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Amber Atherton, Brian Cho and Jason Yeh are joined by founders, friends and industry veterans to discuss the state of play in tech, gaming & culture.
Thomas Vu [00:00:00]:
Guys like us who build pc games or console games or whatever it is, if you take those guys and you said go and build a mobile game, the way you think about mobile game is completely different. But asking someone to jump all the way to VAR or AR is a monumental jump. And so I think it's a generational skill set and I don't think the killer app is going to come from our generation. I think it's some young person who grew up with these devices or don't.
Stephen Lim [00:00:24]:
Have the things to hold them back. We have too much baggage in a.
Thomas Vu [00:00:27]:
Way, in the same like I think that's why Genshin Impact came out of China. That's not going to come out from the US, it's going to come out from place like China. Because they didn't grow up with pcs, many of them grew up with just mobile devices. Everything from business model to game design has to be generational and afforded from that perspective.
Jason Yeh [00:00:42]:
Hey everyone, welcome to the fourth episode of All Chat, a podcast where we're aiming to deliver an unfiltered view behind the scenes of some of the most interesting and current topics within the gaming industry, startups more broadly, and venture capital. Today, we will be discussing emerging technology platforms as we're days away from the initial release of the Apple Vision Pro, injecting newfound excitement and interest into what they're calling spatial computing. As with many platform launches before, games have always been amongst the earliest applications that drive broad consumer adoption, and we are excited to dig into what role games can play in spatial computing and dive deeper into how games have shaped virtual reality and augmented reality to date. I'm excited to be joined by my good friends and former colleagues, Thomas Bu, previously the head of creative at Riot Games and the executive producer of Arcane Steven Lin, who was previously the executive producer of Valorant at Riot Games and now co founder of Raidbase. And finally, there's Brian and myself, partners at Patron, a venture firm leading seed rounds across consumer and gaming startups. Prior to founding patron, Brian notably helped to source Andreessa Horowitz's initial investment into Oculus, which was acquired by Facebook a few months after the investment. Now let's dive into our discussion about games on emerging platforms. Thank you guys for joining us today.
Jason Yeh [00:01:51]:
Excited to chat about spatial computing, VR, especially on the eve of Apple launching the Vision Pro. And yeah, I guess to kick off what have your experiences been using existing kind of VR hardware over the years? Whether it's games, whether it's movies, other stuff, curious kind of what the baseline is for each of you guys.
Stephen Lim [00:02:14]:
Wow, it's actually coming so soon. February 2.
Thomas Vu [00:02:17]:
Like literally.
Stephen Lim [00:02:20]:
Preorder.
Brian Cho [00:02:21]:
That's when we start there.
Stephen Lim [00:02:22]:
Hell no. It's like $3,500 actually.
Thomas Vu [00:02:27]:
It's actually $3,500 at the base level.
Jason Yeh [00:02:31]:
Yeah, the 1 tb version. And then Apple care makes it like 4500.
Stephen Lim [00:02:36]:
I'm either wrong or right, guy. I like, I'm barely in the Apple ecosystem. I'm like Google. I embrace my Google AI overlords.
Jason Yeh [00:02:44]:
I just sent you the green bubble text.
Stephen Lim [00:02:45]:
So yes, I already know who's winning the future battle, and it's not Apple.
Thomas Vu [00:02:53]:
I'm actually pretty excited about this device. And look, no one has it yet. Even developers don't have it yet. I think the first dev kits are coming next week, but everything I've heard, my friends who are there, it's pretty bananas. And I think there's a few things about it that when I construct in my head, why would anybody want this? I don't think they're going after the gaming market, first of all. Although I do think the gaming market will come to them because at some point, because they're within the Apple ecosystem, every single game on the App Store is going to be on there naturally. Right. Obviously there's probably some kind of sort of control transference, but we've all seen those sort of devices that connect to your iPhone and allow you to use controls.
Thomas Vu [00:03:45]:
And so I'm assuming that if you have an Xbox controller or PS four controller, you'll be able to play like clash of clans or something. But why? I'm super excited about the device because I think about the sort of entertainment experience, right? Like, and from everything I've heard, the sort of. You can literally have an imax on your face. And to me, that's kind of like an insane experience at eight k. An IMAX on your face at eight k, watching, I don't know, gladiator, lord of the Rings, whatever movie you want, whatever tv show you want. And even though it's expensive.
Stephen Lim [00:04:25]:
For 2 hours.
Thomas Vu [00:04:26]:
Yeah, for 3500. Well, the good thing is you can change the occlusion, right? So you can see through. So you don't have to have this feeling of claustrophobia, which I think oftentimes traditional VR devices have that issue. But imagine if you're like a business class traveler, right, and you pay already $5,000 just to fly around now for whatever, 8 hours, 15 hours to go to the Middle East, 12 hours to go to Paris, right? You have essentially your library of Netflix shows and movies. That you're watching in an IMAX for 3500, all of a sudden that becomes worth it in my mind, right? Especially if it's eight k, if it's that good. And I think there's a bunch of other features in there that I think people are probably discounting, which is like being within that Apple ecosystem.
Stephen Lim [00:05:27]:
Similarly, like the prospect of building your own man cave and getting a big tv and everything.
Thomas Vu [00:05:33]:
Exactly.
Stephen Lim [00:05:34]:
Value there suddenly.
Thomas Vu [00:05:35]:
And the thing is, when you're in there, you have your iMessage, you have FaceTime, you have all your Apple suite of things, right? So I think it's more of a productivity tool than anything. I think over time, they're going to try to replace this. Why have a MacBook when you can have ten macbooks, right? And you can access, just like, your cell phone mobile in a super easy way. And one of the features I think that's going to really surprise people is they have this sort of, like, we've all seen Blade Runner, right, where the sort of AI character shows up in person. That's what they have. I forget what they call it. It's a feature. I think it's collaborative something or other.
Thomas Vu [00:06:24]:
But effectively, instead of FaceTime, where it's flat, like we're on screens, we're flat, right. You're literally in the room with them. And that, to me, is really bananas, like being in the room with another person. And I think from my understanding, they have it up to about 80% holistic, so almost fully encompass that person, which is pretty bananas, having a conversation. And in this situation where we're all working from home, right, that becomes pretty interesting to have actually people in a room together that's actually in the room together. And I think one of the features they have, they call it parallaxing in it that I've been looking at that I thought was really dope, too, is that if you're using oculus, everything follows you. You walk around, everything follows you, right? They can literally put objects into the world, right? And you can walk around it. And that is a game changer to me.
Thomas Vu [00:07:26]:
That becomes now an empty room becomes whatever you want, right? Now, just extrapolate. Like version two, three, four, right? Like. Like when Steven talked about the man cave. Your tv's over there, it's always going to be over there. Your computer is always over there. Your pinball machine, your pool tape. That's, I think, going to be where it's going. And I think the first version of it is actually going to be.
Thomas Vu [00:07:51]:
At first, I was thinking, well, this is version one, how good it can be. I actually think it's going to exceed people's expectations, even at 35, which is like, actually, I wouldn't have said that even two or three months ago. But as it's getting closer and more news is coming out, I'm like, whoa. This is actually beyond what I expected based on some of those features. And I think if you're at a corporation and you're like, instead of a laptop, I just want this thing so I can use it for just, like, my laptop. I think companies are willing to put $3,500 because they're already spending that for a video card, you know what I mean? So I literally think they're probably going to sell out.
Brian Cho [00:08:32]:
It's already sold out. I think the thing for me is, having worked on the original Oculus steel and having owned a lot of actually quest and the original Oculus headset over the years, if you think about the VR headset, it hasn't really changed that much, right? Since it's released, it's very much the same form factor. And I think that's the opportunity that Apple is going after is now you don't actually need to hold a controller, which just doesn't feel great. If you guys are ever in a VR experience, it already is cumbersome to wear the headset, but when you have these extra two controllers that are kind of haptic, but they're not really natural, I think it really gets in the way. I think for V one, my question would be like, how heavy is the headset? Because actually that's one of the things that really deters most people from continuing to use VR, right? Is like the fact that you have to wear this thing, it's like strapped to your head, it gets really hot. And I think for something like gaming, where you want to be in there for like, if you're like, hardcore gamer, you're spending thousands of hours on a title that's just really hard, I think, to do with Oculus. I think it's just the question is, how can they fix that form factor? Because even with V one, it feels like it's going to be pretty heavy, at least from what I can see.
Thomas Vu [00:09:42]:
I think the solution that Apple had, and I think it's a smart solution, is the computer is not in the headset. It's in that device that's connected to the headset. So you notice that they have that thing that connects to, like a little box with Oculus. It's all in that headset. So you're carrying.
Stephen Lim [00:10:02]:
They highlighted that this does have like the M chip or something, doesn't it have in there?
Thomas Vu [00:10:07]:
But is it in the headset or is it in the box? I don't know, but I know that.
Stephen Lim [00:10:14]:
We have to find out right now.
Thomas Vu [00:10:16]:
There's a cable that comes out, battery.
Jason Yeh [00:10:19]:
Or device or something that's already so sandbox VR out of home, VR theater effectively. They've gone to this custom things HTC product where the computer is moved away from. Originally it was like a backpack, and then it was like in the headset, and then now it's basically distributed across your body so that the form factor is something you can actually wear for like 20, 30 minutes. I think Brian's point is spot on. And also the initial use cases around games requiring short sessions, movies being like movie clips effectively, or like movie scenes, not like full movies. It's because it's very disorienting for people to have it on and then be in that world for more than like 20, 30 minutes. You'll have the VR fatigue, you'll feel nausea, et cetera. It does feel like a lot of the early developers for it were trying to build entertainment, and it was always limited to these shorter sessions because of the user experience.
Jason Yeh [00:11:17]:
But it does seem like apple is trying to move away from purely entertainment will still be developed for it and you can access the content, but can they actually make it into something that you use instead of a laptop, instead of your phone in many cases, and actually just use it as a device that you work on, you collaborate on, et cetera? And I think that's a big question. How much of that side will develop and what are the applications and productivity tools and use cases that actually make people more productive? And is it actually comfortable for those?
Stephen Lim [00:11:49]:
As a person who's generally skeptical about the waves of VR that have come, I generally have the intuition because as a pragmatic person too, like looking for pragmatic solutions, that AR seemed to intuitively have more promise. And on that front, they clearly have addressed a lot of the issues there and have pushed in that direction. There are some things that are like, pretty obvious limitations from as powerful as the M chip may be, is it powerful enough for some of these applications? Battery life is always a thing. I believe it was something like 2 hours or something like that. That's pretty limited. That may not even be long enough to see their recent movie that they made. The recent Apple movie that they're pushing on Apple TV. Yeah, the Leo movie.
Stephen Lim [00:12:42]:
Their battery life isn't even long enough for that, for their own movie. So that's like some obvious stuff. Yes. You can be plugged in while you're doing it, and there's like workarounds and stuff. And all of that just tells me the fact that Apple's even doing this shows a level of commitment. You know, they're not going to half asset. You know, they're gonna be heads and shoulders above many other attempts on a bunch of UI issues, or that's what we should all expect. But it's still all like a transitionary phase, a very obvious transitionary phase.
Stephen Lim [00:13:18]:
And as a result of that, looking at an arm's length as not someone in the Apple ecosystem, like, not wholeheartedly embraced the Apple ecosystem yet they did something unusual here. This is the first product they did that seems the most prototypey. Like they didn't have fast ipod that was like straightaway usable. IPhone, straightaway usable.
Brian Cho [00:13:49]:
Apple Watch one was pretty bad.
Stephen Lim [00:13:52]:
Okay, I didn't have Apple Watch one, but that certainly is now, like, ubiquitous and integrated more in their system. Still, I wonder how useful the watch really is for people and how much of it is like, fashion versus utility and stuff like that. But that's like, what I question of all of Apple. But still, it clearly they have the command and the dedication to make that better, which I'm really glad for. I kind of just want to skip ahead and this is all I can foresee. So I'm not particularly imaginative on this front, but in the renderings that have been offered to me, I want the matrix where I'm just plugged in and I don't even know, or I want the holodeck where I'm just in there messing with people I don't even know. I love that fantasy. But as long as I don't even want the ready player, one version where I'm still attached to this thing and other people are yelling at me.
Stephen Lim [00:14:48]:
In real life, either we're all in the soup or I'm just in my own vacuum in my holodeck dungeon. But that's all I can kind of imagine right now with my limited creative brain. And maybe that's all other people can imagine because we see only variants of those things, right? Or steps towards those things, but either way, feel so far off to that ultimate fantasy. And all these feel like half measures that I'm glad billionaires are motivated to fund, but it's felt very cart before the horse for a long time. And that's what makes me continue to be cautious at best. Not skeptical all the way, but cautious at best. I'm always generally skeptical of a tech looking for a problem and people having to shove down your throat like this is why you want it. And the intermediate cases have not been so compelling yet.
Stephen Lim [00:15:50]:
Yes, I would love to watch movies in HD on the plane as much as the next guy, but $3,500, like that much, or like for the average person and whatnot, or even the $1,000 version, or even the $500 version, it's going to be really unapproachable for a lot of people for a long time. And arguably with the quest and stuff like that, they've hit price points that you can do that already today at lower res and slightly lesser quality of life and experience, but at least there's something there. But even still, now I've taken the last hundred flights, have I seen anyone with a meta quest on their head? Not even once. Have you guys? I don't know. Are people going to start doing that? Maybe they'll start doing it with the Apple vision Pro, because now it's like a fashion statement or whatever.
Brian Cho [00:16:39]:
We have the eye now, right? So people can actually see your eyeball.
Jason Yeh [00:16:41]:
Instead of, I'll just wear sea goggles and pretend like, see the dead eyes.
Stephen Lim [00:16:45]:
Like go from missile. What do you want?
Brian Cho [00:16:48]:
Brings a good point, which is the screen, right? If their screen is just like step function better where wearing that is actually better than having like an 80 inch oled in your house, or it's comparable, let's just say I think if it can somehow justify the fidelity, because I think that's the other issue with VR goggles. I don't know if you guys have tried latest oculus and stuff, but to me, the fidelity isn't really there. It feels a little bit fuzzy, it's a little bit off.
Stephen Lim [00:17:15]:
So, yeah, theoretically, is even the metaquest two or three, is that better than this like ten inch screen that you have in front of your seat on a flight? Probably. But again, and even at a lower price point, why haven't I even seen one person do it?
Jason Yeh [00:17:32]:
That's the argument that a lot of people make. And meta said like, hey, we want to make it accessible for all. The reality is like, iPhone 15 Pro and Pro Max cost, like 1517 clearly isn't. Like that is not necessarily a niche product. There's clearly a lot of people around the world, like, buying iPhones.
Stephen Lim [00:17:49]:
They also carry a weight in a maximum premium that other people don't.
Jason Yeh [00:17:53]:
Yeah, I think there will always be different segments and different price points, but I don't know that I think there is some sticker shock on 3500 because you're anchoring on 500 or 400 or whatever HTC or meta has been doing. But the reality is that wasn't necessarily going to be the resting final cost of a VR device. Especially if you think that in the future it replaces a laptop or an iPad or your phone, then the expectation.
Thomas Vu [00:18:22]:
Is that, yeah, the comp is definitely productivity. Like iPhone, iPad, MacBook. Yeah. I think the reason why you haven't seen people, and by the way, I've seen one person and it was silly on a plane with an Oculus yourself.
Brian Cho [00:18:39]:
Doesn'T count, by the way.
Thomas Vu [00:18:45]:
It'd be two people at that point. Then I see myself, no, look, I think people aren't using. And by the way, the number of VR devices out there quietly is like bananas. I think it's like something like 75 million between Sony. Yeah, between Sony and it's a real number. But I do think that one of the biggest challenges is resolution. They're also using technology that's like 70s technology. It's the same as what you see in movie theaters.
Thomas Vu [00:19:25]:
This technology has not changed and it does give you headaches. And unless you're perfectly adapted to it, it's not like a form function that's natural to you. It really isn't. And that's where I think it struggles. And in that struggle, if you can't even develop in it, if you can't be in it for very long, how are you going to develop in it? Right. And on top of it, the pass through, nobody wants something on their head that is like, you can't pass through. Although I would have to take the new quest. The pass through is actually pretty good, but it's still artificial.
Thomas Vu [00:20:00]:
It's like watching a night camera. It is, yeah. Versus actually, it's just sunglasses. Right? I think it's a very different experience.
Stephen Lim [00:20:11]:
Did you try magic leap? Did Magic leap ever any good?
Thomas Vu [00:20:15]:
I did try magic leap. I actually went there and met with the team and unfortunately they showed me a demo and they're like, it's real. I'm like, it's not real. Come on. I watched their professor Gorocks or whatever, and I'm like, that's not real. Trying to convince me, a game developer that was real. That's not real. Yeah, it's very far behind.
Thomas Vu [00:20:45]:
Again, I haven't used the vision pro yet, but from folks that artists and folks that I trust that have used it are like, holy cow, this is bananas. And again, who knows, right? Maybe they're just enamored by it.
Brian Cho [00:21:02]:
Yeah. What about the gaming stuff, guys? Obviously that's a space that you're very familiar with, but even in AR, it's like Pokemon Go is probably the one game that's really done well, but since then there just really hasn't been like a breakout AR or VR title. I guess you have the beat sabers and some of this other stuff that's like paid games. But what do you think it takes before AR and VR gets to the level of popularity engagement? And again, I think the headset sales is one thing I'd be more curious about the actual engagement, like people usage and how long the usage and the hours behind these devices. What do you think it takes to kind of build like a League of Legends level outcome? Or I guess Pokemon Go was that outcome. But outside of not having that IP, what do you think is preventing it from getting people to play on AR and VR that we've been expecting people to play over the last decade?
Stephen Lim [00:22:00]:
I think one obstacle is at an abstraction above AR VR in that I probably will get yelled at this, but there's a sense that a lot of us gamers talk about where you go home after a long day at work or school or whatever, and you want to play games and hang out with the homies and you want to play something, but you open up steam and you get on discord and you're like, oh, there's nothing to play. And you have that feeling even though at any given moment, technically there's more games than ever that you could play, but you don't actually open all those. And you go by default to some game that you've been playing for the past year. We call that feeling gamer depression.
Thomas Vu [00:22:48]:
4000 games shipped out.
Stephen Lim [00:22:50]:
Yeah, that you don't feel like playing 15,000 last year from what I saw. So there's some dissonance there. And so maybe as a result of that we have this perpetual never ending feeling of like, why is there something new? There's new stuff technically all the time. Is the stuff being delivered new enough? That's like a valid question, or is stuff actually inventive and new that we aren't willing to try? It's something else that I think gamers do not often want to acknowledge, but I think it's actually a dynamic where I felt over know both of Thomas and I worked on Spore where we met, and spore was new on a lot of fronts. And I think in hindsight when I look at it, it's too new on a bunch of things. I think there's some threshold where it goes from new and innovative to overwhelming or unfamiliar.
Jason Yeh [00:23:50]:
Unfamiliar.
Stephen Lim [00:23:51]:
And I think when it's unfamiliar, I believe that gamers are smarter than average groups of consumers. Of course I have bias there, but I think in that perspective, we won't blame ourselves for that dissonance. We're going to blame the developer. Like, this is weird, this is not intuitive, say whatever, but basically it's too unfamiliar, it's too out there. And if that holds any water, maybe that could be an explanation or one of the reasons or one of the obstacles for adoption of AR VR. It's too unfamiliar, it's too out there. And you would think that, well, its job is duplicating or replicating reality, and reality is our reality, and that's what we should be so familiar with. So how much of a leap is it? Maybe that leap is too far, or maybe that leap hasn't been closed enough per earlier conversation, but maybe it all just is too unfamiliar right now.
Stephen Lim [00:24:53]:
So we've been gaming in a certain format for a long time. Transitions to new devices and formats. They do come. Nintendo has been one of the most successful pushing new devices, new paradigms for a long time. They also have a nice, I guess, brand along with Apple, that people are much more willing to try and assume it's good and be wanting it to be good, versus some of the ones pushing VR AR right now have less trust. I'll just call out like meta. How much do I want meta to be the one to push AR VR, even if it's a really good experience? The subtext is, do I really want to log in to Facebook before I use this AR product? And that maybe is another obstacle of the ones that are pushing this, who are rich enough to pursue this, how much do I really trust them to be the ones to provide it? That's where, again, maybe Apple has a humongous leg and just the fact that they can sell out $3,500 times 85,000 units or whatever it was within 18 minutes, I think all those things are included to reduce the barrier to entry. It's like partially trust as an obstacle, partially unfamiliarity as an obstacle, and then there's the big elephant in the room.
Stephen Lim [00:26:24]:
It's like there's still not a killer app. And the prospect of devoting enough energy to proposing a killer app is pretty monumental. In the five, six years ago, whenever it was that VR had like a wave, you had a number of excited game developers to push and try. And since very little of it has ever gotten any meaningful traction. So now all the rest of us still making games are like, do I want to do that now in 2024? This is a big giant caveat here. All the people who went over to meta and are developing games in flight that we can't see right now. But in terms of independent studios or established studios making VR games, all that dried the hell up. It's all like, now we have five or six years of effective, still didn't happen.
Stephen Lim [00:27:24]:
Now you're like, if you want to pitch a VR product, it's like, dude, it's already hard enough to get something approved now. Now you want to add VR as a layer of obstacle to a stakeholder. And it's kind of in this rut. So there are plenty of obstacles here that kind of keep it from this false start, yet, you know, there's hugely meaningful funding and efforts going toward it. Apple coming in is going to be a huge boost that might revitalize a lot of it. But quietly, Valve and meta has still not stopped. They've maintained a humongous amount of investment internally, and yet we're all still kind of waiting for enough critical mass to get past, and maybe Apple will have that critical mass to jolt everyone back into excitement and action. So far, Valve and meta have been in a steady state and they have shipped a lot of units.
Stephen Lim [00:28:24]:
But have people been playing VR besides beat Saber? And how much can you play beatsaber? Well, I think VR, I got a lot of Tarkovr.
Brian Cho [00:28:33]:
You can make the argument that it's kind of like the PDA still, right? There hasn't been an iPhone yet, so you're still playing with the device that just isn't there yet. But everyone has a phone, right? And a lot of people play Pokemon go. And I think Thomas, you and I talked about this at Riot at one point, which is, know, what kind of games can you make more on the AR plus, like the smartphones that we like, I guess. Do you guys have a take as game developers on why? Just again, in like, that's something that we already use, right? The camera. A lot of people are on Instagram and TikTok. Why is it that AR is actually not really taken off from a gaming perspective?
Stephen Lim [00:29:11]:
AR has a little bit of.
Thomas Vu [00:29:15]:
Has.
Stephen Lim [00:29:15]:
A forced pacing to it. You can only move so fast through the world. So once I'm at a place, there's a lot of things I can do at that place, maybe. And that's kind of maybe how pokemon go is. Like, while I'm here, there's like an animal I can catch. There's a thing I can do. But how long until the next place I can move to that has a different thing? 20, 30 minutes or hour or if I even remember to bring it up again, there's at least that layer, my.
Thomas Vu [00:29:40]:
Take, and I largely agree with Steven. I think we need to separate VR and AR. Oftentimes we keep saying VR, ar. I think they're so different in terms of what their utility is and why people are in these spaces. And I think it's smart that Apple is not doing VR, right? It's just not a VR device.
Brian Cho [00:30:05]:
They're telling everyone to call it spatial computing, and they're always super paranoid about marketing, right? So it makes sense that they're trying.
Thomas Vu [00:30:11]:
To, because I really do think it's super different. As different as mobile to console to pc, right? Like completely different form factors, completely different interface. So that's the first thing I think primarily the reason why the killer app hasn't been made is a lot of what Steven said. I totally agree with that, which is the best developers in the world are not taking the time to do experiments on these devices. We're so discerning about, like you said, there's like 15,000 games I shipped on Steam last year. We're so discerning about the games that we play and the time that we spend in these games. And we're so precious about it that if it's not perfect, if it's not new, if it's not fresh, if it doesn't give you something new, I think it's very difficult for any of us to spend that time. And I think the sort of idea of newness, there's this idea which is like, you can only love what you know, right? Like, if you don't know it, how can you fall in love with it? And I think if somebody is building something that's so far out there, it's really hard for the general population to bridge their minds.
Thomas Vu [00:31:27]:
So I totally agree with Slim. I do think that there is an affordance and an interface issue because I think oftentimes, and this is where my take on why people haven't built it, I think it's generational guys like us who build pc games or console games or whatever it is, if you take those guys and you said, go and build a mobile game, it's like literally like what? The way you think about mobile game is completely different. And arguably it's not that big of a jump, but asking someone to do that, to jump all the way to VAR or AR is a monumental jump. And so I think it's a generational skill set. And I don't think the killer app is going to come from our generation. I don't think it's going to be like the people coming out of the big aa game studios that are going to build that. Yeah, I think it's some young person who grew up with these devices or.
Stephen Lim [00:32:33]:
Don'T have the things that hold them back.
Thomas Vu [00:32:35]:
Exactly.
Stephen Lim [00:32:36]:
We have too much baggage in a. Yeah, yeah.
Thomas Vu [00:32:38]:
In the same, like, I think that's why Genshin impact came out of like, that's not going to come out from the US, it's going to come out from place like China. Because they didn't grow up with pcs. They grew up know well, many of them did, but many of them grew up with just mobile devices. Right. And I think a lot of the, everything from business model to game design has to be generational and affordant from that perspective. And so I'm very wary when a developer is like, hey, I have this crazy idea for doing VR. I'm like, do you VR every day, all day long? Is that what you do? Unless that's what you do. And you're totally, that's just your nature.
Thomas Vu [00:33:22]:
You're now affordant. You're completely one with it. I think it's going to be hard. And so every single thing that I've seen, other than the things that maybe work both in AR and VR, like Pokemon Go or Beat Saber, is completely affordant to the controls. And so we're applying all these design principles of walking in VR. It makes zero sense. Why are you walking in VR? It just doesn't feel right. Right.
Thomas Vu [00:33:51]:
Because we apply all the game design knowledge that we have from making like first person shooters and mobas and all these games into a form factor that we have zero idea.
Jason Yeh [00:34:02]:
It's like whenever new technology comes out, the easiest thing to do is, and Chris Dixon calls like the SKU morphic, the port. It's like when nfts first became popular, how do we make Fortnite with nfts? How do we make league with nfts? And it's like, well, that's missing the point. The technology enables you to actually do something different. You need to build something that's native to the use of that technology.
Thomas Vu [00:34:22]:
And beyond native, that's the part that's hard. If we went back and we saw geocities, it was a bunch of magazine covers as websites. That's what they thought the web was, right? Nobody could conceive that the web is like so much more, so much more than bulletin boards and whatnot.
Stephen Lim [00:34:43]:
At the same time. It is natural too, hearing you guys talk about this. It does bring to mind too the two things we could name as like big successes. Pokemon go in AR and then beat Saber in VR. They were both, I think, hard carried by their ips too. What is Pokemon go without Pokemon?
Jason Yeh [00:35:10]:
Even with Harry Potter, it failed. And every other company that got funded to build a Pokemon go for.
Thomas Vu [00:35:17]:
IP. But Pokemon Go was before that. Was that game ingress?
Stephen Lim [00:35:22]:
Yeah, and that was interesting for like 5000 people. But then Pokemon go, but from a.
Thomas Vu [00:35:28]:
Fordance perspective, it was effectively geocaching, right? So there was this arg that it's geocaching where people hide things all over the world and there's like a massive audience that goes and finds these things. It's effectively that, but done in a way that has great ip, but it's completely affordant. There's nothing about that that is outside of the realm of mobile, right? Like they're not trying to have controls, they're not trying to do any of these things, right? It's all perfectly affordant with the device and with AR and same with beat Saber, you're standing still, right? Like you're just winging your arms. It works because it's so clearly made for it. And I think anybody working in those devices should really take that to heart. And I think it's going to be a generational thing. I go watch my daughter, so I have a quest and I don't use the quest as much as she does. She's like literally hacking it apart, playing like Roblox with it.
Thomas Vu [00:36:34]:
She's like hardcore. Every time I walk in her room, she's on the device and I'm like, you know what, in five years she's going to be old enough where she's going to be like, I want to make a thing and it's going to be awesome.
Stephen Lim [00:36:48]:
There's an equivalent of that for my kids. We don't have VR in the house or AR in the house, but my kids use Google home more than almost anything. Their interface is the natural language, like what's the population of whatever? And I hear what are you asking about? And that's normal to them. And so they're not leashed to. We go straight to Google. I have to force myself to switch over to bard recently.
Thomas Vu [00:37:20]:
They do it so naturally recently and he's like, yeah, I've never used email. I'm like, never use email.
Stephen Lim [00:37:27]:
I'm like, that's been only slack.
Thomas Vu [00:37:30]:
He's like, slack, discord. Like, my daughters don't like using email. Email is for school. Everything else is discord, slack, all this stuff. So their paradigm is completely different than ours, and there's literally no way of us ever breaching that unless we ourselves stop using and reprogramming our brain. Right. And for me, largely, I've actually gotten less and less email because of this.
Stephen Lim [00:37:56]:
Oh, for sure, yeah. There's an abstraction layer that is in common between all those. Like, it's the desire to connect and communicate, and the tool is what changes over time. So I wonder if what you can do is project out from like, a classic motivation or a classic compulsion and translate to the new tool. But again, so far it feels so forced. We have this tool, and maybe you can use it for this thing that you've always wanted to do instead of like, I wanted this thing and this thing so obviously makes it better, much better. It isn't that yet.
Brian Cho [00:38:36]:
Yeah, it has to be ten x better. It's like when you went from Palm Pilot to iPhone three G and they had the App Store, it became clear, like, hey, this thing is actually fundamentally better than any of the kind of handhelds came before it. So I personally think it's like a hardware thing too, as much of a behavioral thing. And I do think if there's any company in the world that's going to figure out the interface problem, it probably is Apple, right? They've been kind of masters.
Stephen Lim [00:39:02]:
They also have the force and the brand to shove it down everyone's throats.
Thomas Vu [00:39:05]:
Look, I think it's all that, but I also think it works both ways. I think this is how evolution works. We got flip phones to blackberries and an iPhone, but it has to approach both ways. And I think when the iPhone first came out, people are like, oh, my God, games on the iPhone? What the people are playing snake on the cell phone and people are still complaining about frames. And now people are like, yeah, sure, games. I think games on the iPhone and Android devices are the bulk of the industry. Like, 70% of the industry is revenue generated through these devices. And so I think it's going to go both ways.
Thomas Vu [00:39:45]:
Technology is going to go one way and it's going to be built by the old guard, and then software is also going to be built, and then they're going to hit, like a wall oftentimes. And then on the other side, a young generation grows up and they're like, I'm going to use this in a way that you've never thought of. And I'm going to start building. When I come of age, I want to start building it in this way. And I think, by the way, this is true of almost everything I've seen in the world, right. Game adaptations required people who love playing games to be old enough to now be in the industry to build things like last of us or Super Mario or arcane. It took generations for people who love games to actually express in those mediums, right. Because everybody tried to adapt before.
Thomas Vu [00:40:28]:
It didn't work. So I think it's just like, it's going to work both ways. At some point, you're going to hit an equilibrium and then it becomes normal. It just becomes cultural. Yeah.
Brian Cho [00:40:39]:
I think the Google home thing that you brought up is really interesting because I think a lot of kids are going to grow up with. They might not even be using search. Right. They might be just using.
Stephen Lim [00:40:49]:
Your kids are going to go straight to chat GBT or Bard. I've been testing recently, forcing myself to use Bard as my default search instead of Google and comparing against things I recently searched, like, top whatever restaurants in a certain place. And it's like pretty good, 80% there. It's like pretty good already. And so just imagining it getting even better is like, where it came to it. Like, what you want to do next and stuff. Yeah.
Thomas Vu [00:41:13]:
That interface, the phone thing, the rabbit.
Stephen Lim [00:41:15]:
Yeah, I just saw that.
Thomas Vu [00:41:18]:
It's really fascinating.
Stephen Lim [00:41:21]:
That's effectively what that Bart abstraction is like, the aggregate. It's like basically instead of me opening up the 30 tabs, it does it and then it just aggregates it up until that level.
Thomas Vu [00:41:30]:
So dope was. And I'm sure Apple and Siri is going to do this, but effectively, when he demoed the sort of excel, he just took a picture of the Excel and he's just told it to. He just pulled whatever data out, like redid the tables.
Stephen Lim [00:41:48]:
This is what Bard and Chachi BT is already doing right now. But Bard, that's exactly how I want to use it.
Thomas Vu [00:41:54]:
But it's within a device where you're taking a picture. You're not taking a picture with Bard. Right.
Stephen Lim [00:41:58]:
Like necessarily, you can. You. Do you know how they have Google lens?
Thomas Vu [00:42:02]:
Yeah.
Stephen Lim [00:42:02]:
You know how you Google Google Lens and it's like, translate this thing or like, where do I buy this product? And it'll start doing that.
Thomas Vu [00:42:11]:
Is it on Apple yet or just Google right now?
Stephen Lim [00:42:13]:
It's a website. So you can just go to a browser. You go to.
Thomas Vu [00:42:18]:
Yeah, no, but I just think these interfaces are going to go to rapid iteration at this point because of AI. In the future, AI is going to be in everything, right? Let's just assume that your chair is going to have AI. It's just going to talk to each other. It's just going to know you so well, right? My daughters are all in. Everything is like, I showed it to them once and then they're just like, it's so easy, they won't remember a time before it.
Stephen Lim [00:42:51]:
You know one thing, because I don't.
Thomas Vu [00:42:53]:
Remember a time before, even though Internet, Internet was right before I went to college, I really don't remember a time.
Jason Yeh [00:43:01]:
Before Internet where you had all the information accessible. You just need to know what to do to search it. But now it's like, for kids growing up now. Yeah, for kids growing up now you don't even type and go to Google. You can just talk and say something, an incomplete idea, and then it will know exactly what you're talking about and find the thing that you're looking for.
Stephen Lim [00:43:17]:
There's one thing adjacent to this that it makes me think of that is an underlying aspect or an adjacent aspect where for all this stuff to work, it needs your data to work better. Now, there are some of our friends who are super data sensitive and they're know this is my data and they don't want the ads and they want Google to know all their stuff. So I'm in the Apple ecosystem. I'm like, you don't think Apple's doing this too? But our kids, not just on that stuff, but including social media, there's so much more natural. Sorry, transparency is so much more natural to them or a given, and we'll see of all the good, or they don't care about it, and we don't know the full extent of good or bad of that, but that's the norm. But it coincides with the data necessary for this stuff to work better. It's interesting because maybe this could only happen after the prerequisite of people being, okay, giving up their data, which is.
Thomas Vu [00:44:16]:
It'S just like a super accelerant that's going to happen. But the exciting part is, I think we all, anybody who thinks that phones are the final form of human interface is nuts, right? I've met people who are like, that's like, it's a stepping stone. It's weird because the first iPhone was 2007, right?
Stephen Lim [00:44:42]:
It's relatively not that long ago.
Thomas Vu [00:44:43]:
Yeah, it's really not that long ago. And I think it's going to get, I mean, neuralinks around the corner there's all this stuff that's coming and I think people are going to really be experimental. I think the rabbits just v one of and then the vision pro, all these interface tests are going to be just out of control and I'm super excited.
Brian Cho [00:45:06]:
It'll probably be like the Facebook's Ray bans, like something like that, right? Where it's like seamless and it's like all the.
Thomas Vu [00:45:12]:
Oh, yeah. Oh for mean again.
Stephen Lim [00:45:14]:
I wanted to be matrix. Put it all the way until it's a chip in my brain. And as long as I can trust that I'm not going to get hacked by some other country, go for it, go nuts. Just make everything easier for me.
Thomas Vu [00:45:26]:
There's going to be all those people who are like, not in my brain and there's going to be all the in my brain people. The divide, the great divide.
Stephen Lim [00:45:33]:
That's going to be the Borg and then everyone else. Free thinkers.
Brian Cho [00:45:36]:
Last question. Since we've been talking a lot about interfaces, have you guys seen anything new or exciting around the AI llm stuff? Is there anything from a game perspective that you think has really stood out that could be like a new type of genre or paradigm shift?
Thomas Vu [00:45:54]:
I think the most exciting for me in AI, and I think it's still under resourced and under invested, is robotics. I just think there's just not enough. I just think this is going to be such a game changer. I think I sent Stephen and some of our friends the robot that sort of hovers around your house, it's like a roomba that flies and there's no propellers. It looks like a metal gear drone. Make sure your house is safe. And I'm like, holy cow, this could be used for so many things, like out of control, right. I just think robotics is really excited on the game side.
Thomas Vu [00:46:42]:
I think the most exciting, I personally think that all the generative stuff is going to get to the ones that will survive will be multimodal because everybody just doesn't want to have to go to a text thing and an image thing and an animation thing. And I think it's going to be like one thing that does all of it, but it's likely going to be a race at the bottom because it's going to be trained on the same data. And I really do think it's going to be offline too. I think there's going to be stuff that's going to come out that's going to be so good, that's like on a two gig hard drive and you can use the entire information of the world without having to connect to Internet. I think that's one and two. I think the stuff that I think is going to be most interesting will end up being like coding. I think everybody's going to be really good at coding. I think your coders will get to ten x coders very quickly.
Brian Cho [00:47:41]:
Less developers need.
Thomas Vu [00:47:42]:
It takes no code to a different level. Yeah, no, it's going to be Banaz because code will be really clean. It would be like perfect. It would be totally scalable. You can literally do almost anything now. And it's like v 0.1. What's two, three years from now? I think that's what's going to happen. The biggest impact for gaming, for game.
Stephen Lim [00:48:13]:
Development, admittedly, this is a very stepping stone idea. Or what I'll mention is a stepping stone version of something that might manifest later. That our skeptical team, along with me, are closest to. Being excited about is what can we do to better use and process live data towards modifying the experience within our game? I'll just summarize that as like the concept of being a dungeon master or like a real time game design. Yeah, basically, normally we design the game and then the lag between their response and our iteration at best is what? Every other week of updates, right. But imagine live. Like, I know that Thomas went to go rob, like the bartender sends a bunch of quests, and now I and Brian go and raid Thomas because we know that he's not home. Because the quest giver told us that Thomas is doing something bad and doing something that a live dungeon master would do.
Stephen Lim [00:49:22]:
But obviously we cannot individually be there to host on all servers. But at AI could mimic those things or from a roster or a menu of quests or behaviors and push out on the people given certain triggers in the world. Something like that is more possible than ever before.
Thomas Vu [00:49:42]:
Yeah, within the game. I think a lot of it. I describe it as like personalization, which.
Stephen Lim [00:49:47]:
Is like, it's a version of personalization to me.
Thomas Vu [00:49:50]:
It's like the game knows you, the npcs know you. They not only know you, but they know you. And they might even know you from all your other games that you played. And then it becomes.
Stephen Lim [00:50:00]:
That's like the big, big version I'm doing, the little, little version that's Blade Runner. Right. What do we know you did in the last 24 hours? I'm at that level.
Thomas Vu [00:50:07]:
But yeah, no, I think all that's going to come for sure because it's actually, in many ways, even before all the AI craze. Google knows you, and Apple knows you, and Facebook knows you better than you know. Like, probably even subconsciously, if somebody asked me, what's my favorite color? I have a couple favorite colors, but I bet Google really knows what my favorite color is based on the pixels I click on with the ads that they put in front of me.
Stephen Lim [00:50:36]:
Just imagine your calendar of, like, your quest log. And then you tell Bard one day, like, google, I'm bored. And then it starts adding stuff to your itinerary and go, here, show up here, do this thing. And you don't know at some point which is real and which is made up for you and what it's coordinating between other people. How crazy is that?
Thomas Vu [00:50:56]:
Back in the day, they had that movie, I think, made a game that was.
Stephen Lim [00:51:01]:
Oh, the AR game. Yeah, it was around the game. I don't know if it was related to it, but remember the movie the game or Michael Douglas or something like that for his whole made up game, that version that you described, driven by AR.
Thomas Vu [00:51:15]:
If somebody is like, man, I'm feeling bored, plan me a. That's. We're not that far from that.
Stephen Lim [00:51:21]:
We're not that far that exists today. It's just. Okay, today it's just going to get better.
Thomas Vu [00:51:27]:
AI therapist is like, well, I booked you a flight to Cabo. You just have to show up the airport. The driver's there. I ordered doordash for you when you land. Literally. It can be all.
Stephen Lim [00:51:39]:
I can already do that today.
Thomas Vu [00:51:40]:
Yeah.
Stephen Lim [00:51:41]:
The only thing that stops it is, does it have my permission to do it right now? And pretty soon, those barriers will start reducing, and it will just start doing it as if it's normal.
Thomas Vu [00:51:49]:
Fine. I give up.
Brian Cho [00:51:51]:
What about npcs? Do you think people will ever build connections with npcs and fall in love?
Thomas Vu [00:52:01]:
Yes.
Stephen Lim [00:52:02]:
I mean, absolutely. The Blade Runner. Didn't they show that in Blade Runner? You already can see it. Right.
Thomas Vu [00:52:10]:
But look, even in single player games, I remember when I played Final Fantasy six or three in the US, it was pixels, and I legit cried in that opera house scene with the octopus. Yeah. Literally. People will connect with. I mean, people dress up as their favorite characters. They connect with them. They connect with shows. The whole illusion of entertainment is to fall in love with it.
Thomas Vu [00:52:41]:
And games are the best version of this, right? Games are like, you have to believe a game matters for it to be fun.
Stephen Lim [00:52:49]:
So, what's the takeaway from this conversation? Someone out there in your VR VC network, somebody make a pal world pet companion app that tells you what to do and is your buddy through adventures in life, go.
Thomas Vu [00:53:05]:
And, by the way, automatically funded even that way. We just said AI will know you better than you know yourself. It's 100% that some AI NPC is going to be so deeply resonant with you because it knows you better than you know yourself. Well.
Brian Cho [00:53:22]:
And then the other thing is, like what you guys said, these things could, in theory, last forever, right? So it's like they're basically living like a pseudo living thing at that point.
Stephen Lim [00:53:31]:
Did you guys watch her is happening? It's like the perfect example. Just go and hire Scarlett Johansson to voice Siri and then combine with Bard and win.
Brian Cho [00:53:43]:
Yeah, society's over.
Jason Yeh [00:53:45]:
All the single guys are going to be single forever because married to the NPC.
Stephen Lim [00:53:51]:
Isn't that already happening in Japan?
Thomas Vu [00:53:53]:
Yeah, and then baby incubators and all that stuff. There was that movie with Bruce Willis where everybody, they're in pods and they control, like, AI.
Stephen Lim [00:54:05]:
Yeah, this is super.
Jason Yeh [00:54:08]:
Film.
Thomas Vu [00:54:09]:
You know what I'm talking. That's why I'm like, the whole robotics thing. I'm very interested to see everything from Boston robotics to what Elon's doing. If you look at, I think, Amazon, most of the. I saw a video of a factory in Amazon. There was no people. It was all robots already.
Jason Yeh [00:54:29]:
Yeah.
Thomas Vu [00:54:30]:
And it was like, robots that were, like, robots and there were robots that were, like humanoids, just like, carrying around boxes.
Stephen Lim [00:54:37]:
Yeah. But we already know the limitation to this. All you got to do is walk 100ft away from a wall plug and you're good. Power is going to stop all this. Nobody worked on battery until they use.
Thomas Vu [00:54:47]:
Solar and then silver fusion.
Jason Yeh [00:54:51]:
Fusion. Cool. Well, yeah. Thank you guys for hopping on great conversation, and we'll figure out some other time to bring you guys back to chat about some other new fun topics. Maybe right after a couple of months after this vision pro actually launches and everyone uses my one.
Thomas Vu [00:55:11]:
We'll see what happens. Yeah.
Stephen Lim [00:55:12]:
You didn't have one on order, Thomas.
Thomas Vu [00:55:16]:
I was so lame.
Stephen Lim [00:55:17]:
Maybe Brandon got one.
Jason Yeh [00:55:19]:
We have one.
Thomas Vu [00:55:25]:
I'm. I'm getting a dev kit one, so I didn't need to get one.