Stuff Worth Knowing for the Week of June 5, 2023
Apple reveals the Vision Pro, GameStop and CNN fire their CEOs, and Reddit stays the course.
Welcome back to Stuff Worth Knowing! Each week, I'll round up news related to tech, video games, film, television, anime, and more.
Tech ⌨️
Apple Announces The Vision Pro Headset
Apple has finally revealed its virtual and augmented reality headset. The device that was rumored to be called the Reality Pro was revealed at Apple’s 2023 Worldwide Developers Conference as the Vision Pro. The resulting product is Apple through and through: cleverly designed, featuring high-quality hardware, and an even higher price tag.
Powered by Apple’s own M2 chip, the Vision Pro also has a new R1 spatial computing chip, two 4K displays, 12 cameras, five different sensors, and a total of six microphones. If all that technology sounds expensive, you’re right: The Apple Vision Pro is going to cost an eye-watering $3,499 to start when it launches early 2024.
Apple is oddly cagey about the device. It touts it as a “spatial computer” and a gateway into augmented reality, with the company doing its best not to mention “virtual reality” at all. Despite this, the sales pitch wasn’t all that different from what Meta is offering with its Quest Pro. What has changed is the usability: the Vision Pro works via eye tracking and hand gestures. According to several hands-on, the tech actually works, and works well.
Will that be enough? Probably not. What is key here is Apple has the ecosystem to make this long-term play work. Part of the marketing at WWDC—which is smart given the name of the conference—was aimed at developers and bringing their apps into the Vision Pro’s operating system, visionOS. It’s a bridge for the rich only right now, but one that could pay off further in five to ten years down the line, when a future, cheaper product is out there.
Why It's Worth Knowing: Gurman’s previous reports about this headset pegged the price around $2,000-$3,000, but the price actually starts much higher. Earlier this year, Gurman reported that the company’s planned consumer-level augmented reality glasses were on hold indefinitely, as Apple hit technical issues with the product. “Consumer-level” meaning around $1,500, apparently. I assume once those hit, following a few years of Vision Pro headsets, that Apple will have fully landed on the platform of the future. This… just isn’t it, unless you have money to burn. (You might!)
Speaking of not offering something vastly different from Meta, CEO Mark Zuckerberg commented on Apple’s announcement. “I think that their announcement really showcases the difference in the values and the vision that our companies bring to this in a way that I think is really important,” said Zuckerberg in statements obtained by The Verge. He touted Apple’s demos showing users on the couch, while he feels that extended reality should be more active.
“By contrast, every demo that they showed was a person sitting on a couch by themself,” added Zuckerberg. “I mean, that could be the vision of the future of computing, but like, it’s not the one that I want.” By which he really means, it’s not a vision where he is the owner.
The SEC Files Charges Against Binance and Coinbase
It seems that the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) is getting heated. On Monday, the regulator filed a lawsuit against Binance and its founder Changpeng Zhao. The suit has 13 charges, including allegations that U.S. customers were allowed to trade on the crypto exchange despite the leadership publicly saying that wasn’t the case. The SEC also said that the exchange was commingling investor assets and sending them to a third-party. If you think that latter allegation sounds like what FTX was doing, you’d be right.
“We allege that Zhao and the Binance entities not only knew the rules of the road, but they also consciously chose to evade them and put their customers and investors at risk – all in an effort to maximize their own profits,” said Gurbir S. Grewal, Director of the SEC’s Division of Enforcement in a press release.
The SEC followed that lawsuit with another one a day later against crypto trading platform Coinbase. In this suit, the regulator alleges that Coinbase has been unlawfully operating in the United States, by acting as an exchange, broker, and clearing agency without registering any of those operations with the SEC.
“We allege that Coinbase, despite being subject to the securities laws, commingled and unlawfully offered exchange, broker-dealer, and clearinghouse functions,” said SEC Chair Gary Gensler. “In other parts of our securities markets, these functions are separate. Coinbase’s alleged failures deprive investors of critical protections, including rulebooks that prevent fraud and manipulation, proper disclosure, safeguards against conflicts of interest, and routine inspection by the SEC.”
Why It's Worth Knowing: With these lawsuits, the fall of FTX, and the collapse of SVB and Signature Bank, U.S. crypto bros are running out of places to trade. And without nominal places to trade, cryptocurrency itself becomes far less of a mainstream thing. Many of these organizations were putting a more consumer-friendly face on crypto, and without them that mask is gone completely. I doubt it’ll go away completely, but fading away into the background is good.
The Shout Out: The Plain Bagel has a nice explainer on everything surrounding both of these lawsuits from a finance perspective. (The NYT has a text explainer, if that’s more your speed.)
Reddit CEO Says The Company Won’t Change Direction on Paid API
Last week, I mentioned that Reddit’s paid API changes were going to kill a number of Reddit adjacent apps like Apollo reader. Many of the app developers have stated that they’ll shut down with the change, leading many popular subReddits to call for an online protest on June 12-14. In response, Reddit CEO Steve Huffman agreed to an Ask Me Anything (AMA) on the changes. It’s clear from the AMA that Reddit will not be changing course.
“Some apps such as Apollo, Reddit is Fun, and Sync have decided this pricing doesn’t work for their businesses and will close before pricing goes into effect,” Huffman said at the outset of the Q&A. “For the other apps, we will continue talking. We acknowledge that the timeline we gave was tight; we are happy to engage with folks who want to work with us.”
When asked about Apollo’s creator, Christian Selig, who made these changes more visible, Huffman was less than kind. “His behavior and communications with us has been all over the place—saying one thing to us while saying something completely different externally; recording and leaking a private phone call—to the point where I don’t know how we could do business with him,” he said. Selig replied, giving Huffman permission to show where he had differed privately and publicly.
When charged with being purely focused on profits, Huffman didn’t run from the question. “We’ll continue to be profit-driven until profits arrive. Unlike some of the 3P apps, we are not profitable,” he stated. At least he’s honest? All in all, Huffman didn’t make friends or mollify his users with this AMA.
General Motors Follows Ford in Switching to Tesla Standard
Two weeks ago, Ford signed a deal with Tesla, allowing the car company to use Tesla’s Supercharger network in the United States starting in early 2024. This week, Tesla notched another win as General Motors struck a similar deal. GM will begin developing electric vehicles (EVs) using Tesla’s plug standard next year. In addition, Ford and GM owners will be able to buy adapters for their existing EVs.
The move pushes Tesla further into the forefront in terms of electric vehicles. Not only does it get rivals to move to its plug standard and Supercharger network, it also gets to charge Ford and GM for the energy used.
Of course, the flipside of this is that Tesla will now be responsible for many more vehicles on its network, potentially angering Tesla owners who might have to wait for service. Ford has a goal of selling 600,000 EVs by the end of 2023, while GM is aiming to produce 400,000 vehicles from 2022 to the first half of 2024. That means Tesla’s network needs to be robust enough to handle that increased capacity.
Why It's Worth Knowing: Standards are a big part of controlling any market. Ford and GM jumping over to Tesla’s plug standard and Supercharger network gives the latter company a big leg up over its competition. Even if Tesla loses out pure EV sales, it’ll make revenue on providing power. It just has to make sure that it can expand the network to deal with the added load.
Video Games 🎮
GameStop Fires CEO Matt Furlong
The ongoing struggles of GameStop continue. This week, the company got rid of its CEO, Matt Furlong. The press release announcing Furlong’s firing spent more time revealing that GameStop board chairman Ryan Cohen will be executive chairman, overseeing the company in the interim. Cohen is one of the figures behind the rise of GameStop’s meme stock status, after he invested in the company back in 2021.
Cohen has a number of standard investments, but for GameStop’s purposes, his status as the Meme Stock King is what they’re looking for. Oddly enough, GameStop’s stock has been higher than its fundamentals would suggest, but those fundamentals aren’t bad enough to justify the firing of the CEO. For the first quarter of 2023, sales were at $1.24 billion, down slightly from $1.38 billion year-over-year. Net losses were actually down from the first quarter of 2022: a $50.5 million loss vs. a $157.9 million loss. GameStop’s previous quarter was actually profitable for once!
Now it remains to be seen what Cohen will do with GameStop. The board is largely Cohen’s people from his time at Chewy and the management was picked by Cohen and company. So what will he do in charge that he couldn’t do from the board of directors?
The Shout Out: Brendan Sinclair of Gamesindustry.biz goes over GameStop’s long history of trying to figure out what's next for its retail business.
Twitch Drops New Branded Content Guidelines, Reverses Course
On Tuesday, Twitch streamer Zach Bussey highlighted Twitch’s new Branded Content Guidelines on Twitter. The guidelines limited on-stream logos to a miniscule size and disallowed burned-in ads on streams. For many streamed events and professional streamers, the guidelines were essentially non-starters, making third-party ads much harder to place in streams. The plan was likely to force more sponsors to go through Twitch for full-screen ads, a system that gives creators a tiny revenue share.
The backlash was immediate and fierce. “I don't say it lightly but I think this is a legitimate situation where streamers should consider boycotting Twitch or moving to other platforms,” said Twitch streamer Asmongold on Twitter. Jack “CouRage” Dunlop used the situation to talk about YouTube instead: “Joining YouTube Gaming in 2019 was the greatest decision of my entire career.” Many also threw the branded content guidelines on the pile with simulcasting—streaming on multiple services at the same time—which was recently prohibited with Twitch’s new terms of service.
A day later, Twitch backed away from the stated guidelines. “Yesterday, we released new Branded Content Guidelines that impacted your ability to work with sponsors to increase your income from streaming. These guidelines are bad for you and bad for Twitch, and we are removing them immediately,” the company said on Twitter. The language about branded content has changed, but the simulcasting is still prohibited.
Why It's Worth Knowing: In the face of growing competition, Twitch continues to make mistakes in terms of creator retention. Not only are YouTube and TikTok allowing gaming streams, new contenders like Kick are spinning up. Former Twitch streamer Ninja recently streamed on YouTube and Kick following Twitch’s missteps, for example. If it doesn’t want to lose its spot at the head of the market, Twitch needs to not alienate its creators, forcing them to leave for rival platforms.
EA Planning To Move Star Wars: The Old Republic To Third-Party Studio
According to IGN, Electronic Arts is planning to move the ongoing development of Star Wars: The Old Republic from BioWare to a third-party studio. The studio, Broadsword Online Games, already operates other legacy MMOs, including Ultima Online and Dark Age of Camelot. Broadsword Online Games founder Rob Denton previously founded Mythic Entertainment, which developed Dark Age of Camelot, and he worked on The Old Republic while he was at EA.
“We’re evaluating how we give the game and the team the best opportunity to grow and evolve, which includes conversations with Broadsword, a boutique studio that specializes in delivering online, community-driven experiences. Our goal is to do what is best for the game and its players,” EA said in a statement to IGN.
More than half of the The Old Republic development team is expected to move over to Broadsword. Many of these older MMOs might not make enough money to grab headlines or impress stockholders, but they can operate in the black for years without issue. Hopefully, The Old Republic can live in that space.
Upper Deck Sues To Stall the Launch of Disney Lorcana
Upper Deck has filed a lawsuit that could put the upcoming launch of Disney Lorcana, a Disney-themed collectible card game by Ravensburger, at risk. According to court documents obtained by Polygon, Upper Deck alleges that Lorcana’s ruleset is identical to a game designed at its company. Lorcana co-designer Ryan Miller was previously contracted as the lead designer of a game called Rush of Ikorr for Upper Deck, which says materials from that game were carried over to Ravensburger.
“After over a year of developing Rush of Ikorr alongside Upper Deck, Miller terminated his contract with Upper Deck and, either before termination or just after, began working for Defendant Ravensburger, a direct competitor. At Ravensburger, Miller transported his work product on Rush of Ikorr, knowing such work product was owned solely by Upper Deck, into a trading card game called Disney Lorcana,” says Upper Deck’s complaint.
Upper Deck alleges that Miller created the ruleset for Rush of Ikorr while under contract, before he terminated that contract on October 21, 2020. Disney Lorcana was announced in September 2022, but Upper Deck wasn’t able to compare the rulesets until this year. Upper Deck is seeking an injunction to prevent Ravensburger from launching Disney Lorcana. The game is expected to release at GenCon 2023 in August 3-6, 2023.
“The baseless claims filed this week are entirely without merit, and we look forward to proving this in due time. In the meantime, our focus continues to be on developing and launching a fantastic game in August,” Lisa Krueger, senior communications director at Ravensburger North America, said in a response to Polygon’s inquiries.
Activision-Blizzard Removes Call of Duty Skin Over Homophobic Comment
On Thursday, Call of Duty-centric site CharlieIntel noticed that the Nickmercs Operator bundle was removed from Call of Duty’s Warzone and Modern Warfare II storefronts. The official Call of Duty Twitter account confirmed that the removal happened after Nick “Nickmercs” Kolcheff’s reply to esports commentator Chris Puckett. Puckett tweeted about his sadness over a clash that happened around a California school board’s potential vote on recognizing Pride month within their school system. “They should leave little children alone. That’s the real issue,” said Kolcheff in his tweet.
Despite what some might say, it’s quite clear that “they” is the LGBTQ+ community. Of course, recognizing Pride month in their school system isn’t an attack on children in any way, and in fact, might be a good thing for queer youth. Kolcheff is simply reverting to classic talking points that any expression of LBGTQ+ pride is grooming children, which is incorrect.
Why It's Worth Knowing: With the rise in skins across all types of live service gaming, there’s also been a rise in skins based on real people. Most of these tend to be streamers and other personalities, like Mr. Beast or Ariana Grade in Fortnite. The issue is that companies cannot be sure that the conduct of those real-world folks will align with the brand forever. Queer folks like the shooting action of Call of Duty too, so it behooves Activision to cut Kolcheff’s skin in relation to his comment.
Film, Television, and Streaming 🎞️
CNN CEO Chris Licht Steps Down
Last week, The Atlantic ran a profile on CNN and its new CEO Chris Licht. The profile, aptly named “Inside The Meltdown at CNN”, was a deep dive into Licht’s time at the network. Licht had only been with the network since February 2022, when former president Jeff Zucker stepped down. The profile was a look into a fundamental misunderstanding of journalism and the pure hubris needed to think he could “fix” it.
The profile did not endear Licht to his employees, most of whom already hated him. On Monday, Licht apologized to employees about the profile, saying that “CNN is not about me” to staff, according to the Daily Beast. He promised to “fight like hell” to win back the trust of his employees.
He didn’t get that chance though, as he was fired two days later. Well, according to Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav, he stepped down. “It didn’t work out,” Zaslav told staffers, according to Deadline. The interim leadership team will be Amy Entelis, executive vice president of talent and content development; Eric Sherling, EVP of U.S. programming; and Virginia Moseley, EVP of editorial. Entelis has apparently been floated as a potential replacement.
Why It's Worth Knowing: CNN is one of the major news networks in the United States. Part of Licht’s remit was to drag the network back toward “the center”. This largely meant a push rightward, despite the fact that many conservative viewers would never ever watch CNN. And this rightward push saw Licht making comments about CNN’s previous coverage of Trump and Covid, comments that did not endear him to staff. Combined with a Trump town hall and the disastrous profile, and Licht’s time was limited
Hollywood Strike: SAG-AFTRA Approves Strike Authorization, DGS Contract Vote Underway
We’re more than a month into the Writers Guild strike in Hollywood, halting all writing duties until the Writers Guild of America (WGA) reaches a fair contract with the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP). The Directors Guild of America (DGA) reached a tentative deal last week, and this week the entire membership is voting on whether or not to ratify that deal. Voting will be completed by June 23.
Despite still being on strike, the WGA leadership congratulated the DGA on its deal. “We congratulate the DGA Negotiating Committee for getting a deal they are recommending to their National Board for approval and presumably will then send to their membership for ratification,” the WGA Negotiating Committee told members, according to Deadline. “Out of respect for the DGA’s ratification process and in recognition of not knowing the contract language they have negotiated, we won’t be commenting on their deal points. Our own bargaining positions remain the same as they were on May 1, 2023.”
At the same time, The Screen Actors Guild - American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (SAG-AFTRA) membership voted to authorize its own strike if negotiations failed. The vote was 97.91% in favor.
“I’m proud of all of you who voted as well as those who were vocally supportive, even if unable to vote. Everyone played a part in this achievement. Together we lock elbows and in unity we build a new contract that honors our contributions in this remarkable industry, reflects the new digital and streaming business model and brings ALL our concerns for protections and benefits into the now!” said SAG-AFTRA president Fran Drescher. (Yes, that Fran Drescher.)
Amazon Planning Ad-Supported Prime Video Tier
The streaming service that everyone has, but no one thinks about, is looking into an ad-supported tier. According to the Wall Street Journal, Amazon is thinking about the additional business model for Prime Video. The move would follow similar tiers introduced by Netflix and Disney+, both move to increase the overall audience of their respective services.
It’s a bit of a bizarre move, as Amazon already has Freevee, a completely free ad-supported video service. The logical move would be to add Prime Video originals to Freevee. Of course, Amazon might not want to do that for branding reasons: people forget Prime Video, but they don’t even know what Freevee is.
An interesting wrinkle in the story is Amazon is also in talks with Warner Bros. Discovery and Paramount to allow users to sign up to the ad-supported versions of Max and Paramount+ through Prime Video Channels. The latter service allows users to sign up for other streaming services inside of Prime Video, giving them a single frontend experience. (I have Paramount+ through Prime Video, for example.)
On My Mind 🧠
Zuckerberg Says Musk Gives CEOs The Courage To Fire Tons of People: One concept I bring up from time to time is the idea that C-level folks want to be terrible, but they just need one of their own to step up and give the rest cover to be bad. Zaslav throws shows and films in a memory hole for tax write-offs? Others follow. In an interview on the Lex Fridman Podcast (via Yahoo), Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg admitted that Elon Musk laying off tons of Twitter staff gave him the fortitude to do the same.
His actions led me and I think a lot of other folks in the industry to think about, “Hey, are we kind of doing this as much as we should?” Could we make our companies better by pushing on some of the same principles?…My sense is that there were a lot of other people who thought that those were good changes, but who may have been a little shy about doing them.
Terrible.
How Streaming Broke Hollywood: Vulture has an excellent article about how Hollywood fell down the streaming hole and how that fall ruined the stable business model that it operated under. It’s a lengthy read, but well-worth your time. A brief excerpt from the beginning:
Just ask Shawn Ryan. In April, the veteran TV producer’s latest show, the spy thriller The Night Agent, became the fifth-most-watched English-language original series in Netflix’s history, generating 627 million viewing hours in its first four weeks. As it climbed to the heights of such platform-defining smashes as Stranger Things and Bridgerton, Ryan wondered how The Night Agent’s success might be reflected in his compensation.
“I had done the calculations. Half a billion hours is the equivalent of over 61 million people watching all ten episodes in 18 days. Those shows that air after the Super Bowl — it’s like having five or ten of them. So I asked my lawyer, ‘What does that mean?’” recalls Ryan. As it turns out, not much. “In my case, it means that I got paid what I got paid. I’ll get a little bonus when season two gets picked up and a nominal royalty fee for each additional episode that gets made. But if you think I’m going out and buying a private jet, you’re way, way off.”
Ryan says he’ll probably make less money from The Night Agent than he did from The Shield, the cop drama he created in 2002, even though the latter ran on the then-nascent cable channel FX and never delivered Super Bowl numbers. “The promise was that if you made the company billions, you were going to get a lot of millions,” he says. “That promise has gone away.”
Nobody is crying for Ryan, of course, and he wouldn’t want them to. (“I’m not complaining!” he says. “I’m not unaware of my position relative to most people financially.”) But he has a point. Once, in a more rational time, there was a direct relationship between the number of people who watched a show and the number of jets its creator could buy. More viewers meant higher ad rates, and the biggest hits could be sold to syndication and international markets. The people behind those hits got a cut, which is why the duo who invented Friends probably haven’t flown commercial since the 1990s. Streaming shows, in contrast, have fewer ads (or none at all) and are typically confined to their original platforms forever. For the people who make TV, the connection between ratings and reward has been severed.
So who is getting rich off hits like The Night Agent? Not streaming services, no matter how many global viewing hours they accumulate.
A 14-Year-Old Did The Lego Section of Across The Spider-Verse: Sincere apologies for the slight spoiler, but there’s a Lego section in Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse. The section is a throwback to The Lego Movie, a film directed by Spider-Verse co-writers and producers Phil Lord and Chris Miller. But while The Lego Movie was done with a whole team, the Lego section of Spider-Verse was done by a 14-year-old kid who rose to viral fame making Lego riffs on existing Into The Spider-Verse and Across The Spider-Verse trailers.
The New York Times talked to the kid, Preston Mutanga, a second-generation immigrant who lives in Toronto:
The Lego Movie is inspired by people making films with Lego bricks at home. That’s what made us want to make the movie. Then the idea in Spider-Verse is that a hero can come from anywhere. And here comes this heroic young person who’s inspired by the movie that was inspired by people like him.
Phil Lord
I adored the first movie and was so hyped for the second one, so getting to work with the people who actually made this masterpiece was honestly like a dream.
Preston Mutanga