transition where you cannot backtrack (e.g. going through a door/gate and blocking it behind you, going down a sliding slope, jumping down a vertical), that’s usually a sign of a level transition, which serves pacing and possibly technical goals. There are also occasionally hard transitions after cut-scenes (teleporting you to a location), some of which I felt created dissonance (after having you struggle mightily for a few hours to get to a place, it seemed trivially easy how you got to another location).

There are some issues for me with the basic gameplay formula. Resource hoarding is a pretty big problem (at least at moderate difficulty). Thematically as a post-apocalyptic survival adventure, the game encourages players to engage in stealth through tight resource constraints. This is in conflict with utilizing the fun combat skills that players unlock. (The player could tweak the difficulty settings very granularly, for example increase the environmental resource amount to encourage more open combat.) To be clear, I actually agree with the game’s trade-off here: the combat is less fun, but thematically more immersive. But it’s one element why some players find this game un-fun to play.

Another problem created by the scavenging gameplay and ambient stortytelling is backtracking. That is, after clearing an area, combing back through it to open every last drawer, and trying to find every ambient story point / collectible. This is again in conflict with the desired pacing. And it also creates narrative dissonance – “I gotta hurry to rescue my friends… but after going through every drawer.” Even in levels/sequences where there was clear urgency, I couldn’t help but think – hey, maybe there’s some rare collectible here, I should take my time.

Lastly, the concessions in the buddy AI was at times immersion-breaking. As a Naughty Dog convention, there are many parts of the game where you have an AI companion. This serves important story goals (after all, without a buddy, it’s hard to have “walk and talk” sequences), and they can assist in puzzle and combat gameplay as well. But in stealth gameplay, they still land in uncanny valley too often – they can sneak around, and will look for positions of cover, but it feels like overall they are still treated as invisible to enemies. I’m not 100% sure of this – there was one occurrence where it felt like the companion was detected; but on the hand there’s probably a dozen occurrences where the companion should have been spotted, but was completely ignored (sometimes comically).

Problematic game length

This was the biggest issue I had with the game. If we take each bullet point in the 4-act structure above as a “chapter”, and each chapter roughly takes up 2-3 hours of game time, then we get to a 20+ hour game length. In my own experience, I got to the end of Act 2 cliffhanger after roughly 18 hours, and ended the game after about 32 hours. For a linear action adventure, it’s both an astonishing feat and an excessive over-indulgence.

I feel it’s the product of compromises – it was set that the game would have dual protagonists, and each protagonist’s arc demanded a experience that couldn’t be too compressed. But the end result is a journey that is both too long and still too rushed. There wasn’t space to flesh out the numerous side characters, and I’d loved to see more of the Seraphites’ story, for example.

I can’t help but think, what if this game was broken into 2 parts, and released episodically? This is most probably a terrible idea, with lots of risky questions – how will the episodes be priced, how far apart would the releases be? How many players would purchase the first episode but not the second? But to me it would seem to be a better match with the game’s ambitions, and could perhaps help position expectations better.

Alternatively – what if the “chapters” were unlocked at an announced schedule? Like an episode a week (more practically, maybe one chapter every couple of days)? There might be something here, if a narrative-focused game’s content release factored in the social media cycle – e.g. the weekly reddit discussion/reactions of the latest Westworld episode, and the community activity leading up to the next episode. Again, probably a terrible idea still…

Player expectations / toxic fandom

I feel we also have to talk about the massive community controversy since the game’s release. In hindsight, the marketing misdirection was probably too clever and came across toying with players’ emotions. And the overly-strict spoiler guidelines to reviewers was also a major lost opportunity to align player expectations. For example, I don’t think there would have been a significant downside for reviewers to discuss the dual protagonists setup – yes, it would have been less surprising in that moment, but the forced experience in empathy would still hold (and players would be less distracted wondering how long the Abby section would last).

I think I can empathize with much of the community angst, especially the most fervent fans who dived in on launch day and were shocked. That moment of shock, and initial grief, became a rallying call online, and took on a momentum of its own. In contrast, professional reviewers under embargo had to process that moment in isolation, and were obligated (professionally) to finish the game and reflect on the whole experience. This is perhaps one factor contributing to the gulf of opinion between professional reviewers and players.

However, this raw emotion of anger / denial is in no ways justification for the massive abuse (racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia and various other forms of prejudice / bigotry) hurled at the makers of the game. (Unfortunately, this is all too common these days – The Last Jedi and the 2016 Ghostbusters come to mind.) The sense of entitlement is out of whack. The industry, and the fans, need to reflect on this.

And I guess there’s some meta irony that a game about hatred (it’s futility and overcoming it) is the subject of so much futile hatred. It is after all, a video game, a work of fiction. Perhaps this was the 5D chess that Naughty Dog was playing all along. But at the end of day, as a developer, and as a player, I hope that we can see more games take risks like TLOU2, and I hope the controversy doesn’t discourage game-makers.

Valve的平台困境

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This is a backup of a wechat account post, originally posted Dec 5 2019.

（楔子：写这篇，起因是上周Steam Controller手柄停产的消息，在我看来也算是Valve此前的一套策略的一个完结，故作此文。）

2011年我在加州刚刚进入游戏行业的时候，同事们聊起Valve这家公司都是带着万分敬意的：

  • 它不只是一个创造过数款划时代游戏的顶级游戏工作室；

  • 它也是一个有着令人敬仰的独特企业文化的公司（我们都认真拜读过其员工手册，并将其与Netflix著名的culture deck相提并论），小而美的数百人公司规模，在行业里四两拨千斤；

  • 另外在当时，其数字平台Steam已经初步确立了其PC游戏数字渠道霸主的地位，这也是一个令人艳羡的公司战略转型，之后的走势更是主导着欧美PC游戏行业的潮流（譬如近年来独立游戏的井喷，与其密不可分）；

  • 延伸一点，既运作一个大型软件平台，又直接掌控了平台上最有价值的应用（Dota2和CS），这与微软当年左手Windows、右手Office两大利润中心如出一辙（不愧为从微软出来的创始人）。

在过去的近十年里，Valve这种奇特的小公司、轻资产、平台化的模式表面看起来依然靓丽，活跃用户数不断创新高，其它的指标（营收、平台游戏发行量等）画图大概也都是向右上方迈进。不过，我倒是觉得Steam陷入围城已久，种种破局的尝试也基本都宣告失败，未来十年的走势不容乐观。

对Windows强依赖

我不看好Steam的最大原因，就是因为其对Windows平台的强依赖。而Windows平台的影响力的式微，用A16Z的Ben Evans 2015年的一张经典的图可以概括（推荐拜读其原文”Microsoft, capitulation and the end of Windows Everywhere“）：

（这里的点当然不是说Windows/PC业务崩盘了，而是在巨大的移动端增长面前，Windows平台已经退居次席，不再是整个生态的中心，也就与未来创新、新增长点大体无关了。在可预见的未来，Windows还会存在，缓慢衰老——这里可参考上上一代行业霸主IBM，大型机业务每年还在卖几十亿美元。）

过去十年里，Valve并非没有去积极尝试”去Windows化”。2013年的SteamOS（基于linux的操作系统），15年的Steam Machine（基于SteamOS的硬件），以及配套的Steam Controller手柄，概念上来说是已经垂直整合了整个终端体验，而且处处彰显着Valve借力打力、四两拨千斤的经典思维。

只是，在严峻现实面前，这套操作步步皆输。拥抱linux固然自由了，但作为面向大众终端消费者的操作系统，linux本身就是海市蜃楼（已经快20年了，linux消费终端爆发的春天似乎总是就在眼前）；SteamOS得不到开发者重视，做不起来也就毫不意外了。（前两天看到某外国开发者吐槽，没记错的话大概是这样说的：”linux版本是我们游戏0.5%的销量，却占用了我们50%的客服资源。”）

而Steam Machine所期望的轻资产模式（让有意愿的硬件商来制造），也是很难走得通的。20年前微软进军主机市场，也曾寄希望于有外部厂商能负责硬件，但无人问津（商业模式上这是不成立的亏本买卖），微软只好自己砸钱。

至于Steam手柄，这本身倒是一个大胆的想法（怎样用一个手柄取代键盘、鼠标，以便于在沙发上对着电视玩游戏？），但也可以说是蛮典型的以公司痛点为出发点（而非消费者痛点）的产品——玩家并没有在电视上玩文明6的刚需，而是Valve抓耳挠腮在想怎样把自己的平台拓展到客厅里。

PC渠道的红海残局

回到Steam的主战场，本来似乎波澜不惊的残局（各大发行商的自有平台都只做得马马虎虎，Steam的大哥地位看起来很稳），但突然杀出了个Epic Games这样的程咬金。

Epic的路子迈得很大很野，而且似乎很清晰地就是在模仿Valve当年的策略，以一个现象级游戏堡垒之夜的用户量和利润为依托，强势拓展平台业务：

  • 打分成价格战、花重金签独代来吸引开发者，这其中还自然利用了其UE4引擎的垂直整合；

  • 坚持每周免费送一款游戏去拉玩家；

  • 最野的一步是在安卓端，借堡垒之夜安装包自建渠道，无视Google Play。

面对Epic的搅局，以及一个没有什么大增长点的红海市场背景，Steam的市场份额与利润几乎必然下降（平台分成下调恐怕只是时间的问题）；如果应对不当，得罪了开发者或玩家，甚至可能让出龙头地位。

破局思路？

那么Valve面对这样的局面，有哪些宏观策略选择呢？

若继续坚持平台为核心的策略方向，那还是要回到”怎样在windows之外有存在感”这道题的解法，而在微软、索尼、任天堂、苹果和谷歌的主机/手机生态里面似乎都看不到什么明显的空间。（Steam的iOS app，存在很久了，基础的社交、购买体验实在是乏善可陈；而且稍微大胆一点的想法，比如通过app来云游戏玩自己steam上的游戏，也极易触及苹果平台规则的禁区。）哦，或许欧美安卓生态上，随着Epic对Google Play商城的公然挑战，会有更多的文章可做（会引来更多的效仿者），但Steam并不像Epic那样有个安卓爆款游戏/应用作为天然的流量切入点。

如此这般，平台策略里好像也只剩下垂直整合、开辟新硬件平台这条路了。而VR，看起来是Valve的一个重点布局，毕竟连当年发家的Half-Life IP都拿出来为VR站台了。只是，VR概念热闹了这么多年，能看到的杀手级游戏好像也就是Beat Saber（开发团队刚刚被Facebook Oculus收购）；对于硬核游戏，单单是输入方式上就还有很多基础科研要做。

抛开平台策略不谈，其实作为一个玩家当然是希望看到Valve能继续推出好的游戏。回归游戏研发的本位，Valve是有巨额的IP财富的，但近年来的AAA开发的团队规模又已经上了一个量级。在玩家膨胀的预期面前，Valve的中小团队能否对经典IP交出满意答卷，恐怕并不乐观（卡牌游戏Artifact的雪崩就是实例）。

Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon Wildlands (2017)

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I’ve been holed up at home due to the 2019-nCoV coronavirus outbreak. The news and social media coverage got really depressing really fast. This got me itching to play a laid-back, single player, third-person-shooter with modern military weapons.

Turns out, there’s not many games that fit all of the above. Max Payne 3 was the first game I turned to, even though I had already played it years ago. I quickly remembered my previous annoyance at Rockstar’s heavy-handed narrative style in that game. I could go back and play Max Payne 2, which is probably my all-time favorite third-person-shooter… But the graphics do look a tad dated now. So ultimately I ended up buying Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon Wildlands during the Steam sale for $30.

(Loosely summarizing the game’s setting: you play as a covert operative in a fictional version of Bolivia that has been overrun by a powerful local cartel. Your goal is to bring down the cartel one territory – from a huge open-world map – at a time.)

I had quite a lot of hesitations going in. The game had fairly mixed reviews (69 on Metacritic for PC), many of which seem focused on the repetitive missions and formulaic Ubisoft open-world. I thought I was okay with these faults – the “job to be done” for me was to chill and mindlessly shoot up some bad guys. I was a lot more concerned with some criticisms around stealth gameplay – to be clear, I didn’t want much stealth gameplay (see my “job to be done”), and I didn’t want to be frustratingly replaying some missions because of stealth requirements.

Thankfully, this game is primarily an open-world shoot-em-up, and stealth is mostly optional.1 Yes, if you crank up the difficulty setting and go for realism, you shouldn’t expect to be able to outgun whole armies (with air support) by your 4-man squad. But at regular difficulty you can certainly approach most areas “weapons free”, especially if you are riding in on an attack chopper with mini-guns blazing. (Doing so has been quite cathartic, in my current state of mind.)

Indeed, the attack chopper approach makes most early to mid-game level content feel broken thematically. The session loop becomes “scour the map for a nearby attack chopper, get it, and then blaze through missions”. To balance against this, some later areas are designed with SAM missiles to enforce a no-fly zone.

Quick commentary on vehicles: like any proper open-world, there’s plenty of variety across land, sea and air, but by far choppers offer the most utility – they are the easiest to control, seem just as fast as the planes I’ve seen, and offer insane firepower. From a design perspective this seems quite unbalanced. As a random idea, setting an ammo limit (at higher difficulties) could be a good way to bring them in-line for players who want more realism, without sacrificing the laid-back gameplay at lower difficulties.

Another commentary I have is around what makes the formulaic open-world core game loop sticky. It’s all about the layering of activities and rewards. A typical mini-loop looks something like this:

  • Look at world map – pick an objective
  • Seek a mode of transportation, often involving acquiring the transportation by force which becomes a player-created mini-quest
  • Travel to objective destination – en route, get offered many optional distractions, from emergent world events (GRW doesn’t offer this, but RDR2 and The Division for example both do this a ton), to optional side-quests / rewards
    • Get sidetracked by optional distractions, after which the loop is reset or continue to original objective

    • Arrive at objective destination, get offered again nearby distractions (some may be trivial, like a collectible reward)

    Finish objective and restart loop (the whole loop might have been anywhere from 5-20 minutes)
  • This short loop is quite sticky, even on repetitive play into the hundreds of hours, as it offers both nice natural branching activities (as well as a player-driven overarching goal), and lots of rewards big and small. All of this is layered on top of the most basic loop – the satisfying gunplay of every single enemy encounter (the audio-visual feedback of a headshot or bullet-spray).
  • After so many open-world games, the above seems common sense, but there are still serious offenders that break the flow – Far Cry 5 immediately comes to mind with its heavily intrusive story-quests, which when triggered will literally snatch you from whatever you were doing (like, flying a chopper) and declare you have just been captured. (That was enough for me to churn from that game.)

    • My last commentary is regarding loot. As a modern military shooter, guns and gear naturally bring a deep loot system, and this game goes as deep as any. There are both standard guns with lots of modification options (which all need to be unlocked), as well as special unmodifiable guns (effectively, legendaries). These loot (there seem to be hundreds of guns) can be acquired via missions, achievements and/or micro-transaction crates. At first glance it looks impressive and desirable, with lots of “chase” items; but after 20 hours or so I think the “chase” items feel largely cosmetic and diminishing returns hit hard (after all, do you really need 20 assault rifles that largely play the same?).

    1. So far I’ve only encountered one mandatory stealth – no kills – mission, which involves a cameo from Sam Fisher. ↩

    Annual parties in China

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    With Chinese New Year right around the corner, the annual ritual of burning a full month on corporate annual parties has thankfully come to a close. Here I’m jotting down some observations about the practice.

    First off, to state the obvious – Chinese New Year (CNY), which usually lands somewhere in January/February is a big deal. The whole country shuts down for about a week, as literally hundreds of millions of people scramble to get back home for family gatherings. For corporate life, right before CNY annual bonuses have usually just been decided; there are a lot of year-end business summaries, presentations and discussions.

    And then there are the annual parties, which occur at every level of the org. Tencent, for example, has a corporate annual party (tickets are raffled) usually held at a sports stadium, where key executives take part in some performances. Then the business units will have their own respective parties, trickling down to the departments / teams.

    There are 3 typical components of any party:

    • The performances, usually singing / dancing acts, and often modestly budgeted mini-films. Usually each sub-department provides one act
    • Prize raffles, which occur throughout the night, with each prize’s sponsor (a “boss”, partner team etc.) clearly identified. A current-gen max-spec iPhone is a typical good prize, while grand prizes can go quite a bit higher. If a “boss” (say, a director level manager) happens to win a prize, there can be a loud chant of “double”, which means the “boss” is supposed to re-draw the raffle and double the reward out of their own pocket
    • Drinking and toasting. For mid-level managers and above, this feels like the main function of the night: an elaborate and potentially stressful ritual of toasting and hazing, accompanied by private conversations. These conversations are often powerful bonding moments where important business alignments are forged / reinforced. It’s one huge networking and alliance-building session facilitated by a lot of alcohol

    The reason I said at the beginning that a full month is consumed by these annual parties at various levels is because of the invitation format. All these parties can have guests external to the org, and it is important to pay respect (and who you send to the party shows your level of respect to the host). If your work depends on a web of relationships with other departments at the company, you may be expected to attend a whole host of parties to oil these relationships. Which ones you go (and skip) reflect your priorities.

    At the ground level, these parties are rare moments for the team to vent and let off some steam. At the studio/team level party (usually the smallest and most intimate party you attend), many people get very, very drunk. Subordinates team up and get their team leads drunk. Disciplines which feel they have been under the whip of another discipline (say, game design barking orders at engineering and art, as is the norm in Chinese studios) extract revenge. The next day often is still a work-day in theory.

    Thoughts about 2019

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    An unfashionably late (as usual) post about 2019 and the big games industry themes that I found interesting. Similar to last year’s post this will be focused on the China perspective.

    Further global footprints

    A continuation of the past several years – 2019 saw Chinese devs & publishers continue to expand globally. Representative titles such as PUBG Mobile continued to gain ground, ending the year as one of the year’s biggest games in terms of revenue and active players. (Note that the game’s revenue is going to be meaningfully higher than popular estimates, as the game is integrated with various non-Apple/Google 3rd party payment channels that are significant – or even the majority in terms of payments market share – in Southeast Asia and other emerging markets.)

    Similarly, Garena’s Free Fire was also raking it in – primarily from Southeast Asia and South America – reporting over $1B in lifetime revenue since its 2017 launch. (Garena is based in Singapore, though Free Fire‘s dev team is based in Shanghai if I’m not mistaken.)

    To sum it up – real-time competitive PVP mobile games (by Chinese developers) PUBG Mobile, Free Fire and Mobile Legends are now household names across the Middle East, South and Southeast Asia, and South America.

    It wasn’t just about emerging markets – Call of Duty Mobile blew open the gates to the prestigious North American market. While it has a lot to work to do to lift monetization, it is likely changing the perspectives of the gamers who have the most platform choice (and who have been the most snobbish towards mobile gaming).

    IP partnerships

    Staying with Call of Duty a bit more: I’m very confident we are going to see a lot more of these types of East-West IP partnerships, purely out of necessity. Simply put, I’m not aware of any western studio that have the proven capabilities today to execute in-house against the development and publishing of a mobile game similar in technical complexity to PUBG Mobile or Call of Duty Mobile. Epic and Fortnite is the closest example I could think of – but even there, their mobile optimization and global footprint pales compared to the above.

    In a way, these partnerships, or talks of such partnerships, are nothing new – for example, over the past few years, Blizzard have certainly talked several times with Netease, Tencent et al about mobile projects around all of their various IPs. (Personally I’d love to see a Starcraft game on mobile.)

    But what is likely new is the seriousness of these conversations now – the Chinese devs have a lot more proven successes to point to, and the western IP holders are a lot more educated about the proven market demand. So expect to see a lot more of these, and possibly a lot sooner than you’d guess.

    Chinese design innovations

    What I personally found most interesting last year though, was the startling success of Chinese devs when it came to their biggest deficit traditionally – game design innovation. It was truly a break-out year.

    Consider the following list of titles:

    • Auto-Chess
    • Archero (I wrote about it here)
    • AFK Arena
    • Punishing: Gray Raven

    Each of these games were hugely successful in 2019 in some way. Auto-Chess spawned a esports genre after itself (and certainly disrupted the landscape of adjacent CCGs). Archero caught lightning-in-a-bottle with its surprisingly elegant (and highly addictive) core combat. Arknights and Punishing: Gray Raven both represent best-in-class games in their respective genres today (tower defense and 3rd-person action), on top of stylishly creative original anime-IP (interestingly, both were apocalyptic sci-fi in theme). And mobile developers couldn’t seem to stop talking about AFK Arena, a brilliant iteration from Lilith Games on a genre they themselves largely created half a decade ago.

    Also – almost all of these games on the list come from relatively unknown developers (the exception being Lilith). This certainly feels like the silver lining in the deep winter that Chinese devs have inhabited the past 2 years (venture funding has been nonexistent since 2017, and the game license issue has froze up the domestic market). I look forward to the many pleasant surprises that the surviving studios will bring to market – whether it’s aspiring blockbusters from known studios such as Genshin Impact (by miHoYo), or the next wave of indie hits.

    从Stadia出师不利说起

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    [Note: the following post was originally posted on wechat last week Nov 20. I started a new wechat public account as an experiment, and will look to write posts in Chinese periodically. These posts will be posted here as well as backup.]

    今早看到了谷歌Stadia在北美等市场首发后的第一波媒体评测，初步反响可谓惨淡（Metacritic只有寥寥几篇好评，大部分为中性和差评）。随便以techmeme上摘录的几个媒体标题为例：

    • 纽约时报：”Google Stadia Wants You to Replace Your Video Game Console.  Don’t.”
    • Eurogamer: “Stadia tech review: the best game streaming yet, but far from ready”
    • VentureBeat: “Google Stadia review — It works, but it doesn’t matter”

    这个结果显然不是谷歌所愿。究其原因，首先会提到的是谷歌的执行，这既包括产品本身体验层面的（网络体验、逊于主机的实测画质、延迟手感，都有若干指摘）；也包括营销层面，尤其是对于消费者及市场预期管理的严重不足，以及其毫无吸引力的商业模式和内容库（相当于只是在租服务器；游戏本身还是要全价购买、且锁定在Stadia平台；缺乏能招揽生意的独占游戏）。

    以上种种问题，倘若愿意砸钱（加大研发投入、运维预算、补贴用户、去抢独占游戏），或许都是可以改善的。然而这里仍然有个绕不开的基础问题：谁是云游戏的目标消费者？这个市场的体量值得这样投入吗？

    可以从这几个方面来想。一方面，云游戏可概括为用网络性能替换硬件性能。以当下的网络条件和带宽成本而言，这样的一个置换几乎一上来就割舍掉了绝大部分的发展中市场（如印度、南美、东南亚），也即与当前全球游戏市场的人口红利无关。而对于网络条件合格的欧美日韩发达市场来说，“不想买或买不起硬件，又想玩AAA游戏”的群体恐怕又是先天不足的体量：这是在一个成熟红海市场里面去搜寻种种边缘用户。

    又或，云游戏服务的出发点不是去取代PC和主机，而是在互补场景中（比如，出门在外接着玩）的增量服务。这固然是一个消费场景，但1）这里面临着游戏跨平台打通的种种难点（硬件平台政策，以及云游戏商业模式的困扰）；2）这个场景本身的商业潜力（有多少人愿意为此付多少钱？）有待论证。（这样的一个互补增量方向，微软作为唯一横跨云计算与游戏硬件平台的公司，应是当下位置最有利的厂商。）

    另一方面，我们（尤其是中国游戏开发者）能看到的是，手机作为增速最快（无论性能、还是玩家消费和时长）的游戏硬件平台对PC/主机平台的空间压缩，这也自然压缩了当下云游戏概念的空间。如果手机上的吃鸡，已经在体验上逼近端游，那么云游戏吃鸡的场景又何在呢？

    这并不是说Stadia这样的云游戏服务毫无前景和价值。5G乃至再下一代网络的建设会降低成本、拓宽市场覆盖面（不过当下5G本身也是概念甚嚣尘上，实质可能比较悲观），届时或许会彻底改变这个命题。此外，也许云游戏技术的主流应用并不是一个面向消费者的服务，而是一个面向开发者的中间件（公允地说，Stadia发布的时候也带到过这个点）。当然，这样的一个服务的想象力和估值自然要比当下吹捧的概念小很多。

    Assessing China’s game development capabilities

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    This seems to be a re-occurring discussion I have on this blog, but with the release (and early positive reception) of Call of Duty Mobile (developed by Tencent Timi – J3 studio; published worldwide by Activision and Garena in respective markets), it’s worth refreshing this conversation.

    Similar to PUBG Mobile, Call of Duty Mobile seemed to immediately receive praise for its technical performance. Players are wow’ed that “this is playable on mobile”, “it runs so smooth!” Etc. It is indeed an impressive feat, with no doubt lots of hard labor and ingenious solutions to hard problems. In its sum it’s Chinese developers reaping the rewards of their half-decade investment in mobile development at AAA scale.

    Framework sketch

    If we take a step back and snapshot Chinese developers’ capabilities in the global games industry value chain, we might get something like this (excuse my crude hand-drawn graphic):

    China’s capabilities in the global games industry value chain

    Here, the value chain component labels are intentionally generic (I’ll come back to this later). And the artificial separation of “Design” and “Manufacturing” are divergent from reality, but you get the rough idea.

    The main observations I tried to capture are:

    • In the console platform, China has traditionally only had a minimal / partial “manufacturing” role, in insourcing or outsourcing (e.g. western developers’ China studios that help their western teams finish their games; or large outsourcers like Virtuos). A lot of this is due to the lack of a home-grown market
    • In PC, Chinese developers made lots of games, but they were generally non-AAA and in the lower end of the market (for example browser games). There were various attempts at shipping these games to a global audience, but nothing that became a cultural phenomenon
    • In mobile, Chinese developers are leading the charge on almost all fronts (with exception of “design” which I will break down in a bit), pushing the technical boundaries as well as going deeply to emerging markets that have historically been neglected by most publishers. Their capabilities in manufacturing and distribution are industry-leading

    Now coming back to why I generically labeled it “manufacturing” and such: this is thanks to a quick chat I had with a co-worker this week. My colleague has an education background in industrial management. When I started discussing with him what I thought were the strengths / weaknesses of Chinese developers, he instinctively mapped it to industrial manufacturing – “it sounds like they are very good at running the factory – operating manufacturing processes, solving the production line issues, ensuring output quality etc. But these production line engineers tend to be terrible at new product development because they are focused on totally different sets of things.”

    I thought this was a great insight. And yes, game developers tend to know whether they enjoy and are good at making new games or working on live titles (very few developers are great and passionate about working on all stages of a product’s lifecycle). But mapping it back to an almost archaic manufacturing-line metaphor really helps distill the point.

    (One other benefit about the generalized industrial labeling is we are reminded to explicitly reference what has happened in other industries – for example appliances and consumer electronics.)

    A side-bar about Design

    So, to the part about “design” and China’s capabilities here. First off, here I’m using “design” in the more general sense (and it’s probably a poor word choice on my part) – it refers to loosely everything to do with new product development. I think this is by far Chinese developers’ weakest area. Thinking out loud here, there’s a few factors why:

    • China has a relatively shorter history of game development, and the industry has always been skewed in narrow areas (online f2p)
    • Much of China’s recent growth has been in perfecting the production line – working around harsh memory constraints to realize a feature, designing a networking model that supports twitchy real-time multiplayer gameplay in unreliable mobile network conditions, making the game run on 5-year old phones, efficiently integrating with a long list of social networks / app stores… When most teams have focused on being the best production line team, they lose the mindset for new product development
    • China’s shorter-term planning and rampant clone culture results in less value placed on original design, and thus less exercised muscles
    • And to some extent, China’s education system and societal values are detrimental to fostering type of talent that excels at creativity and independent thinking (this is obviously a huge topic in itself, and it’s easy to overstate this factor’s impact; but I think it does exist and should be listed)

    Known unknowns vs unknown unknowns

    So, coming back to Call of Duty Mobile. In many aspects it’s a great product and the team should be proud of what they’ve accomplished. It’s a great showcase for the Manufacturing prowess of Chinese developers.

    From the extremely few anecdotes I’ve heard about this project (casual conversations with folks from both Activision and Tencent), the Activision team was fairly hands-off with the game’s development. (In Activision’s IR comms, the game is also described as “Published by Activision, and developed by Tencent Games’ award-winning TiMi Studios”.)

    I think in this specific case, this IP-licensing model works, because there was likely little doubt what the desired gameplay experience is (bookended by PUBG Mobile on mobile, and the decade-plus refined Call of Duty experience on console).1 That is to say, the challenges in this project are mostly known unknowns – “how do we solve the input challenges?”; “how do we recreate these iconic CoD maps to fit the memory budget?”; “how do we ingest Activision’s raw assets into our assets pipeline?” etc. Or really, mostly known knowns, as Timi has already overcome most of these challenges in their previous (now canceled) PUBG game.

    For this type of known unknown work, as it relates to mobile games, I doubt you can find more capable developers than Tencent and Netease. And I expect them to find further success with other IP licenses, for example, the rumored Apex Legends mobile game, or even the negatively primed Diablo Immortal (which I still cautiously hope will defy expectations). And I could imagine them tackle something like Destiny or World of Warcraft2.

    Basically, anything where there’s a beloved IP on top of proven gameplay (that can be adapted to f2p)- call Tencent / Netease and get it on mobile. Forget your own biases about what should / shouldn’t be on mobile. The Chinese teams will solve all the seemingly impossible challenges, and the game will reach an otherwise unreachable audience (the billion plus players in emerging markets, the older / younger gamers for whom mobile is a much better lifestyle fit than console / PC).

    But for exploring unknown unknowns, or in our industry, creating games that doesn’t have a clear reference or have so many new ideas ingested that it has become something evolutionary, I still think the heavy-weight teams in China generally lack the DNA, culture and org structure to effectively pursue. Games like Zelda: Breath of the Wild, Portal and Clash Royale, to name a few random examples.

    Thus as a closing thought, the marriage of global Design capabilities to Chinese Manufacturing seems like a literal $10B opportunity (if not more). It is clearly incredibly hard to do, starting from a lack of talent – people who are passionate / knowledgeable about game dev, speak the languages, and are adroit at bridging the cultures. But I’m quite optimistic that this will improve over time. Perhaps Apple’s “Designed in California. Assembled in China.” Is one gold standard we could look at.

    1. Before PUBG Mobile there were perhaps lots of questions of “why would players want to play that on mobile?” But now that’s been answered loud and clear by literally hundreds of millions of players. ↩
    2. Netease already made a thinly veiled WoW clone… ↩

    Control (2019) review

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    I was a big fan of Max Payne and an even bigger fan of Max Payne 2 – I think it’s one of the best action shooters of the early 2000s, with immensely satisfying gunplay. I haven’t kept up with Remedy’s games since then though, so I can’t compare Control to Alan Wake or Quantum Break, which I’ve heard is set in the same narrative universe.

    Control is a weird game in many ways. Instead of talking about the plot / setting (which is what most reviews do), I’d like to start with the core combat mechanics. (I’d like to believe that the team at Remedy started the project with ideas about the core combat – which is about a small set of superhuman abilities on top of a run & gun third-person shooter – and then crafted a world and story around it.)

    Combat design

    The entire combat mechanics can be categorized in 3 buckets:

    • Physics abilities that share a common energy meter (auto-regenerates)
      • “Launch” – grabbing objects, including rockets & grenades fired at you, and hurling them at targets. (This is easily the coolest ability as it takes into account the mass of the object – heavier objects take longer to grab and fly slower, but do tons of damage given their momentum)
      • “Shield” – raising a shield made out of debris that blocks projectile damage
      • “Evade” – a quick dash in a specified direction
      • “Ground Slam” – while levitated, expend all of your energy to slam the ground doing AOE damage
    • Conditional abilities that have no resource nor cool-downs
      • “Seize” – mind-controls an enemy when they are low on health, duration based
      • “Levitation” – suspending in air at a specified height (controlled by how long you held down jump), gradually start dropping after some time; once you start falling you can’t levitate again until you hit solid ground
    • 5 weapons, which share a common ammo-like energy meter that auto regenerates
      • Can fast switch between 2 selected weapons; changing to other weapons require pausing and accessing the menu UI
      • Fairly typical weapon archetypes: semi-auto pistol that’s great at headshots; shotgun; machine gun; grenade launcher; sniper rifle (that pierces all targets in a line)

    The core combat revolves around resource management of the energy and ammo meters while being mindful of your position. You are very fragile when your energy is fully depleted, as you rely on Shield and Evade for damage mitigation (good old covers being the only remaining option). The addition of Levitation means you also have to keep track of how long you’ve been in the air, as some level designs have platfomer elements where you can instantly die due to falling off the play-area.

    There aren’t a ton of variety to the enemies (and by the game’s end encounters do feel repetitive), but they generally serve the combat mechanics well. Compared to other third-person shooters, combat in Control is a lot more vertical, given you and a few enemies can levitate. Enemies have distinct strengths / weaknesses: armored enemies (armor auto regenerates) can be impossible for most weapons, but are easily devastated by Launch; mini-boss like enemies typically have specific vulnerability windows (often right before they unleash an attack).

    The combat isn’t particularly fast-paced (this isn’t Doom), especially if you take a methodical cover-based approach. Fights generally happen in generously sized spaces, and you are encouraged to frequently reposition. There are generous amounts of Launch-able objects (anything and everything from fire extinguishers to sofas / tables and even low-health enemies). By the end of most fights, the area will resemble the end of the elevator scene in The Matrix – lots of debris and damaged structure.

    The elegance of the combat design is that it supports a lot of play styles, and there are generally multiple solutions which all feel bad-ass. A small example: an enemy fired a rocket at you. You can raise a Shield at the last split-second to perfectly block it, or you can grab it (Launch) and send it back where it came from, or you can Evade sideways.

    Where it falls flat somewhat is in balance tuning of certain “tougher” enemies. As mentioned previously these enemies have distinct vulnerability windows – once you understood this, they are not particularly challenging. They do, however, soak up a ton of damage with their long HP bars, leading to drawn-out repetitive fights. An example: there’s a grenade-launcher mini-boss that has a lot of HP and armor. You will see him quite a few times. He’s slow and his grenades are easy to dodge/block/throw back. So fights with him you can generally just ignore him until you’ve cleared the mobs. Then the fight with him is a repetitive phase of waiting for him to fire grenades and then throwing them back (meanwhile using the pistol for extra headshot damage). It’s not hard; it’s just boring.

    Level design / art

    The levels in Control are fully indoors, set in a supernatural office building. I’d guess some of this were practical constraints due to the combat system (the destructible props). There is a decent amount of variety, beginning in some rather mundane office-space areas before expanding to industrial plants, cavernous excavation sites and futuristic space hangars (and a lot more that I can’t easily describe). There are a lot of incredible set pieces, many of which have world-bending properties similar to Inception, and the game’s cut scenes utilize them well for mood and foreshadowing.

    The game seems to have a fairly restrictive palette, with a sharp contrast between grey (when nothing’s happening) and red (when you are fighting). It’s very read-able – whenever there’s still red, you know it isn’t over. It does feel monotonous after an extended session.

    The setting is definitely spooky / creepy, especially since most of the time you are alone, but thankfully never fully ventures into horror territory.

    I’ve seen some comments complaining about the verticality and maze-like layout of the levels, especially in conjunction with the confusing in-game map. I’ve also had my fair share of wandering around trying to find where to go next, but I’m generally appreciative of the effort here. I got a slight hint of Dark Souls level design principles here, where you sometimes find yourself back at an earlier spot via unlocking a short-cut or accessing the same space at a higher vantage point. And if anything, the maze-like nature is at least fitting with the game’s theme.

    Narrative

    I’ll try to write as little as possible about the story, because it’s convoluted, and also because the main plot isn’t that satisfying. Suffice to say it’s a sci-fi mystery, about the female protagonist trying to find out what happened to her brother who was abducted by a secretive government agency (“Federal Bureau of Control”). Very reminiscent of The X-Files. People have also commented on the similarities to SCP Foundation (one of those TIL moments discovering that site).

    A lot of the story is delivered through heavy-handed monologues. There’s also a large amount of full motion videos, featuring the head of research of the mysterious FBC. You don’t have to watch any of these; but they are generally well done, even perhaps too good, so that you are often idling at a place watching a video. I liked the music video in particular, it was brilliantly weird and light hearted at the right time in the game.

    Also, perhaps taking a page out of Fallout’s playbook, the game heavily utilizes text-based collectibles liberally splattered around the levels to offer optional backstories on supernatural events as well as mundane office life. They are just as effective as their counter-parts in Fallout, painting a vibrant scene that honestly is more interesting than the main story (at least with regards to the brother-sister thread).

    Quests & progression

    The game has a serviceable abilities tree (each of the afore-mentioned abilities have power-ups, some unlocking passive stats, some unlocking new mechanics). The weapons can be upgraded, and there are RNG-based mods (enemies drop them, you can also craft them) that can be attached. There are also RNG-based mods for your character (which affect passive stats like HP or energy).

    As you fight enemies, they drop currency, crafting materials, and mods directly. The mods are largely forgettable – they may offer powerful stats, but it’s not a fun system. I never bothered with the crafting piece.

    Likely in an attempt to extend the playtime (and add some combat moments), the game also features random time-limited quests as well as a missions system (e.g. kill x enemies of Y type at location Z). The time-limited quests (do this in the next 20 minutes) are spawned at a few specific world locations, and they can really spawn at any time, even during “boss fights”. You also only have once chance – once you die for any reason, these quests are failed. Overall they can be disruptive to pacing – I’ve ended up just ignoring them, since to tackle them I have to stop what I’m doing, travel to the nearest fast-travel spot, and endure a loading screen.

    Bringing it all together

    Assembling the above together, and Control is this uneven, weird sci-fi action shooter with moments of brilliance. The plot intrigues but perhaps never really hooks, but the dreamy Inception-like space-bending levels and the pulsating combat generally delivers.

    There are two particular highlights I want to call out:

    The first is a brief (maybe 10 minutes) sequence in the main plot, where you have to traverse and fight through a particularly disorienting maze (called the Ashtray Maze), accompanied by heavy metal rock music. This is not a particularly difficult bit, even though I did have to play it twice. It’s almost like a scene lifted out of Inception or The Matrix, and it nails the tempo. By the end of it, the female protagonist exclaims to herself “that was awesome!” And I wholeheartedly concur.

    The other is a series of optional boss-fights tucked in side quests. Two things are noteworthy here: the main quest line doesn’t have any boss fights – there are at best a few heavily armored enemies with long HP bars. These side quests feature a series of Dark Souls like bosses, with unique mechanics and puzzle designs. From a combat perspective, some of these boss fights (I’ve not played all of them) feature the best of the game, and the difficulty is tuned up in a fair way. In my favorite one so far, the boss is an indescribable ball of stuff that shots out a stream of wooden clocks (yes, this game is weird) towards 4 surrounding platforms. You have to constantly levitate from platform to platform, keeping track of the boss, while also fending off mob spawns. And to best damage the boss, you have to be near/on the platform it is going to attack, and Launch a clock at it right before its attack. I spent a good 2 hours on this boss, due to a variety of deaths (falling down; losing track of the boss attack; got swarmed by suicide mobs).

    Archero

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    This simple mobile game has been quietly popular in my part of the Riot office recently, and I found myself quickly spending 2 hours a day on it, so I thought it deserved a quick write-up.

    Reading the credits and the publisher’s website, Archero is developed by a small indie team (11 people listed in the credits, including 2 programmers, 4 artists and 1 game designer) in China. The publisher HABBY has a stated strategy to identify high quality indie productions from China and bring them globally. (I’m generally a fan of this approach and think there’s an arbitrage opportunity here currently.)

    Core gameplay

    The core gameplay is deceptively simple but with a sharp design insight. This is an action roguelike dungeon crawler, where you control a character that can perform ranged attacks. You only control the character’s movement; when the character stops moving, he attacks based on AI auto-aiming. The insight is the interesting tension / trade-off between moving and attacking, and the high mechanical satisfaction gained from stutter-stepping / orbwalking (to borrow MOBA mechanics terms) that effectively weaves together dodging threats / repositioning and dishing out damage.

    This is literally a game that can be played with one thumb, but it can feel very satisfying with a good amount of depth and skill expression. At any moment in time, players are reading the dynamic battlefield for upcoming threats, and making rapid decisions around optimal positioning.

    The roguelike elements play nicely into content replayability. Players are offered random power-up choices (from a pool of skills) as they level up in a single run. These choices loosely constitute a “build”, though that is an under-utilized design space in this game in my opinion – there are skills that are clearly more powerful and are almost always prioritized. Despite this, the sheer RNG nature does provide lots of variability to each run, with the usual satisfaction highs/lows of RNG.

    (A side note, the core gameplay largely holds up, but sometimes can get into a degenerate, unreadable state visually due to too many projectiles on-screen.)

    Meta loop

    The meta-game loop is where this game could really be upgraded. Core game content is segmented into “Chapters” of increasing difficulty (enemies with tougher mechanics and higher stats). Your character has permanent progression through gear (which can be dropped through play or loot boxes, can be fused to a higher rarity, and leveled up) and persistent stats power-ups.

    The stats power progression (and thus, monetization of power) is really steep. A casual glance at Reddit shows most players talking about being stuck on Chapter 7 for weeks on end. (I’m stuck on Chapter 5 after a week’s play, with no monetization.) This is where the game sort of falls apart – the loop becomes a very long grind (farming earlier chapters) for gear drops, so that you can fuse / level-up to increase your stats, so that eventually you meet the power level to beat the chapter you are stuck at.

    So why is it implemented like this, and how can it be better? If I were to speculate, this is likely a content production problem, with the small team making a conscious trade-off of using a steep power progression in place of a content treadmill they can’t keep up with. In other words – for live-ops there’s better churn/LTV by forcing players to farm for months vs. players cruising through the content and “completing the game”.

    There are a bunch of systems that can be introduced to partially alleviate this. A random daily quest system would go a long way to introduce variety and make farming more tolerable. Social features are an entirely untapped space as well. For a small team though, these are likely substantial engineering challenges, so I don’t begrudge the team for not taking them on already.

    Watch this space

    My overall feeling from a couple of weeks’ play is this is likely a core gameplay concept that will be lifted by another studio with a larger budget, and married with a more mature meta loop. This is very much a diamond in the rough.

    Thoughts on WWDC 2019 Keynote (games-specific)

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    This was all around a very exciting WWDC Keynote, that I feel advances the entire Apple ecosystem in various ways. In this post though, I’ll primarily focus on the relevant parts with impact to the games vertical.

    Xbox One and PlayStation 4 controller support

    The facts: Apple announced Xbox One and PlayStation 4 controller support across the entire iOS, iPadOS and tvOS family. This was really but a footnote in the whole 2-hour plus proceedings, but there’s a lot of tea-leaves that can be read here.

    For one, this seems clearly in service of the Apple Arcade service, and part of a wider games vertical push, coming later this year. For years I’ve lamented that Apple didn’t have a passion for the games business (unlike their passion for music), despite being uniquely positioned to really shake up the landscape. This may be a sign that this year is different, and Apple is making an earnest effort.

    This may seem like an obvious thing, but getting over 100m1 hardcore-gamer-approved controllers “for free” is a big deal. It will go a long way in spinning up the virtuous cycle of more developers taking advantage of controller support and more gamers looking for controller-friendly core titles.

    It’s also worth pondering whether Microsoft and Sony actively participated in realizing this, or just passively agreed. I’d bet more on the former, given the mobile gravity narrative I’ve discussed some years back.

    Project Catalyst

    I’m assuming Project Catalyst is what became of Marzipan. In any case, this was the initiative to make porting iOS apps to Mac easier. Today’s section on Project Catalyst was easily one of the keynote’s biggest highlights (only overshadowed by SwiftUI in my opinion).

    I don’t think it’s a coincidence that Apple picked a game as one of its 3 testimonials onstage today. MacOS is at the end of the day a 100m install-base platform, and Project Catalyst had made it easier for game studios to consider adding Mac to the list of supported platforms.

    Sign in with Apple

    This announcement makes a lot of sense given Apple’s privacy-as-a-platform-differentiator value proposition. (The throwaway email generation is in particular a nice touch.) By making it mandatory to any app that offers a 3rd party login, Apple has also introduced a lot of uncertainty to developers who want to own their users’ account identity.

    This is more aimed at ad-tech and Facebook / Google, to be clear, but it could be pretty messy for game publishers who leverage them for sign-on and virality. For cross-platform games it also introduces more potential account / social fragmentation, if players are offered several choices (e.g. Facebook / Xbox Live / Apple) to create an account with. Certainly the account creation flow just got more complicated for UX designers.

    Ingredients for post-platform

    The 3 bits above can all factor into the post-platform narrative. It just got much easier to envision a console-like experience with an Apple Arcade game, where a player is sitting in front of an iPad with a PlayStation controller.2 In this world there’s also no reason why the iPad can’t become the most popular platform to play Fortnite (given it’s predominantly a console game), and the iPad offers a degree of mobility not existent with PlayStations.

    Of course, we still need to see what Apple actually delivers later this year, and it’s a cliché to say that it all depends on the content (it does).

    General keynote thoughts, beyond games

    Some general thoughts, for those curious:

    • SwiftUI was the star of the keynote. Even as someone who has not professionally coded at all, this was super cool, and makes me tempted to pick up a Swift programming book
    • The Mac Pro and Pro Display’s pricing is all about re-establishing the high-end of Apple’s line-up, especially as the iPad and MacBook’s use cases become blurry (did you see iPads now have mouse support?)
    • The Pro Stand with a $999 price tag was a bizarre marketing move, to say the least. Do you have to purchase either the $199 VESA mount adapter or the Pro Stand? (Looks like you do.)
    • The Minecraft AR demo – for now this remains “cool demo” and not very practical. It also seems like just laying the foundation for an eventual hardware (Apple glasses?) announce
    • I’m waiting for the next Apple Watch hardware refresh to get a replacement. I recently traded in my original series Apple Watch for a paltry $27
    1. Xbox One + PS4 sell-in is around 130M; actuals for total number of controllers might be quite a bit more, given that gamers may have multiple controllers per console for local multiplayer. ↩
    2. I’m being a bit deliberate in choosing the iPad in this example, given there are roughly 500m iPads in use which is far bigger than the install base of AppleTVs, and using console controllers with iPhones may be considered silly by portions of the western audience given the screen size. ↩