The WAN Show - The DEATH of Cloud Gaming - WAN Show February 5, 2021

Episode Date: February 8, 2021

Start your build today at https://www.buildredux.com/linus Save 10% at Ridge Wallet with offer code LINUS at https://www.ridge.com/Linus Honey automatically applies the best coupon codes to save you money at different online checkouts, try it now at https://www.joinhoney.com/linus Check out Carpool Critics, our new movie podcast: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCt-oJR5teQIjOAxCmIQvcgA Timestamps (Courtesy of MattDog_222) 0:00 Intro with Google Stadia changing  1:49 Luke's take about Stadia 3:34 Linus's problem with what Google was doing 4:56 Talking about acquisition opportunities 6:38 Linus: The bigger problem with Stadia 8:24 One of the holy grail's of gaming: Fully destructible environments 9:50 Linus's prison escape simulator game idea 11:02 Game called "Teardown" discussion 11:53 The core idea of cloud gaming + Google lacking patience 13:26 Google's confusing mindset hypothetical example 14:22 Everyone knows games take a long time to develop (except Google) 16:05 GeForce Now has reached 6 Million members 16:48 Luke: Nvidia & Microsoft have good approaches 17:45 Xbox Series X example 18:40 Comparing to Nintendo Wii/Switch controller/accessory costs 19:59 Luke singing the song again + Linus trying to censor it live 20:26 Nvidia requiring companies to be transparent about RTX3000 specifications 21:57 Linus calling one of the writers about RTX3000 spec requirement 23:02 TDP not making much difference, but boost clocks are 25:01 Currently don't know much about the 80W vs. 150W (price, power usage, performance) 26:40 Luke enjoys Nvidia shooting themselves in the foot 27:44 What Linus thinks Nvidia needs (Intel like naming approach) 28:32 Is Linus still holding GME (Gamestop) stocks? (skip to 42:24) 29:05 Sponsor: Build Redux 30:28 Sponsor: Ridge Wallet 31:13 Sponsor: Honey 31:57 Luke tells us a story from his mom 34:18 Comparing old and current YouTube comments 36:23 Other people responding to comments for you 37:33 (Rumor) Apple VR Headset could cost $3,000 39:22 Linus worried about Apple's approach + How it might impact VR market 40:27 The Valve Index's VR problems comparison 42:24 Linus GME (Gamestop) stock update 44:34 (Floatplane chat) GPD video question 44:57 How Yvonne (wife) handled the GME stocks 47:28 Not LTT Store 48:14 LTTStore.com (New scarves) 49:54 Valve fined $4,000,000 on Steam controller 52:10 Linus: Gaming patents shouldn't last as long 54:18 NZXT Apologizes for safety issue on H1 case 56:30 Superchats 59:46 Linus's lifetime investments summary 1:02:17 Conclusion 1:02:41 Outro Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

and studios being closed so this was i mean this was everywhere in the gaming news so ours kataku uh gama sutra that is an amazing name for a website by the way um everyone's reporting on this google stadia google's game streaming service that allows people to play modern games without a powerful pc if you somehow hadn't heard of it, is changing the direction of its business. You know, the thing that's most kind of unbelievable about this to me, Luke, is Google taking a service that they just introduced and dramatically altering course. Yeah, or potentially just killing it off entirely.

Like, I'm getting whiplash. I'm getting whiplash here, you know? So Google is canceling multiple projects basically all of the games that it had slated for release beyond 2021 game studios in montreal and la will close impacting about 150 developers the company will apparently try to find them new roles at google though and they will now offer their stadia tech to tech publishers, allowing Stadia to become the streaming tech for other companies. So essentially white labeling the service. There were a number of games that were being developed by third-party developers that got

their funding pulled. So that's pretty sweet. And basically, okay, yeah, cool. So that's pretty much the gist of it. But let's talk about what this means. InputMag said, I think the company looked at the portfolio of original IP in progress and realized it was doomed to fail its first big test as a console maker, creating a mascot. That is a very interesting take. I have no idea why Alex Clark, one of our writers, decided to put that particular take in here. So why don't we just come up with our own takes? Luke, give me your first impressions on this. What's the takeaway? Yeah, I think they needed to buy something. They're talking about how they needed a killer app. They needed a mascot or whatever. Yeah, I think they needed to buy something. Microsoft

has done a lot of purchasing game studios and integrating those studios i think that would have made a lot more sense making them part of the xbox brand yeah yeah definitely i'm like leading with a very big foot in that direction um taking in companies like bethesda um and i don't remember all the names of them but some pretty like giant was it is arcane studios. I, sorry, I can't remember all the names of it right off the top of my head, but like they've made very big acquisition acquisitions in that space. Um, another thing that I think could have been a very large issue. Um, and I hate to, to, to throw sand in this guy's direction again, but, um creative director for sg and e which is what's being shut down um was alex hutchinson who was the guy who was basically saying that like streamers

need to pay game game development studios yeah um all while using a like stolen piece of art as his cover photo for twitter like it it was, it was terrible. And if that's the creative director for your company and what you really need to make this succeed is creative direction. I'm concerned that that trust may have been misplaced. Those are, those are my main two takeaways. They, they needed a thing. They needed a face for the platform and, and the person who is potentially making the face for their platform made one of the biggest negative splashes I've seen in the gaming space in a long time.

And the gaming space has some big negative splashes. Here's my big problem with what they were doing. And you mentioned Microsoft and the way that they've been going on a game developer acquisition spree um when you're google when you're google you have literally more than a hundred billion dollars in the bank why don't you just go like okay here here's a here's just this is totally totally off base and maybe totally ignorant but like how much is sega's like total market cap okay like what is what is sega worth uh market cap 3.8 billion and i don't think you even i don't think you even would have to acquire

a company for its market cap i don't remember what sort of the rough calculation there is. And I bet you Sega has divisions. Sure. Because I know Sega has like physical stores in Japan and stuff. So I don't think Google cares about that. Sega Sammy. I actually have no idea what Sega Sammy is. Sega Sammy Holdings.

Maybe that's it. Anyway, the point is, it doesn't matter. You have $ hundred billion dollars anything is for sale for the right price so whether it's you know one of those chinese developers right now that is absolutely knocking it out of the park i forget what article i was reading the other night but there's like a chinese adventure slash rpg game like kind of a breath of the wild clone. It's the second that I've heard about in the last like couple of months. That's apparently just-

Jonathan plays it. Oh no, it's a different one. It's a different one. This is a Chinese only one right now that like just launched and it's like crushing it. Like there's gotta be a game. And I realize acquiring Chinese companies is complicated. I'm just saying there has got to be

an acquisition opportunity right there. We just go in and you say, look, we need a flagship. Let's go. Obviously, you're not going to be able to buy a Mario or a Gordon Freeman or, you know, one of those very, very expensive IPs. Yeah, but you even OK, so just to interject right here, you mentioned Sega. And that's actually kind of interesting because when you and I were playing Anno over the weekend, I mentioned a company that was developing a Civ competitor game. Do you remember that? Yeah. I couldn't remember what it was called. It was called Humankind. And it's actually kind of interesting for this particular conversation because Humankind is being developed by Sega, or sorry, it's being developed by Amplitude Studios

and it's being published by Sega. Sorry, wrong way around. But it was like alpha or beta tested or something on Stadia, I believe exclusively. So they like sort of thought about working on it. But you need more than a 4X game. And a 4X game probably isn't going to be like the face of your studio yeah probably not so they like sort of dipped their toe in but like most people didn't even know about it and it really wasn't far enough to me

the bigger problem here is just that google is so so so that's one way that they could have so people are pointing out that buying sega wouldn't be allowed because the japanese government is extremely protective of japanese companies so okay fine i'm just saying i'm sure someone somewhere would have been willing to make a deal if they were to go try and find like a franchise to to make their own okay so failing that failing that they just had to not be such chicken Google does this all the time they go okay no really for real we're committed this time we're gonna do it this time and the pitch for Stadia like really the pitch for cloud gaming in general to me if you wanted to truly take off is that it

was supposed to deliver gaming experiences that were otherwise impossible and luke you and i have talked about this on the wan show a lot of times but there are truly gaming experiences like really massively multiplayer gaming experiences or like like with highly interactive environments for example that would simply not be possible with a client running on you know potentially unknown or or or sort of unequal hardware all over the world and then trying to synchronize through a server where you'd be far better off with the game world itself running on the server locally and then having everybody remoting into it and just like control and control clients uh yeah exactly well like exactly what stadia is so having thin clients that are just uh interacting with

this with this just enormous you know game world like I mean, so, you know, Luke, one of the holy grails of gaming would be fully destructible environments. And there are ways that you can kind of get close. I mean, I'd say the closest thing would be something like a Minecraft to a game with a fully destructible environment that is really core to the gameplay.

But that's a Lego game, essentially. And to be clear, I know there's way more depth to Minecraft than digital Lego. So many people just... Yeah. Okay, Boomer. Okay, Boomer. Yes, I know. What I mean to say, though, is that we're not...

When you destroy something in Minecraft, you're doing it block by block. You're not talking about objects physically interacting with each other in realistic ways. That's not what we're talking about. But with Stadia, that's something that if you threw enough horsepower at it, maybe you could actually do like that would be so cool. enough horsepower at it maybe you could actually do like that would be so cool yeah and they have a lot of like we i mean we had battlefield bad company um which did like a an amazing job at the time yeah when it's it's quite old now rainbow six siege same story slightly newer it's a certain amount of stuff that's destructible but it's often very limited and it's not only destructible yes exactly it's very limited what

you're talking about is like full-on destruction you can blow the building down if you need to i'm talking about like a like a prison prison escape simulator okay where literally you could have you know this mega prison of a thousand prisoners okay and it's this gaming experience where everybody you know kind of like a wow raid or whatever okay so everybody starts the game knowing that this is going to be a five or like a six hour round right and so it's it's like okay the prisoners have to manage to get like enough spoons or whatever and and and shanks and like there's this no i'm serious though okay no seriously i would i would probably play this you're laughing but i'm i'm serious like doesn't that sound like an amazing gaming experience and meanwhile so the guards are outnumbered you know

30 to 1 or whatever it is but they've got all these tools you could have all this voice chat and interaction you know kind of like among us you could have rules with respect to voice chat so you have to actually sit down like at a comms terminal in order to to move your guards around you'd have a limited number of views like an experience like proximity chat so the the guards and the prisoners can like beak each other and stuff exactly exactly uh apparently there's a game called teardown which is fully destructible so we can go have a quick look at that okay but that's that's built into the name so that's probably like all it is um okay that's my that's my concern looks very lego blocky as well okay so

i don't know enough about this game to comment on it teardown satisfying destruction okay so i don't know enough about this game to comment on it tear down satisfying destruction okay so i'd have to i'd have to have a look at this on i think i saw the creator talking about this on imager but yeah it's still very block based it's really cool very cool it looks it looks really cool the how the lighting interacts with things visual style is really nice yeah but you can still it's very chunky very blocky you can still see that which is i mean it's great it looks it looks sweet the reviews all look very very positive that's fantastic i'm happy for the people that made it um but like you see this car get shot by the helicopter and it's like it's it's cubes the point is the killer app for cloud gaming was supposed to be gaming experiences that

we couldn't otherwise achieve that That was the sales pitch. And what Google needed to do is understand that it was going to take time and have some patience for a change because they just can't do it. It's like they just can't do it. Okay, let's say, for example, that I had a Google-like mindset and I wanted to do something like develop a commercial property. The way that works is when and if you can acquire any land, which could take you years, you then have to create a proposal for how exactly you would do it. You have to get that approved by the city, which could take six months to two years. You have to get a bunch of due diligence done. You have to get an architect to design something. You have to get an engineer to

actually make it buildable. You then have to get the city to approve that again. Then you break ground. Then you have to get approvals and inspections at every phase in this process from actually deciding, you know what? I'd love to have like a building to operate my business out of to walking through the front door and like plugging in your laptop and sitting down and working is a process that can take anywhere from 36 to 72 months, realistically. Google's the kind of company that goes, you know what? We should have a really nice headquarters. Let's get started. Two years later, three years later, the work site is covered in bulldozers and a Google executive

shows up in a nice car, out and is like hey you know what this really isn't working out the way that we'd like sorry about that see you later like that's the way they are or or or they like they do something like even dumber and they'll just be like hey you know what great job guys keep it up we're gonna start another a mostly identical job site next door and we want you guys to compete with them and we're gonna see who goes the fastest because that's how you get the best product apparently like that's the it's just their mindset is so frustrating they had to know everybody knows i know and i'm i'm an idiot

when it comes to game development luke am i an idiot when it comes to game development luke am i an idiot when it comes to game development help me out here probably so am i there you go okay but do i know and do you know that developing a triple-a game takes five years if you're lucky but yeah yeah a lot of i mean look at uh starfield it's called starfield bethesda's new game um it was announced years ago it was announced in e3 2018 and people aren't expecting it to be coming until like the late 2020s um if we look at uh skull and bones i've been really really excited about this game for a long time uh its initial release date has been pushed back a few times. It's currently saying March of 2021.

This had a gameplay trailer in 2018. It had 23 minutes of gameplay shared with IGN in 2018. Games take forever. And what Google was theoretically trying to do was something that hadn't been done before. So optimistically, that was going to take 10 years. So instead of like launching based on that promise, they had to take a slower and steadier approach,

know that they were going to have to be reliant on current gaming experiences for a very long time and freaking stick it out because if they made the investment and if they pulled it off, it had the potential to be an absolute goldmine. As it is, they are getting their lunches absolutely eaten by NVIDIA. So meanwhile, some GeForce Now numbers here. Hold on a second. Where is it? GeForce Now. Ah, yes. Okay. So this is one of our other news topics. GeForce Now has reached 6 million members by its one year anniversary of coming out of beta. They've got over 175 million hours of games streamed. They now support over 800 titles with 30 new games coming this month.

And starting today, the Chrome browser has support for GeForce Now, and that's coming to Windows and macOS. The latest client also includes support for Macs with the Apple M1 chip through Rosetta 2. And I mean, it doesn't require the purchase of a console. You can use basically any controller you want it's extremely flexible this approach and microsoft's approach as someone put in here

under my thoughts i i think are much healthier and much better approaches um microsoft honestly has been winning a lot of hearts in the gaming side of things i think for a while now allowing people to play on multiple platforms. Yeah, cross-licensing the games. That's great, isn't it? Cross-licensing the games is amazing. Them making it so that you can play through the cloud, you can play through your computer,

you can play through your Xbox. They just want you to be able to play games. That is a much more... I'm at risk of using a wrong term for this, but it feels like a much more wh i'm at risk of using a wrong term for this but it feels like a much more wholesome approach to gaming than we've had for a long time from a lot of studios a lot of studios just seem to try to loot as much as they possibly can and just take from you everything and give as little back as possible yeah games um but microsoft seems to be at least spinning that around a little bit you can play on whatever platform you want.

It's better. Check this out, Luke. The Xbox Series X, in spite of the supply issues that have gamers understandably upset, the Xbox Series X has 8,500 reviews on BestBuy.com with an average rating of 4.8 stars. I mean, you can say, okay, you can say, yeah, Microsoft has been putting consumers first and has been trying to ditch an image of nickel and diming gamers for every last

penny. But look at this. Look at this. This is such a cool move. I mean, we talked about this a fair bit in the lead up to the launch of the Series X. Not only can you reuse your old controllers, which is so consumer and environmentally friendly, but they only charge you, if you don't have an old controller to use now, they only charge you 50 bucks US for a controller. Like that is one of the,

I remember being absolutely shocked because one of the first, actually the first game console I ever bought for myself as an adult was a Nintendo Wii. And the Nintendo Wii was, wasn't it like 250 bucks or something like that? Like the console itself was cheap. Yeah. But by the time you kidded yourself out with four Wiimotes, four classic controllers, and was there anything else in terms of accessories a pair of

switch controllers right now is a hundred canadian dollars um a single joy-con which like really isn't enough for almost anything is 53 canadian dollars the pro controllers are actually actually that's a third-party controller. Yeah, no, the Pro controllers are super expensive. They're like $100 Canadian dollars each. And a single Joy-Con is $40 US dollars. So hold on, let me find a Switch Pro controller in America here. America.

Here, do you think we can line this up? Okay okay 70 70 us dollars so microsoft's doing a great job of winning hearts and minds of gamers now all they need to do is have some of those game studio acquisitions pay off for them so they have some freaking uh platform exclusive games except they won't because they're finally respecting pc gamers which is super cool uh by the way luke okay so hold on i want you to we're gonna we're gonna try and time this okay so you gotta you gotta sing the song again i gotta try and beep you okay ready okay i'm saying the whole thing yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah go for it yeah yeah go for it i'm gonna get the timing right live live live censoring here we go okay you ready yep yep merica fuck yeah oh it doesn't work uh i cannot beep over top of you so that that's awkward. All right, cool. Why don't we move into our next topic here?

NVIDIA is requiring companies to be transparent about RTX 3000 specs. So the source here is The Verge. And yes, I know, I know. But actually, they've done a pretty good job of digging into this. NVIDIA previously... Okay, so if you don't know what's going on with rtx 30 series then you probably didn't watch the land show i think it was last week but in a nutshell there's like yeah there's well over a dozen different skews of these mobile rtx 30 gpus total like well over dozen. And even though you've only got like 3060, 3070, 3080, and then even Max-Q, Max-P, which is for performance, theoretically that's only six,

but there's like way more than that because there's all these different TDPs that they can run at. Now in the past, NVIDIA encouraged but did not require manufacturers of laptops to be transparent about the actual technical specifications of the GPUs that they were including. It is now completely mandatory. So this is a good step in the right direction, but he's not working. So he really doesn't have to take my call. I'd actually love to have one of my writers join us for this conversation, um, because this doesn't necessarily completely solve the problem. Hold on a second. Let's just see if he picks up. Hello? Hey, I know you're not working right now, but do you want to talk for a couple minutes on

the WAN show about sort of a near and dear to your heart topic? Sure. If you're busy, it's fine. It really is fine. No, I'm just driving right now. Okay, chill. All right, so we're talking about NVIDIA now requiring companies to be transparent about their RTX 3000 specs, right? So they actually have to disclose the TDP.

Now, do you want to share with me a little anecdote that I was on my way to the bathroom and Alex's desk is right next to the bathroom. It's not as bad as it sounds. He actually chose that desk because it has more space, you know, and it's fine. We have actually a pretty, it's a pretty solid door. So you can't hear too much grunting. Anyway, the point is i walked past his desk and he tells me this story so go ahead hit us with the story oh well i don't know if this is valid anymore because it turns out that the bios was just broken on both of them it was like amd's bios rollout was just garbage but as of the last time that i tested the 80 watt tdp uh 3080 had about four fps less

than the 150 watt one and they're both boosting to about the same core clocks thereabouts it kind of just depends on like the thermals it seems has nothing to do with like the actual tdp right okay so basically what we had learned but now we are apparently not sure if it's 100 true uh so we're gonna have to get back to you guys on that one is that even though you might get an rtx 3080 whatever, okay, so that's like the TDP, it seems like the actual performance, like we've seen with even their desktop GPUs over the last number of years,

really comes down to the GPU boosting to whatever the heck it wants, and that's what you're gonna get. So if you go and you throw like a 150-watt thermal solution on an 80-watt 3080, you might actually get very similar performance to if you put a 150-watt thermal solution on a quote-unquote 150-watt 3080.

But I guess that kind of makes sense. Do we think that maybe... Yeah, go ahead. I should also say that the 80 watt one was a lot louder when it was doing that that was like fans cranked and overclocked in the asus like tuning thing it was more like nine fps lower so i think it was like 81 fps versus 90 on overclocked but it's the sort of thing where like if you want performance you can just turn the fans up and it's there right and then you just also have a much thinner lighter

laptop yeah okay all right thanks alex you have a good weekend all right so what we don't know though is if there's some kind of price difference for laptop manufacturers and if there's some kind of power advantage like um i mean power consumption advantage to getting one of these like 80 watt versus 150 watt chips so maybe there's some binning that's taking place either way what we're learning is that there is still a lot more to learn about mobile RTX 3000 series. This is not something that has been simple, clearly, for NVIDIA and their partners to work into mobile devices. There's a couple more news items here. NVIDIA says, we are requiring OEMs to update their product pages to the Max-Q technology features for each GeForce laptop,

as well as clocks and power, which communicates the expected GPU performance in that system. So it's a step in the right direction, but based on Alex's anecdote about finding that if he just turned it into boost mode or whatever Asus calls that on that particular model, mode or whatever asus calls that on that particular model uh the performance completely changes we just we just don't really know exactly what we're dealing with until we have an industry-wide measure that's like uh you know however many fortnite fps's or and i i don't know what that would end up looking like so the verge referencesge references how their MSI GP66 Leopard with an RTX 3070 was able to outperform an MSI GS66 Stealth with an RTX 3080

and that it would not be possible to tell that from specs alone. So they're keeping an eye on it. We're going to be keeping an eye on it, but there's part of the problem. I'm sure you'll hear more about this on WAN Show in the future. This has been an ongoing conversation.

I do enjoy how they like, NVIDIA has been like repeatedly shooting themselves in the foot with all these like weird naming setups. And their end result of that was like, we're requiring the other companies to be transparent about the performance. Like just pushing so much responsibility onto other people i understand like they do i i think it is the right move i just find the wording around it kind of funny um because it it makes it kind of sound like it was something wrong the

whole time yeah yeah yeah it has nothing to do NVIDIA releasing more than a dozen SKUs across three different model names. Not having a clear difference, you know, in the in the actual product marketing. So, you know, good job, NVIDIA. Glad you're sort of working on fixing this up. I wish you had made it more clear in the first place. I mean, honestly honestly what we really need is and as this is going to sound crazy i'm about to sound crazy luke are you ready for insanity yeah what we really need is nvidia to take a more intel like approach to their product naming i know i'm sorry but intel actually has this figured out with different suffixes for different TDPs.

Yeah, U is like super ultra low power and F has no onboard GPU or whatever. And like T is low power, but like desktop. Like they have, I mean, I think they've kind of broken some of their naming schemes, but. They were trying though with Q and sort of P, unofficial P. Yeah yeah it's just that they

like went and introduced way more skews than they had suffixes and now we have this problem yeah uh some people in chat are asking about whether i am still holding uh i'm still holding gamestop so hold on a second let me let me just i'm in hodling diamond diamond hodling diamond diamond hands baby um luke do you want to talk through our next topic while i while i while i demonstrate the people what's going on the someone that works with luke's mom thing yeah sure so i gotta i got a phone call no wait wait i gotta i gotta make money first to make up for this uh let's let's get our let's get our sponsors Let's get our sponsors going. Oh, the show is brought to you today by...

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They get a small commission from the sites where they save you money. So it's free to use and installs in just two clicks. Oh no, I just closed the doc. So the point is, go to joinhoney.com slash Linus, get honey. Yay. All right. Luke. Yes. Tell us the story. Tell me a story, Luke. So my mom calls me. Was this last night? I think this was, I think this was either last night or Wednesday night. And she sounds very distraught on the phone. She sounded very concerned.

It sounded like she had maybe done something or something had happened. And she was, she was worried about me. Like, you, you know, that, like that tone that sometimes mothers get. Yep. So I knew something was wrong and I was asking her what was wrong. And apparently her and a lady at her work got in a little, little bit of a, I believe purely verbal altercation. And I guess my mom being a proud mom has talked about me a bunch at work. So this this other lady said, more or less, and I'm I, I cannot possibly quote here. So these

are not the words that were said. Yeah. Meaning as I I'm hopefully going to get the meaning across. My sons are good at computers too. I'm going to get them to like go on the internet and like leave mean comments for your son to like try to get back at my mom, which to me felt like they were having like a classic elementary schoolyard battle. My dad could beat up your dad

yes so what i have to say to the the alleged sons that are sicked at me is that hopefully you're enjoying the wanshow uh if you do leave a bad comment i'm probably not going to see it anyways um and i'm sorry about your crazy mom but hopefully you have a good weekend and you enjoy the way yeah you have a you you have a good one you have a good one hopefully he's going that is so brutal like i just she was so concerned about like these internet comments i'm like man i've been on the internet as a public figure for like 10 years now i don't care i think pretty much everything's been said okay i don't think there's anything that could be said to you at this point luke that you've never heard either from a comment on the internet or from me during

an annual performance review all right so i was gonna say especially i feel like especially early on when we first started you were quite and i feel like it was more important back then, because I feel like the internet was like more vicious and brutal back then. But you used to kind of like help toughen people's skins a little bit. I did. Get them, get them ready. And I, yeah, there's not, there's, you're not gonna, you're not gonna bother me too much on the internet anymore. Our community was markedly more brutal. you're not gonna you're not gonna bother me too much on the internet anymore our community our community was markedly more brutal actually in the early days like we're at the point now where like you go back and look at like early comments on an ltt or like an ncix tech tips video from eight nine ten eleven years ago especially the earlier ones actually let's go

back oh man how long have i been doing this holy crap time go back like 11 12 years ago you know the the comment section is just full of like oh look at this guy what a or whatever right like it's it's just every other work for that one yeah exactly those comments especially used to be very common yeah and it's like a i don't even find that particular word insulting because no it was just very common yeah what even does it mean it's like okay yes and uh yeah even if i was yes and so what so so there's that um but there's also just like just how how relentless the attacks were back then nowadays i feel like we've fostered an environment where it's people just kind of know they know a don't bother because they don't care at all and b um you know that's not cool right like it's i feel like

there's also another interesting internet thing that i think has evolved is there's a lot of defenders now that's true white knights um and i don't even mean that in a negative sense i don't even mean in a negative sense white knights are everywhere like yeah and like pretty intense ones there's there's i have seen comments a fair amount of times where i'll it'll happen on twitter too someone will like tweet something at me and i'm like okay i can't really respond to this because like it's about me or something and if i defend myself on this it's's just going to be stupid no matter what. And I can't just tell this person they're dumb. So like, I can't really do anything. And then someone like responds to the tweet and just tears them apart. And I'm like, I didn't even have to do

anything. That was great. And I can't respond to that person or like their tweet and say, thank you. I can't do anything. But like, I just silently appreciate it. And that's become, I feel like, very common these days. Just a quick heads up, guys. There's some people who seem very confused. The word I used was a single syllable. So it sure as heck didn't start with an N. Let's be real A-plus clear about that, okay?

Thank you. I have no room for that particular word in my life, never mind my vocabulary. All right, so let's go ahead and move on to our next topic here. Rumor, Apple's VR headset could cost three grand and have 8K displays. RC Mail posted this on the forum and let's run you through the details here could feature two 8k displays and have a

price tag of yeah three grand man i mean well with that said it's not like valve didn't release the index and like that's doing great apparently at, at $1,200. So if... Oh, people will buy it. No question. Yeah. No question. No question whatsoever. At least one model is expected to have 12 cameras for AR and hand tracking. That's crazy.

The headset will also have a LiDAR sensor to quickly generate a 3D map of your room, which is actually creepy, but super cool at the same time. Hopefully that's all local. Apple is still testing various input methods, including things worn on your fingers, reading body movement and a knob in the headset. Don't know what that's about, but yeah. I mean, that would be super cool.

We've said countless times on the wan show yeah that apple is very happy you know exactly where i'm going apple is very happy to to watch a bunch of people break into a new segment and trudge through the beginning of it and then come in and be like here you go here's the ready for market one um so yeah i would i would love to see this come out and i would love to see it do really well that would be very good for vr as a whole um like however much you like or dislike apple it like doesn't matter because if they bring this to market it does really well that will bring other things to market that will also do really well this would be very good for vr as a whole i still i worry about apple i i are i don't worry about apple apple's fine i just mean i worry that apple's approach will not win me over i mean they just they've shown time and time again

a disdain for gamers if they popularize it yeah there's like, we, we see this all the time. Like some, some, a few random companies will make some janky things. And we're like, these are cool, but they're not there yet. And then Apple will make it and it'll be there now.

And everyone will clone it. And it'll be better in a lot of ways, but it could actually be worse in a lot of ways. You know, like the whole notch trend thing that i really wish never happened um fair yeah that's true yeah yeah i don't know i still think it's i'm still rooting for good because i think a lot of what vr needs right now is just more market adoption sure that's fair it just needs more people to start using it more and more and more and more people just need to start using it and we'll get better solutions because like even the index and see this is why this is why all the

vr subreddits and stuff hate me even the index as fantastic as it is is pretty rough yeah it's not perfect oculus's lenses are so much better than valves um it's heavy the speakers are great those speakers are like the speakers are fantastic the mic is like unbelievable really good it's unbelievable that blew my mind absolutely blew my mind yeah um there's there's some things that are really good about it but you still need to like drill a bunch of stuff into your walls yeah and it's like steam vr updates can be really clunky and you know when you decide okay i'm gonna play vr you don't just throw on your headset and go you gotta i gotta because mine's on mine's on my tv so i gotta go get my like remote control like headset or handset thing i gotta like log into windows i gotta open up steam okay technically

you can just turn on the controller and it'll it'll fire up uh but it it like sometimes it doesn't work properly or i'll get into beat saber people start up on their computer first and like one of my sabers is stuck on the floor even though it works when i like go into the menu it's tracking just fine but then the game doesn't have it and i gotta i gotta restart the entire steam vr thing in order to get it working like these these early adopter growing pains are like they're still there it's been three years yeah four years or whatever it's a great experience and and that's awesome and whatnot but like it's just it's not 100 there you still have to map your room out by walking around it with a controller so you have all these like hard edges and it can't deal with um oddly shaped rooms very well it has issues with reflections there's like all this stuff that like yeah we do need to eventually

get over um and it's great right now but yeah there's there's so much better in the future there will be so much better people are asking about the update on my holdings so i didn't end up going all in 50k on gamestop i bought thirty thousand dollars of gamestop and then ten thousand dollars of amc so which is another meme stock and then 10 of bcrx which i actually bought because I thought it was a meme stock, but actually it was one that was reasonably well-researched. So, so far then, the biggest loss has been GameStop. I would show this to you guys, but I think I can't actually focus on it anyway, and it's kind of hard to look at. Also, the market value is not working correctly on my app for whatever reason. I don't know. I'm

sure someone can fix this. So you can see the 30,000 is there. So I'm diamond hands holding. I told you guys that I'm going to ride it into the ground. So, you know, for me, it was not about thinking that I was going to be getting rich quick or anything like that. Frankly, I didn't need to gamble the money. I actually have a job where I make really good money. So I didn't need like, like an investment lottery ticket, effectively. For me, this was more

about the movement that was happening, being on the right side of history at this time, I really do believe wealth inequality is the biggest problem facing us as a society right now. So, you know, for me, there was only there was only good outcomes. Good outcome number one was, hey, it turns out they're right to the moon. Okay, cool. And we could have found something cool to do with the money. Maybe we maybe we donated or something, you know, we'd figure something out. Maybe we host like a really cool event that we don't even try to make a profit on, but people can come and participate. I don't know what it would be, we'd find something to do. Or good or good outcome. Number two was some wealth got

redistributed. There you go. Um, so I, I saw it as kind of like a donation to people who were investing in this thing cause they really needed it. Uh, and you know what, maybe it ended up going to the hedge funds anyway. I don't know, but one way or another i i i felt i don't know i felt compelled i felt like i needed to participate i enjoyed the memes um homie kp over in floatplane chat says hey i saw the gpd video is the new one worth the weight or should i go with the max really want to emulate ps1 and a few gamecube games man it's the new one is like sick um wait i saw the gpd video you mean the like most recent one that i thought that was the gpd max there's the win three i don't remember whichever one the last one we did is it's sick it's sick

it's like sick go for it uh people are like wife talk please okay so she wasn't thrilled with me doing it without talking to her. But the reality of it is that, you know, once we talked about what I was doing and that I wasn't just like going crazy and buying into some get-rich-quick scheme, she facilitated getting the account all set up. She got me the credentials. She helped me through the whole process because transferring money from one bank to another is not always something you can do electronically.

So she's like, yeah, okay. She watched the kids for me while I went and got the checks from the office and went to the bank and deposited it and like helped me get it all going. She put time aside to help with it because like we're good. Like we joke a lot about you know oh you

know what has he done now you know she might be mad ha ha ha i really liked the sleeping on the couch tweet that you made yeah yeah i was obviously joking i have never slept on the couch in my entire 15 year relationship with that lady and neither has she we have a hard and fast rule, you do not go to bed angry. We've definitely been up till five in the morning from time to time. But we have always slept in the same bed. And we have always stuck to that belief. So that's what it is all about when it comes to maintaining a relationship we've found. Hey, yeah, McNuggets got it right. My luckiest moment in life was meeting Yvonne. Not just that, but you know, I we don't take for granted that we had the we had the the the privilege of meeting each other extremely young, you know, so we met each other when we were 19. And not everybody,

not everybody finds the one that fast you know neither of us had to waste a lot of time if yeah if and i don't mean waste time i mean sometimes you know we look back and we go you know how maybe it would have been maybe it would have been fun to to date for a while and stuff or you know have a more wild and crazy university experience or or whatever you know it's sure more wild and crazy university experience or whatever. You know, it's sure. Yeah, maybe that would have been fun. It's not really my style.

Luke's laughing. Yes, yes. I'm I'm very I'm I'm pretty conservative. Yes, Luke. But the point is, the point is sometimes you can't help but think about those things. But I definitely have no regrets whatsoever i'm i'm glad it worked out this way uh oh speaking of being glad things worked out this way oh i just put an lttsore.com i'm afraid of whatever that is oh does that does that exist that's gonna going to exist very soon, I'm sure.

It's available. Only twelve hundred Canadian dollars. Oh, OK. Yeah, don't. That's a stupid thing to do. If you're going to if you're going to like spend money on that for the memes, please don't. Please do something useful with that money.

Like buying GME. I was going to say, I'm kidding. I'm kidding. I'm not a financial advisor. I'm just a smooth brain ape. I have no idea what I'm doing. That's the boilerplate disclaimer for that, right? Okay. Don't really, for real, don't do either of those things, okay? Don't throw your money away. All right. If you want to throw your money away, do it on lttstore.com. Guys, these are sick.

We finally have them. We've got... Okay, here. How do I, no, not that one. Oh, uh-oh, what'd I just move? I think I just moved a thing. Where's the one I want to move? Where's the thing I want to move? Oh, there we go, there we go, there we go. Okay, here we go, here we go. Let's make it a little smaller. Storage and RAM for those cold days, $39.99. That's right ladies and gentlemen we have ltt store scarves see look it's got a little notch for the m.2 it's got the nand chips on there the dram cache it's got the see check it out sarah oh hey sarah's modeling the uh the m.2 one look at that hey lloyd's up in there lloyd designed this one look at look see it good for, it's good for casual. I'm probably the most casual looking one here.

It's good for like a business casual. It's good for more businessy. That still looks pretty casual. The point is it looks great. And the Ram one. So we've got orange and dark gray. Look at this guy. What a majestic specimen.

Isn't that fantastic? Ioyd did a fantastic job if you already have one of the toques or beanies uh it's a very similar material we're working with the same supplier we've been extremely happy with them you guys are going to want to get in on this i know it's a little late on for the winter season but hey you know it's always winter somewhere hitting winter now yeah exactly exactly so go check them out lttstore.com uh what else we got uh oh man uh valve was fined four million dollars in a steam controller patent case uh corsair got him so ironberg inventions the ip holding arm of scuff who who Corsair recently acquired, made the argument that the Steam controller contained the same rear-side control surfaces that they had just patented. Interestingly, Microsoft used the same implementation of back paddles on the Xbox Wireless Elite controllers,

but they licensed the patent from Corsair for $6 million, which Valve could have done because they have enough money to buy the Earth and all the heavens. They just decided not to. So, now they've had to pay, I think it's $4 million, which Valve could have done because they have enough money to buy the earth and all the heavens. They just decided not to. So now they've had to pay, I think it's $4 million in damages. And that may not be entirely the end of it. Don't quote me on that. Um, one thing that was really interesting about this was just that there's a lot of patents in the game industry from Sega's patent on in-game directions to Nintendo's patent on the D-pad, which is interesting because it might actually explain why Xbox D-pads suck so bad. So if it's a unique feature that can be monetized, you can pretty much bet that game developers will

try to protect it. In this case, I think Scuf was extremely reasonable about it. They wrote a letter to Valve explaining their belief that the rear controllers were an infringement and apparently valve just like went ahead with it anyway um so there you go yeah there there was um i believe it was a trattant trattant poll patent troll situation but a while ago i remember talking on the land show about uh there was like someone had patented the idea of having a mini game during loading screens because like console loading screens back in the day i haven't played much console lately but it might still be not great uh but it used to be horrible i remember trying to load morrowind on the original xbox was like an ordeal like one of the worst parts about dying

was like the fact that you'd have to load the game again, not the fact that you lost your save necessarily. You have to launch the game again. It would take so long. So yeah, the idea of having like, I don't know, even Snake running during those loading screens was patented. So like there was like one game that had it

and it was really cool. And I was like, wow, this would be awesome. This would be really great when everyone starts doing this and then just nothing and it it sucked but i do kind of feel like in gaming um patents should probably not be quite as long as they are in other industries because it moves so fast. I mean, what was the, what's the patent expiry standard? 20 years. So in the United States for utility patents filed on or after June 1995, it's 20 years from the earliest filing date. So like 20 years, what was happening in gaming in 2000? That would have been Xbox. That would have been first generation xbox is how long we would have to wait for something like that or something like a better d-pad design to start to make its way out into the general market that's pretty rough and that

assumes that they don't manage to extend the or renew the patent in any meaningful way and like i'm all for having the opportunity to make money based on your innovations that absolutely matters but especially if it's being utilized in a way that has no appreciable impact on your business whatsoever it's it's pretty it's pretty rough i mean i would make the argument at this point that the xbox does not really compete with the nintendo switch and microsoft and nintendo can you think of a way that they really go toe-to-toe anywhere i mean yeah not really i can't think of that many people that are like oh man i don't know which one i'm going to get, a Switch or an Xbox. It's either, am I going to buy a Switch or not? Or am I going to buy an Xbox or a PlayStation?

Yeah, like in a sense, they're both competing for some chunk of your disposable income. Yeah. But to me, they're not two sides of the same coin. They're completely different wallets. It's different currencies. So it just feels like there's got to be a better way to do it. Unfortunately, I'm just one of those people who is finding a problem,

not one of those ones who's suggesting a real viable solution. In our final news item for the day, NZXT has apologized for the safety issue around their h1 case the h1 will be removed from the nzxt store after gamers nexus proved that the nylon screw fixed so basically they had a pci express riser in there that didn't have a big enough keep out zone around where it screwed in so the screw could actually accidentally if it like scratched the surface of the PCB, like the epoxy that's on there or resin or whatever it is, if it scratched it, it would actually contact the copper underneath. And that was a 12 volt portion of the PCB. So it would just short and could potentially start a fire.

they fixed it with a nylon screw instead of a metal screw. But Steve from Gamers Nexus made the, I think, compelling point that the nylon screw is only a fix as long as the user keeps that nylon screw forever. So if the original owner resold that case, for example, a new owner might not realize how important that is or might look at the nylon screw and go, oh, that's a crappy nylon screw. I'm going to get a better metal one, which could allow it to short, turning to heat, and then, well, potentially causing a fire.

So anyone who previously requested a nylon screw kit will be sent the NuFix, which is an updated riser assembly that should resolve the issue of exposed traces on the PCB once and for all. Steve from Gamers Nexus is still critical of how long it took NZXT to properly solve this problem. But it seems like this new solution should be the last one that is required. I am happy that they actually resolved it. That's cool. Yeah, me too.

Yeah, me too. Because like for me, it's rough. Like it puts me in a bad position where like we've worked with NZXT and the last thing we want is a bunch of like sponsor spots, not just moving forward, but even like past ones, promoting a company that is not taking care of its users. That's not something that we stand for. And so, you know, for us, we need,

well, it's just, yeah, it's that simple. We need our advertising partners to do the right thing in these cases. Yeah, yeah. All right, that's pretty much it. Other than going through some super chats. Austin asks, when are new beanie colors coming? Need more to tame the COVID hair.

You know what? I don't know if we have any other colors planned at the moment. I mean, it's a matter of time. At some point, we'll probably do it, but I don't know right now. Lucky says, we have motherboards and CPUs

that are interchangeable. Why not graphics cardboards with various memory slash connector configuration? So it's been done way back in the day. The truth is that it's just not worth changing. In most cases,

it would add so much more cost and complexity to the design of the board. And in most cases, a GPU was designed specifically around the memory technology that it's going to go with. And the industry moves fast enough that by the time you're ready to upgrade that to some new memory technology, that new memory technology is going to be faster or higher density than that GPU could really take advantage of anyway. So you might as well just upgrade the whole board

at the same time. Joe asks, what is the best way to support you both? I love the content. Used to be a floatplane OG, but missed a payment. Floatplane is definitely the best way to support us both. You should also still be a floatplane OG if you resubscribe. I mean, yeah, it definitely wouldn't fall with

one payment i there might be a system that eventually takes it away if you don't pay for like a really long time but like if yeah if you miss one payment you're not you're not out of the game um so yeah if if it if it stays an issue just contact support uh gabriel gray says uh bought at 16 for a game stop uh covered at 38 the rest at 372 if i'd held i'd have had 150k after taxes and fees dang still ended up with 90 so hey there were some people out there who really did make out like bandits on that whole thing um anw says you were talking about the process and time of developing commercial property. What are the odds that LMG Floatplane hires enough staff that you need to move to a larger space and would you want to build it? Man, I wouldn't want to build anything. One of the

problems that we have as an utterly unique sort of new wave company, like new media is that there's nothing really designed for us. So it's definitely something the reason I know all those timelines is because it is something that I've looked into. And we are starting to feel the squeeze of our current space. That's why we have five units now instead of three, which is what we started with. But I that's not something that I would promise or commit to in any way. It would be an incredible amount of work. Hey, thanks, Admiral Bro Code. And, oh, Asagir says,

have you tried any of the new synthetic badminton shuttles that are not classic nylon? I've seen a lot of articles about it, but availability seems to be worse than GPUs. Yeah, I'm super excited to try it. I have not tried it. I've only used feather and nylon so far. I would love to try the synthetic feather ones.

So that's it for the WAN show, you guys. Thank you very much for tuning in. Oh, that's great, Righteous Weevil. What a great comment to squeak in at the end. I'm graduating with my computer information systems degree this semester, and your content was super helpful and entertaining. Heck yeah. JM asks, Lin linus where would you invest if you had just 50 000 us dollars i would invest in my business linus media group or one of my other businesses like creator warehouse inc or a float

plane media inc those those are the best businesses for me to invest in because any business, whether it's a private firm and you had you had no way of you have no way of knowing about or or controlling and all you can do is react to them but that's the difference when you invest in your own business you're the one at the at the wheel you can steer the ship and that's something that as an entrepreneur i believe in very strongly. Up until my GME investment, the only investments that I had ever made in the past were I dabbled with OCZ and NVIDIA back like a thousand years ago. Yeah, true story. I bought NVIDIA at $18.

If I had just, instead of pulling it out and then leaving it- You would have diamond-held NVIDIA? If I had diamond-held NVIDIA, I'd be in great shape. It would also be an enormous conflict of interest, so I couldn't have done it. But, you know, that doesn't mean you don't look back and go, oh, gee, what if?

So, like, way back in the day, like, I don't know, like almost 15 years ago. And then I bought some crypto back in 2018. That didn't work out great for me. And the thing is I went 10 years without investing I bought some crypto back in 2018. That didn't work out great for me. And the thing is, I went 10 years without investing because I basically see it in a lot of ways as gambling. There are ways to do a lot of due diligence, but there also is an element of gambling involved.

And that's not something that I... I've always been a one in the hand versus two in the bush kind of guy. And then I didn't stay true to that. And then I regretted it. And I was like, okay, yep. Now I know, I know this. I'm, I'm just, I come in too late.

I get out too late. That's what I know about me. Um, or I get out too early sometimes, you know, with the Nvidia thing. And then the last investment that I've ever made in my life was the, the meme stuff that I just talked to you guys about. And that was only because I told you guys I'd do it, not because I expected to make any kind of money. So yeah, that wasn't really. That wasn't like a financial forecast profit decision. Yeah, that was not I was not about

making money for sure. Yeah. Yeah. All right. So that's it. Thanks, you guys very much for tuning in. We'll see you again next week same bad time same bad channel and yeah alexander fl comments i forgot i had float plane quality much better here wow heck freaking yeah you guys gotta get float plane yo yeah bye you didn't run the intro by them I'm running it now I Run it after you say bye. No at the beginning of the show. I totally forgot Let's see You