Gemini, GTA, and the search for the next big thing
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Welcome to the Verge Cast, the flagship podcast of Vaporware. I'm your friend David Pearce, and I am almost done Christmas shopping. As I'm recording this, it is December 16th, Monday, which means it is nine days until Christmas.

And if I'm being honest with you, it's a record for how far in advance I'm done holiday shopping. I don't recommend living this way, but here we are. Also, thank you to everyone who sent in recommendations for like cheap stuff to buy for acquaintances and secret Santa gifts. A bunch of you recommended power banks, which I think is an awesome idea. So I'm getting a lot of people like nifty little batteries to carry around. Also, some people recommended lottery scratchers. Super good idea.

Candles was one that came up a bunch, and I'm sort of conflicted. Candles are awesome. I have them everywhere. But is that like too intimate a gift to give to a semi-stranger or just a random person at work? I don't know, but I'm going to try it. We'll see how it goes. Anyway, lots coming up on the show today. We are going to do two things. This is our last Tuesday episode of the year where you take a little break around the holidays.

But we have a really fun episode coming up today. First, we're going to talk about the Google stuff from last week. Google made some big announcements about Gemini and AI and kind of showed off its entire vision for the future of everything in a way that I thought was really fascinating. So we're going to talk about that with V-Song and Kylie Robison. And then we're going to talk about video games. So Ash Parrish came on the show a few weeks ago and said the biggest story in games this year is two things that haven't launched yet.

And I think that's fascinating. So I asked Chris Grant, who is our group publisher and was the editor-in-chief of Polygon, to come on and talk about what that means and where we're headed and why the biggest story in video games is two things that don't exist yet. All that is coming up in just a second.

But first, I have to tell you really quick before we take a break about our CES show. So on Wednesday, January 8th, if you're going to be in Vegas for CES, we are doing a live Verge cast at 5 o'clock at the Brooklyn Bowl, which is at the Link Hotel, which is the one with the big Ferris wheel, like right in the middle of the strip in Vegas.

It's going to be free to come. Super exciting. We're going to do some fun stuff. It's like a weird, huge concert venue that is slightly intimidating, but I think it's going to be very fun. You should come out. Put it on your calendar. It's free. It's going to be super fun. We would love to see as many of you as we can in Vegas Wednesday, January 8th. I'll put the link to the thing in the show notes. By the way, it says you have to be a SkyMiles member to get in.

Don't worry about that. We'll figure it out. I'm not worried. It's going to be fine. Anyway, come to the Vegas show. Come see us at CES. Very excited to hang out with all of you. Lots to get to today. So let's just get into it. All that is coming up. We have to take a break. This is The Verge Cast. We'll be right back. Support for The Verge Cast comes from Stripe.

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Welcome back. All right. It is mid-December and there is still AI news happening, which if you want to know anything about what 2024 has been like, there it is. Let's just get into it. So

Last week, Google, over the course of a couple of days, made a couple of different announcements. It announced Gemini 2.0, its new flagship AI model that is going to kind of underpin everything that Google's doing. And then the next day, it announced Android XR, which is basically Google trying to do for headsets and smart glasses what it did for smartphones. Somebody is going to be the big cross-platform operating system that all the hardware makers use to make these headsets and smart glasses. Google is going to be the big cross-platform operating system that all the hardware makers use to make these headsets and smart glasses.

Google would very much like that to be Google. So Android XR, Gemini 2.0, somewhere in the combination of those two things, I think is the future of Google, or at least is what Google thinks is the future of Google. So I asked two of the people who covered both sides of this, V Song and Kylie Robinson, to come on the show. And the three of us are going to try to figure out how to put this Venn diagram of news together into what Google is up to and thinks might be the future. So let's just get into it.

V-Song, hello. Hello. Kylie Robinson, hello. Hello. Okay, I have brought the two of you here together because you have had a rarefied experience individually, which is that you got...

a wacky Google demo. And there are very few things in life as a tech journalist more fun than a wacky Google demo in which you get walked through a bunch of stuff that might not be real. It might not ship. It might not even be the thing that you thought it was, but someone made it and they're really excited to show it to you. And I also think

Between the two of you, you got like kind of Google's whole vision for the future of everything. And so I just want to like see if we can put all of these pieces together between us. But first, for the people who don't get to do these demos, I just want you to both like explain the days you had with Google a little bit. Let's just do it chronologically. Kylie, you go first. Sweet. Yeah. So I got to demo Project Astra and Project Mariner. So they're both kind of...

agents. I heard you say in the last Verge cast that you think Project Astra is kind of their whole vision for Gemini in the future. So I would agree with that. Yeah, they locked me in a library hidden on campus and they showed me a bunch of art on TVs and they asked Astra to talk about that. And yeah,

Yeah, it was really excited to talk. It would interrupt the speaker sometimes. She had a really Bebo who she was really excited to show me and the AI was more excited to be shown. But yeah, you know, I got some on rails demos. Something I didn't include in the story is they had this book called

you know, about France. And then she flipped through the pages and asked it to remember each page. And then she showed some wine that was on the table and was like, okay, like,

Fair enough.

And then Project Mariner is just like a typical agent, a Chrome extension that, you know, can go through your grocery list and buy stuff for you. It just takes over your web browser. It was really slow, but both are really interesting to see, even as research prototypes, just kind of how they're thinking about the technology. But yeah.

as I mentioned in the article and you just mentioned a second ago, like they're like, we don't know what this will look like. And if, if, or when this will ever launch, I'm like, cool. Awesome. Yeah. One thing I was wondering is like Google demos exist on a spectrum between like, here's a thing, a person built that we thought was neat and figured we'd show you all the way up to like, this is the product that will take us into the future. Where on the spectrum do you feel like these demos were like, where is this stuff within Google right now?

Astra is this will take us into the future. And Mariner is there. It's so new that I think it's not going to be the future product yet. Yeah.

So, yeah, I would say that's where both fall. They just, like, found a thing that can open a new tab in Chrome and, like, got really excited about it. Right, exactly. That feels like as far as we've gotten. Yeah. Right. Okay. All right, V, your turn. Tell us, you got to play with hardware, which means you got the even weirder experience of having a bunch of Google employees watch you use a gadget, which is the literal worst thing. So, tell me a little bit about your demo. Google...

and Samsung employees. So there were times where I had a whole crowd of people just staring at me, and that was uncomfortable, especially because I got to demo Android XR. And when you are in XR, short for extended reality, which encompasses augmented reality, virtual reality, and mixed reality, all these levels of reality, you're basically in a headset

So you can't see people necessarily depending on the demo, but they're all just staring at you, walk around the room, just like, ooh. The worst version of this, by the way, is the Vision Pro demos where people just sort of mysteriously appear in your vision and then slowly fade away. This was a little like that.

Oh my God.

A headset. No, thank you. And some prototype smart glasses. So basically, two different visions for what XR is going to look like. Project MuHan. MuHan being infinity in Korean.

I don't know why they just didn't call it Project Infinity, but here you go. Project Mu Han is basically a Samsung and Google flavored version of the Vision Pro to the point where like everything I was doing in it, I was like, ah, this eye calibration and pinchy, pinchy UI seems awfully familiar in that it is exactly the same.

as the Vision Pro. And, you know, they're showing me things like, oh, you can tap this button and go into an immersive environment to watch your movies. And instead of saying on Apple TV, they said Google TV. And it was like that level of like almost one-to-one for some of the things I saw, which, you know, when we all saw the Vision Pro demos last year, we were like, oh my God, wow, this is really impressive. So it's impressive that they're able to do that and all of that.

whatnot. But yeah, it was like Google-flavored Vision Pro, that demo. And then the smart glasses was really cool because I felt like Tony Stark. But like the whole thing behind all of that and what makes it kind of AI-related is that they're saying, Gemini is the key to unlocking XR forever. This is the killer app. Gemini is the killer app. And then, you know, I got...

walked through a bunch of very impressive demos, frankly, but like on guardrails. So they were all very sure that this was going to work. And yet at the same time, every single time I would say something and ask Gemini something for the demo to work, they would just be like holding their breaths. And then when it did work, they would just like breathe, like audibly like...

Okay. Okay. Very cool. Very, very awesome. Very cool. And like, they're like, we totally meant for that to happen. That was definitely, thank God, thank God that, that, that worked because, you know, they would say something to me like, oh, you know, you can switch between different languages when you're talking to Gemini and it'll answer you in the language that you asked it. And I was like, okay, cool. Can I try this out? And so I started speaking in Japanese and they were like, yeah, it'll totally work. Yeah.

Oh, my God, it works. That kind of energy that was happening in there. So I feel like on the spectrum of here's the thing somebody made. Do you want to look at it too? This will lead us into the future. I feel like all the Android XR stuff is like way down at the this will lead us into the future end, right? Like Google seems to really believe in this whole project.

Yeah, I don't know how far into the future. Like Project Wuhan, that so they were very adamant that everything I was seeing was a dev kit and that they were rolling everything out to devs so that there would be a robust ecosystem of apps and experiences by the time it hits consumers, you know, taking very vague potshots at how Apple just threw the Vision Pro at us without thinking.

A lot of apps to work with. Listen, it had iPad apps and that didn't help anyone for any reason, but it had them. They were there. Yeah. Yeah. So, you know, they were very keen to be like, oh, yeah, you know, you'll be able to use all these Google Play apps out of the box when Project Wuhan arrives in 2025. So that will be coming next year, ostensibly, whether they mean January or December, probably January.

And then the prototype glasses I saw were like super duper cool. All the demos I saw on that totally like I'm a huge smart glasses skeptic and I have been if you look through the whole body of my work and I felt myself like kind of believing that.

understanding that everything was on guardrails, of course. But then, you know, you talk about like, okay, so when are we going to see these front glasses on people? And they're like, well, we're making the prototypes, but we will be working with partners for the hardware to actually come out. So like, I know X-Real is working with them, but as to when we'll actually see that,

It is going to be in the future is what it's going to be. Yeah, the future is a long time. Yeah. Kylie, this thing about the killer app for AI being glasses, I think is really fascinating because it seems to work in both directions. Everybody who is making glasses thinks that AI is going to be what makes the glasses great. And everybody making AI thinks that glasses are like the natural interface for it in so many ways. Like,

Google is completely bought into this idea, right? That like Gemini on your face is going to be the best possible version of Gemini. Does everybody believe this? Like are smart glasses and AI just going to smush together across the whole industry? No. Short answer, no. I think it's been reported that Sam Altman's working with Johnny Ive on earbuds, you know, so that's one way to go about it in terms of integrating AI into the physical world and what we do with it.

Glasses is a really compelling use case. However, you have said on the Verge cast, and I hear this all the time, that glasses are annoying. And I hear people saying, I want to like it, but I hate wearing them. And I'm sympathetic. However, I've always worn glasses. So my entire life, I'm used to them. And you don't need them. They're just purely an affectation. You just wear them because they look cool, right? Right. Do I look cool? Oh, my God. I'm so jealous right now because I'm wearing contacts.

I have to have corrective vision, so I'm jealous. Yeah, V is well-documented as more or less blind here on the first cast. Yeah, no, I'm negative 2.5, negative 3.5, but I don't think that's blind enough. I think my mom's negative 6 in both eyes, which is pretty blind. Negative 9, negative 8.75 with heavy astigmatism. Babies...

Yeah. Love that. For the meta Ray-Bans, you, I think negative six and above, they can't help you. Like, you're screwed. No, no. Honest to God, when they sent me my prescription ones, they're like, just so you know, we did this, like, out

out of house because Ray-Ban wouldn't do it because you're so blind. I appreciated it, but it was also just like... You're breaking the curve, V, as always. Love that. Yeah. So, no. I think a lot of people are not interested in it. I still think it should be built and I still think it's really cool and I am happy to use them, but I don't think it'll be like the killer version of this. I think they're going to have to keep iterating and hardware is hard. I'd be interested to see how earbuds, if that ever drops, that's going to be

very interesting to see. So like a really interesting conversation I had with Google and Samsung while I was there is that they did not seem to buy into this whole idea that it'll be one hardware device that conquers everything or that is the key. It was like,

They were saying like, oh, well, you know, VR headsets, those are going to be episodic. Those are things for like when you want immersive content, when you want the 500 foot TV screen on the whatever. Smart glasses are going to be when you feel like you want to be on the go and discreet, but that may not be something that you do all the time. So I think...

the way they're approaching it is an ecosystem of devices, which, you know, is great for spending money and trapping you into these silos of gadget ecosystems. But I think to your point... Consume. Yes. To your point, I think not everyone's going to want the glasses form factor, but...

that form factor is going to give some advantages that an earbud can't. And that I think in the future they're pitching, we'll all have incredible disposable income to have 40,000 different gadgets for different use cases. So, yeah. Yeah, I mean, I think...

I I'm of two minds about the glasses thing as somebody who does not wear glasses because my vision is sick, like not to brag, but like, all right, it's pretty. OK, fine. Yeah, OK. I've like some of the best people are always saying I have the best vision. People are saying people are a lot of people are saying that. But I think on the one hand, the idea of like wearing glasses, I don't otherwise need glasses.

for like pure utility reasons, I think is just never going to happen. I think there's a world in which like they are a fashion item and people wear them in part because they look cool even when you need them like correctively. But then somebody pointed out to me recently, they're like, okay, when you have sunglasses,

And you aren't wearing them. Where do you put them? And I was like, oh, well, I put them in my like coat pocket or I put them on top of my head or I like fold them up and put them in my shirt. And they were like, yeah, that's fine. That's like that becomes a use case that actually works. And it's a thing you can both carry around and put on in a bunch of ways. And actually that ends up being really useful. I had this moment to be like, oh, maybe there's something to that, that actually glasses are more useful.

able to be taken on and off than I was giving them credit for. But then for the huge percentage of people who need them correctively, that doesn't work at all because you're going to have to wear them day in and day out. And like, I don't know, did either of you talk to Google about this idea of like, what happens if we wear these things all day, every day? Are you just going to shove ads in my face? Is the future just giant AR billboards in front of me all the time while I wear the glasses that I need to live my life?

They're very adamant that that's, like, not what they're building towards. And from what I saw in the prototypes that I saw, like, that's going to be very hard to do because, you know, like, the science fiction of it, like, I talk, like, a lot in past stuff that I've done just about how science fiction really forms our perception of what these things will look like, right? So Tony Stark is the example that gets pulled out all the time. And with Tony Stark and his smart glasses, like, in that

or the ones that he gives to Peter Parker in one of those Marvel movies, which name is escaping me right now. Like the display moves around, right? It's like a dynamic display. The whole lens is a display and that's just like not,

where we are. So they were very excited to show me these prototypes and they're like, oh, this one prototype you're going to see, it's a monocular display, which means it's off to the side. It's only in one area off to the side. And then they were like, but oh, try this prototype and it's binocular. What do you notice about that? And so that has like a display in both of the lenses and it's a little more centrally located. But because of how small the display is, like you're not really seeing billboards everywhere. You're seeing like

one area and it's changing based on your use case. So like a notification pops up. It's not like you're seeing like everything overlaid in a minority report type way. It's like one notification in one area and you can see it and it's small. Or like one of the really cool things I saw was turn by turn directions for Google Maps and like, oh, you see a little bubble and it tells you the direction. And if you look down, then it becomes a zoomable map. Like you have to look down, though, to see it.

Um,

And I was like, interesting. And that was because they actually don't want you to have AR directions that are so distracting when you're walking around that you can't be aware of your surroundings because that's a safety, a public safety issue. So it's a dystopian nightmare to think about. I think about that short film, I forget the name of it, that came out a long time ago where the person was on a bus and it was just like ads everywhere and like, oh my God, do you just want to die seeing that? But I think...

In reality, no one would enjoy that. And then I say this about wearables all the time. You have to want to wear them. That's the only way that technology works. So if no one wants to wear these because the experience is so bad full of those ads, that's just, you know, I think they're, I asked them, they were aware of it and they tried to very much be like, no, no, no, no.

We're not going to do that. Yeah. So it's an easy thing to say, I think. Very easy. But it is at least something I'm happy... I would rather them say that than the other thing, right? Which is like, this is such a sick place to put ads. Like, all right, cool. Kylie, what sense did you get? Because I think one of the things Google is pretty clearly pushing towards with something like Mariner is like making it really easy to shop for things, which is one heck of a way to make money. And Astra is super visual and is a way to like...

see the world through your phone and glasses and there's all kinds of stuff you could do there. Do you get a sense of like Google trying to sort of sneakily find ways to turn this stuff into money here? Or am I just being cynical? Of course.

No, of course. I once again was listening to the Verge cast that just came out and you had mentioned that like agents are a way for them to like, please, we need money. Like we need an application for these really expensive models. And this seems to be one of those applications. And I wrote about that a couple of months ago that AI agents are what everyone's creating. It's what they desperately need because they need to charge money for something that is useful.

And they just haven't been able to figure out those applications yet. And this is something I've been thinking about largely for 2025 is that it's going to look like to me, everyone trying to find those applications for these frontier models, whether that's internally or people tinkering with the models and building their own wrappers, you know.

I think agents, honestly, like when I was doing those demos, I did get a sense of like, oof, this is coming really fast. Like I felt, you know, my brain kind of spinning a little bit because, and this is something I was telling them too, is that OpenAI loves to say, we don't want to shock everybody and drop everything too soon before they're ready. And you're like, yeah, right, man.

Okay, whatever. That's actually your favorite thing to do? Yeah, exactly. So we don't want to freak people out because it's so powerful. However, when I was doing these research prototypes, I was like, oof, this is actually kind of giving me vertigo. This is like...

Like, this could be a lot to unleash into the world. I had that too. How so? What was it that happened that made you feel like that? I think it was just the ways that it could be used nefariously. It's obviously not that smart and it's very slow. So like, that's why it's not out yet. But I don't know. I just haven't seen something like this yet in the wild. Something that takes control over my browser and like,

with natural language. Like just a few years ago when I was covering software dev culture, the big thing was no code, low code. So you could like use natural language to program. And I'm like, wow, that's really cool. And now we're using natural language to control our web browser and shop for us. Like, you know, obviously I'm going to just say that this is Vaporware. It's not out, you know, it's research prototype, whatever. But just seeing the demo, you're like, wow, this is, this feels like some huge leaps. You know, we don't know when it's coming out, but that's

The natural language thing, it really shocks you when it does work. Because I had, they were like really pushing that as like why Gemini is going to be a killer thing because you can just go like,

Show me a video of XYZ and it'll automatically open the YouTube app and the thing without you asking like what the app is. And like, that's like, oh, okay. But like I had a moment like you did where I was like, oh no, oh no, we are not ready for this. Because they were basically like, I was in the glasses and they were like, oh, why don't you ask Gem and I what the title of the yellow book behind you is? And I'm not looking at it. And I...

And because it had seen it before, I didn't take a picture of it. It was able to tell me the title of the book behind me. And then I take the book and they're like, why don't you ask? Open to a random page. Why don't you ask Gemini to summarize what's on the page for you? And I'm not taking pictures like I would with a meta Ray-Bans. I'm just looking and it goes like, oh, okay. But what this page is about is about the nexus of AI networks and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And it's like, oh, no, no.

College professors and teachers everywhere are cooked because students are just going to take textbooks and just like go summarize this for me and whatnot. So, yeah.

A thing that has started creeping onto my TikTok For You page a lot is college students giving tips on how to do exactly what you just described. Like, here's this cool new tool where you can upload the PDF that we have to read for this week, and it'll give you this summary and these flashcards. And it's just like, this is just presented as if it's like...

you know, how to access your email address. And it's just like, oh my God, like what are we supposed to do with this? But this is one of the things that I've been thinking about this for forever. Like you guys, I'm sure have heard the thing that Google always says about like, you know, 15% of Google searches are new every day. Like, which is wild given how big Google is and how long it's been around. But like,

This thing that everybody has been promising us with AI is that it is going to like completely change how we use technology. And I think the thing that I have spent too much time thinking about is like how I'm going to replace all the stuff that I normally do. And so far, the answer is AI doesn't really replace any of that very successfully. But this question of like, can it are there going to be new things and like new questions we can ask and new ways to do stuff?

That feels like where this gets really interesting. And like, what's the title of that yellow book behind me is like not a real use case. That's not a... No one ever needs to do that in real life. It's a good magic trick. It's a great magic trick. But like just the other day, so there's a bookstore like a mile from my house that's going out of business. And so everything that they're selling is half off. And we were in there the other night and wound up having to like run out before we left. But I was reading the inside of a book and

like just the book jacket. And I was like, oh, this sounds cool. It's like a super spy thriller. Maybe I'll buy this. Cannot remember the title of it. And if I could just be like, what was the name of that book I was looking at the other day in the bookstore? Like that's the stuff, right? Like that actually is like a sincerely useful thing to have in my life. And the question for me is how far we are from that kind of stuff. And again, it seems like the things you're seeing in these demos are like not,

They're not products, but they're also something more than like ideas. And so I think how I'm how I don't know, I'm sequencing all this stuff in my brain trying to figure out like, when is this all going to actually work? And it gets harder and harder to figure out. Yeah, it shows that they're capable of building it. I mean, they have built something that I am seeing with my own eyes that is working in some capacity. So it's like the the first like step into, you know, and I don't know when we'll get this. I don't know when it'll be, you know.

It's scary. Like, it genuinely is scary. And you were talking about those TikToks earlier made me think, like, is this what people felt like, you know, when kids started using the Internet for the first time? It can't be. This just makes me feel a little sick sometimes. I know. It super is. It is. This is like the thing that gives me hope is that this is the same kind of thing we've gone through with every technical development ever. Right.

And, you know, whatever. Kids are growing up not learning how to read. So like the internet did do that. So here we are. But we soldier on. So V, coming out of all these demos, do you buy this big thesis from Google that like Gemini unlocks the face wearables for the future? What I will say is like knowing that my demos were incredibly controlled, right? They didn't even let me take pictures of anything. Right.

Knowing that, seeing everything working, did I feel like Tony Stark and that Gemini was my Jarvis? Yes. That was really freaking... I did. It felt very scary. And that's something. I mean, because you were a person who... I'm a huge skeptic. ...spent a lot of time in Division Pro and kind of every time came out of it being like, what is any of this actually doing for me? So the fact that you had even that much of that experience is something. It was for the glasses, though. Just because there is more interaction with the world online.

around you and some things that I would be like, oh, this would actually be useful in my life. Like stepping out of a subway and going like, I have no idea which way is north-south. I have directionally challenged, look down, can see a map, know which way I need to go. Like those are things that feel real, right? But do I think Gemini is going to be the key to unlocking that? I want to play with it. I want to see how I can break it. Like,

I had a demo where I had a woman speaking in Spanish in front of me, and I was getting immediate translations beamed into my eyeballs in English. And she was enunciating. She was speaking clearly. She was not using slang. She was not talking in the ways like, would you be able to translate a Gen Zer saying like Sigma Alpha Riz Ohio to me? Like, you know, like that sort of stuff is the is the...

You know, like until it can do that, until it can adapt to real life in real time, that's the real question. If we were just living in the control demo, sure, sure, I believe it. But we don't. Life is weird.

You know, and it's very halcyon when you go into these demos. They're very Pollyanna-ish about, like, how people will use these things. And I'm very curious to see how we're going to break them and whether Gemini is up to the task. Gemini was very sassy with me, though, because I was thinking of how to phrase my questions because we are so trained to be like, hey—

insert name of assistant, play song from album in app and like these very stilted ways of talking. So natural language is mind blowing, but it's also just like I was pausing and Gemini says to me, you don't have to say, hey, Google. Really? Oh, geez.

jeez, she's so sassy. She's like, that's actually not my name. If you could just, if you could address me correctly. That's really not my name. And then I said, the other really creepy thing is I said I was hungry inside of Project Moohan and I was looking at Google Maps and whatever and it just started popping up restaurant recommendations all around me in the thing and I was like,

That's creepy. That's, I don't know if I like that. Thank you, but I don't know if I like that. That is the slow tilt toward the ad hellscape that makes me worry. It is, it is, it is. I can't believe you have to have boundaries with it. Like, hey, I'm not interested in that. I did not ask for that. Yeah, here's what I will and won't talk about, Gemini. I have rules. Kylie, same question to you with Astra, which I think like you were saying is like,

Google's most ambitious version of AI things. You've now used the latest and greatest of Astra. Like, do you see something big inside of that yet? I do. I agree with V though that, I mean, like, real life is very messy and variable. And yeah, 15% of Google searches are new still this many years after the start. I think that that's real life. So I don't know if this comes out anytime soon. And yeah,

I think AI as a field is so, it's in a really weird spot. It costs a lot of money, but Google has a lot of money. And I think they're willing to really sink it into this. So yeah, I do. I do see these being really useful. Astra, I'm not sure how I would use that outside of glasses, if I'm being honest. That's where it seems most useful to me in a wearable form factor, because I don't think I want to walk around with my phone killing its battery, asking it questions. Yeah.

But it's cool. It's still cool. As for the Project Mariner, I had said a while ago, because I had gone to New York and I was bopping between places really quickly. And I was like, I would just love something I can say like, okay, I'm boarding this flight at this time. Can you get these groceries for me and make sure they're at my door at this time? That would be great. It's a very silly thing. But when I saw Project Mariner, I was like, oh, this is like

almost what it's trying to do, except you have to supervise it. You would be faster and you literally just have to watch it do its work. But yeah, I think that that could be useful if they can nail it down, make it faster, make it safe in the long term. However, I am not 100% sure they can iron those out. I don't know what they would need to do to iron those things out. I think as all the AI leaders like to say, like Altman likes to say, we're going to need some major breakthroughs. And I think that's the same for this.

Yeah, that makes sense. All right. Well, we're going to have to keep tracking this because I think everyone is kind of running in this same direction. We're going to see a lot of headsets really soon. We're going to see a lot more of this multimodal AI stuff. So I think the three of us are going to have to just do this periodically because it's getting weird out there. And I'm going to need help. Multimodal. I'm so sick of that word. Everyone's just like, it's multimodal. We are a multimodal podcast now, V. You, me, and Kylie, we are multimodal. Yeah.

I don't know what that means, but I don't think I'm allowed to say it on a podcast. The podcast of multimodal agents. All right. Thank you both. Appreciate it. Thank you. All right. Thanks for having me. All right. We got to take a break and then we're going to come back and talk about video games. We'll be right back.

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Make progress. All right, we're back. Let's talk about video games and more specifically, the most important stories yet to come in the video game industry. There are two things looming over video games. Grand Theft Auto 6, Nintendo Switch 2.

Both things seem to be real. Both things will ship at some point. And it's kind of all anybody has been able to talk about all year. Ash Parish came on the show a few weeks ago and said that the biggest story of the year in gaming was

was these two things that don't exist yet. Grand Theft Auto 6 just won most anticipated game at the Game Awards. It's literally winning awards before the game even chips. Like, this is how much this stuff matters right now. And I think the story of those two things is going to be, in a very real way, the story of the game industry, but also maybe bigger. It might be a story about the entertainment industry or the tech industry. If these things are as big and successful as they might be, really...

We are going to talk an awful lot about them. And so I figured before they launch, before things get too crazy, Chris Grant, who is the founding editor of Polygon and is now the group publisher for The Verge and Polygon, and I think that makes him like my boss's boss's boss or something like that,

He's just a video game nerd. So I figured I'd have him on and we talk about why these things matter so much and where they're headed. Chris Grant, welcome back. I don't even know when the last time I've been on the show is. It's been a minute. I'm going to accept welcome back, but it's been a couple of decades. It has been a couple of decades. Every once in a while, I'm like, Chris, you should come on the show. And you're like, I'd love to come on the show. And then I'm like, do you want to come on the show? And you're like, I'm busy.

This happens frequently. Or, Chris, you should come on the show. I'm like, sick. Anytime, David. And you're like, I'll put it in your calendar. And then I wait patiently. That doesn't sound as right to me. But anyway, I have two things I want to talk about before the year is over. Ash Parrish came on the show a couple weeks ago and said that the biggest story in gaming of 2024 was two things that have not yet shipped. And I find that fascinating.

fascinating and I've been thinking about it ever since and I want to talk about both of them with you. We're recording this on Friday, the day after the Game Awards, where Grand Theft Auto 6 just won Most Anticipated Game. So let's just start there. Let's just talk about GTA 6 because I feel like I am still struggling to wrap my mind around how important and anticipated and big a deal this game is.

in the next year, but also in kind of like the next generation of video gaming. So like, just to wind this all the way back to the beginning, why is Grand Theft Auto such an important franchise? Like, why has this thing meant so much to the gaming industry for this long? Grand Theft Auto is an older franchise. So it's been around a minute, most notably Grand Theft Auto 3, which came out on the PlayStation 2. PlayStation 2 is the best-selling game console of all time. And as gaming became a more adult pursuit,

There were fewer and fewer games to play as an adult, or maybe more specifically as a teenager, looking for things that weren't more childish. And Grand Theft Auto 3 came at a time when there was a real appetite for that. There was a real appetite for games to feel more mature. And Grand Theft Auto 1 and 2 were...

for all intents and purposes, different games. They were top-down. It wasn't the same kind of open-world sandbox that we think of today. So Grand Theft Auto 3 was the real change. It came at the right moment technologically. It came at the right moment culturally. I think a lot of video games, like, it's cultural. Video games are entertainment products. They are powered by hardware. They have generational leaps. We'll talk about some of that generational leap later.

When we get into six, but they are fundamentally cultural moments and how you talk about them, how you play them, what you do. That's what powers the sort of culture and culture.

sort of legend of some of these games. Why are people excited about Grand Theft Auto 6? Because it's part of the Grand Theft Auto franchise. They haven't played it before. It'll be different. And why are they excited about the Grand Theft Auto franchise? Because they've played 3, or they've played 4, or they've played 5, and they have memories of playing with their friends, or they've played it in their college dorm, or they've played it with their buddies after work. They've played it online, increasingly, is how a lot of people engage with this game. And that...

volume of play across decades is so profound and the sales numbers are so high that the number of people who have touched this franchise and may want to touch it again becomes kind of staggering under its own weight. And so when you talk about 2025, you're really looking at an audience that not just the audience for GTA 5 or GTA Online, but some of that audience for 4 and some of that audience for 3 or some of that audience for Vice City or San Andreas or whatever is

And how many of those people will trade up for the new one? That's a lot of folks. Yeah. Well, but what I wonder about the way you describe the legacy is like, you could say a lot of that same stuff about, I don't know, the Halo franchise over the years or Call of Duty or like Madden, if you stretch a little bit, right? Like the stuff that sort of culturally means things to people, unlike your average video game. But I don't feel like we talk about

Grand Theft Auto the same way that we talk about those games. Nobody is hanging the future of the gaming and entertainment industries on the success of the next Call of Duty. There's something different about GTA. I might argue the thesis on Call of Duty a little bit, considering the Microsoft Activision Blizzard merger, largely powered by Call of Duty. Fair. Maybe the next one more than most. Call of Duty is a little different because it comes out every year.

Fair. So, you know, if the last GTA came out in 2013, which is wild. Is that true? Yes. We'll talk about sort of like what that means to have a franchise that's taking that kind of gap year between its career and what's happened since 2013 to now, the

The whole world's different, frankly, and not to mention video gaming and technology that makes video games possible, which is also sort of a wild testament to GTA 5's success that it remains one of the top 10 most played games and best-selling games every year in that interim period. And I confess, I haven't played GTA 5 in a long time, but from the little bit I understand, it's a very different game now than it was in 2013, right? The game is the same as in the single-player game, sure. Okay.

There was a bunch of DLC that they had committed to release that never came out, right? Like, what is different is GTA Online. And GTA Online did not launch alongside GTA V. It came out a little later. GTA Online is the thing that has propelled that game and propelled its sort of popularity over the years, which we can get into. But the, you know, games like Madden, games like Call of Duty, they're immensely popular. They sell a ton. They're some of the best-selling games every year. Those are the games that people will trade up every year. They have these memories of playing it.

And they accrue some new audience and they shed some audience. And so it's like not different from a subscription business, right? Is your churn kind of turn over the audience on the higher end? They don't want to play anymore. Do you pick up new audience of the younger end? It's interesting way to think about it. You just pay 60 bucks a year for Madden. That's just how that's your subscription cost. Yeah. And so, uh, Halo, a little different. I think Microsoft wishes it had a call of duty or a Madden and Halo has not managed to retain that cultural relevance, uh,

But GTA has, and it has in part because previous GTA 4 to 5, I think was 2009 to 13. So there's a four year gap there. Reasonable, right? Same generation. That was the Xbox 360 PS3 generation. GTA 5 comes on the tail end of that generation, as in like the very tail end, like the new consoles are coming out and it sets records, right?

It's the fastest-selling entertainment product of all time, etc., etc. It continues to hold some of these records as being one of the highest-grossing entertainment products ever made as an individual product. But that's on the Xbox 360 hardware. That's on the PlayStation 3 hardware. And just to put that in context, those consoles, at least the 360 came out in 2005. PS3 came out the following year. That's 20 years ago. 20 years before the 360 came out.

was the NES. Wow. Like, I don't want to make half the listeners just turn to ash. I'm sorry. That was awful. I didn't like that at all. Should I add trigger warning? Liam, let's add a trigger warning before I say that. Just in case anyone's driving or something. So 20 years is a long time technologically. And we're talking about, you know, a game that was targeting hardware that came out in 2005. And now we're talking about a game that's targeting hardware that came out in 2020.

We're already on, well, you could say we're on the tail end, you know, on the back half of this generation of hardware, the PS5 and Series X. So this is a wild generational leap for a game that itself has come to define technological leaps, what is possible with the state of the art in games technology, and

What is that going to mean? I'm sure you've seen some of the GTA 5 videos where they put crazy real-time mods in there. Like, it looks like real-life stuff. Like, it's kind of nuts. What happens to a game like GTA 6 when this amount of budget, this amount of time, and then, to your point, the expectations that come on the other side of it. Will it meet them? To some degree, I mean, it has to. It's a make-or-break kind of moment, but...

And then on the other hand, of course it will. Like the level of expectation on a game like this is so high. The number of people that will buy it just to mess around with it. I will buy it. I'm not a huge GTA player. I will say, I will confess on the internet. Please don't harass me on the internet. I've never beat a GTA game. I've played hundreds of hours of GTA games and I play the missions and they're just, I'm not for me. And I can't get through them.

but I will play it to mess around. And so you get to GTA Online and the point of GTA Online is just go mess around. Right. Okay. And I think that what a game looks like today and how you develop a game and what kind of audience you target, it's really hard if you haven't been providing that live service that Rockstar has been providing this whole time. And so I assume that they are going to GTA 6 with some real focus on the single player, a huge focus on the technology and what that sandbox enables them to do.

But then just as much focus on the living game aspect of it, games as a service. What does it mean to have a game like GTA 6 and its online component exist for another 13 years afterwards? That's going to put us into 2038 for everyone else that wants to

Think about what their retirement target looks like. Yeah. I mean, that's part of what's interesting about this moment to me, because if GTA Online didn't exist, I think everybody would be making sort of the same assumption about what GTA 6 was going to be, right? They were going to expand the idea of an open world game, give you more to do, more things going on, make the world feel bigger, just like do it at a scale nobody has done before, right? That's kind of GTA's thing. But that's kind of already what it's doing. That's like what GTA Online is.

is and is becoming to a certain extent. So part of me wonders what if there is even an obvious thing for this game to do that feels like a generational leap that way. I think that there's a couple things I could imagine them doing. And GTA Online is really big and ambitious, but it's not what people think of as state-of-the-art when it comes to

online social based play right i mean fortnight's right there i'm sort of commanding a level of attention and a level of diversity across its different products just this week

They launched new ballistic mode, 5v5 multiplayer. Like they're going to go head to head with Call of Duty now in Fortnite. They've got a new Lego brick life mode. So you can just hang out and build Lego stuff and have a little town and play different careers. They're going to have the OG mode is back. Hugely popular. And like Fortnite as a platform, right?

is a really interesting idea and how it competes in a world of increasing consolidation on that end of the market. Is GTA 6 a platform? I don't know. I would not be surprised.

If you roll back to the way you described the game 20 years ago, the phrase that just popped into my mind is Roblox for adults, which is a thoroughly fascinating possibility that really doesn't exist in kind of the way you're describing. Roblox wants to tell you it exists, but it does not. It does not exist. I think Epic is trying to make that into Fortnite, and I see the Fortnite islands, and it's all the same Roblox junk billionaire simulator and all this clicker game stuff going

The vernacular of those games is pretty limited. And when I see my son play Roblox games, I know I'm a bad parent. They're trash. Low nutritional value, right? Trust that I make Astro Bot available at all times for my family. It's available day or night. So you're a good parent. That's the job. I'm a good parent. Astro Bot, notably Game of the Year winner yesterday, last night. That's right.

I don't want to say Polygon got it wrong. It was Bellaccio at Polygon, but in this household, we stan Astro Bot. So GTA 6, yeah, I have some real questions about what it means to support that game over the decade plus that they intend to support it. Is it going to be a platform? Are they going to think of it that way? How do experiences get built in it? How do you keep an audience engaged when the competition is more fierce? They are not going up against the competition in 2013. They're going up against competition in 2025.

You see Call of Duty, I think, doing an admirable job here with Warzone and thinking about what that free-to-play environment looks like for a Call of Duty game and how that is complementary to a retail product and how they sort of push it forward. But yeah, it's going to be fascinating. I think they have a track record that really can't be denied. And I think even just to Ash's point, one of the biggest stories this year is just

Like waiting for any sign of anything having to do with GTA 6, a news announcement, a trailer, you name it. Those things really indicate a level of sort of like latent energy, right? It's just going to explode when it comes out and you'll capture all of that. Will you capture more? And I think they do need to capture more for a product this size to be successful. We will see.

I think the sense, though, that the non-release of some of these things has been looming over 24. Last year, we had Tears of the Kingdom, which I think demanded a lot of attention and sort of gathered up a lot of that energy.

But in the background, amidst gaming today, the top 10 most played games on PC in 2023, Fortnite, number one, Roblox, Minecraft, Counter-Strike 2, Counter-Strike Go, sort of shared, Sims 4, Call of Duty, you know, TKTK, Modern Warfare 2, 3, Warzone 2, League of Legends, Valorant, GTA 5, and Rocket League. That's the top played games. Here's the wild statistic about that. Average years on the market for those games.

9.6 years wow so the games people are playing are not new games that just come out and so what's happened in gaming is that these things have to last much longer they have to function like platforms they have to function like i actually look at this list of games even across the other consoles maybe the exception of switch and it doesn't look like games the way i think a lot of times we think about it it looks like sports right and i don't mean esports here i mean like

It looks like the way you think of sports. I like Minecraft. I like soccer. Like, it's just an abstraction. It always is there. It has rules. You play it with friends. It's Minecraft. Will GTA 6 earn a spot on this table? Like, I kind of assume some of that GTA 5 audience moves to it, but what does it look like? But do you think it does that by owning that mold and sort of leaning into the kind of things that you're describing, you know, Roblox for adults, or does it do it by...

doing the thing no one else can do and making a new...

sort of wholly contained game that is good enough to pull this off? Because I feel like you can put your hopes on either one of those, but maybe not both at the same time. No, I'm going to say both. I'm going to say both. I'm going to say that they're going to make a single player game that's going to move the needle and sell a lot of units because people want to play it. And then they're going to make a sticky multiplayer online experience that is going to be competitive across a landscape that looks like this. That would be a hell of an achievement. That is going to grow and shift over time because they will continue to iterate on it and develop it. Heists.

for GTA 5 came out years later. Sure. Right? And that was 10 years ago. Yeah. And they were still aware that that game had to shift and move. They had to continuously add features and add functionality for it to be successful. And now, again, they're in a world where they compete against Fortnite. And like, it just, it has to be different now. Right now, there's an ongoing event in Minecraft. My son is very excited about. Like, there's just a constant pace of iteration, innovation happening in these spaces that GTA will have to

compete with in a way that it kind of currently does. It is not non-competitive. I think a lot about what happens in the pace of developing games. I think a lot about the new Final Fantasy games that have come out and how they've really been struggling to meet some sales expectations. One of the things that was crazy is the last Final Fantasy game, 16, which struggled on a PlayStation exclusive, a weird concept these days, that

and came to PC much later and struggled there. They'll make it up over time, I suspect, but it started development before Fortnite came out. And I think that is like kind of a wild sense, right? Of like how much changes in a certain period of time when a game like Fortnite can come out and quite literally change what our expectations are of games and games culture, what you get for a free-to-play game, how much value there is in a freemium model.

um something that a lot of gamers would turn their nose down at yeah but then you look at fortnite and like this is a very high quality game that's a lot of fun to play and is very good and you don't need to pay for anything so if that was 2018 that fortnite really popped off uh again gta 5 2013 like how much has changed since they even started development on this game and um i think that's part of the expectation that's part of the anticipation uh it's part of that legacy and i think there's you know

There's also the technology of it. What more can they do with another effectively 15 years of hardware iteration, hardware development? It'll be exciting to see. Yeah, you've tracked the hype cycle of games like this many times over the years. Should people keep their hopes high on this one, do you feel like? It does seem like, historically speaking, if anything is going to live up to this kind of hype...

GTA has as good a shot as any, but also, kind of like you said before, maybe nothing can be as good as we're sort of expecting this game to be. My general point of view is you shouldn't get hyped about anything. Try not to. Just a touch of nihilism right before the holidays. Try not to, but if you insist on getting hyped about GTA 6, if you like those games, will this game meet your expectations? I think so. I think that they've had...

kind of impressively consistent hit rate for that entire series. Again, it's not my kind of game, but if you like those games, like they have...

I don't want to say never missed, but they've come closer than most franchises to upholding a certain level of expectation and value. I think the way that they're releasing it and why, to Ash's point, it's been looming over 24, is because Take-Two has a very specific point of view on the release strategy for this game, which is when it is ready, there is no competition. It is an alpha predator.

There's no competition for GTA in the market. They don't need to release it. Nobody's nipping at their heels. They're still banking cash on 5, which is still in the top 10 most played games every year. So why rush it? They don't need to rush it. And they will wait until it is ready and done. And I think that that is...

should be comforting to somebody who's looking forward to it. And then the question becomes, do they know what done means? Is the target quality good? Is it what you want? Is it fun? Again, I think they have enough of a blueprint at this point to follow that people who like GTA games should probably be well targeted by it and they'll appreciate it. Now, again, that isn't enough. They will need to grow new audience. They will need to bring in new players. They will need to siphon off some of those Fortnite fans, etc.,

Will it do that? Does it have enough juice to continue to grow over time instead of just keep what they have? And that's the big question for me. I don't know. Yeah. Yeah, I think to some extent, we're just going to make a slightly better new game every year is an actually easier strategy. Yeah. The iterative year-by-year strategy is expensive and difficult in its own way, but

Now you can have misses in there and keep going. Call of Duty Modern Warfare with a notable miss a few years ago, like a little bit of a return to form this year. Okay. It can absorb that impact again for GTA 6. If this were to be a miss, I find it almost impossible to imagine it being a miss, but if it were to be a miss, catastrophic, right? Like you don't get another at bat. Um,

So yeah, it's a bit of a riskier game. And again, to take to his point, they'll just wait until it's ready. There's no sense in taking that kind of risk. Yeah. So the other...

highly anticipated thing that I think we're likely to get way before GTA 6 is the Switch 2. I asked you when I saw you in person a couple of weeks ago to make me feel better that the Switch 2 isn't going to suck because I have pinned a surprising amount of my hopes and gaming future on the Switch 2 not sucking. Tell me how to feel about the Switch 2. We assume it's coming sometime in the next three months, right? Like it is legitimately imminent in some way here.

If I were to bet, I'm going to say it's coming in the first half of the year. Okay. Nintendo's fiscal, I want to say, starts in Q2 and April. So there's a reason to think maybe they try and get it out just before or just after. We'll see. Sure. Nintendo will also wait until it's ready. So there's that. The reporting so far has been that they want to wait until they have enough units.

that there isn't any risk of hardware shortages or any other sort of holdup. So they just want to be sure when it comes out, you can get one. Because there was a bunch of that at the beginning with the first Switch, right? Wasn't it hard to get for a while? Nintendo historically has struggled with inventory pipeline, right? Remember the Wii?

Oh, yeah. You couldn't buy it for years. Yeah. And it was already using old hardware. Nintendo's strategy of using older hardware. The Game Boy was famously built using really old hardware. And they reimagined what that old hardware can do. And that's sort of Nintendo's magic. But it's old hardware. Yeah. So the Wii comes out with old hardware and they can't keep this thing in stock. So there's something... I always found Nintendo's point of view on this a little disingenuous. I think that they like having things sell out. I think they like...

managing a very tight retail environment, that feeling of you got one fresh. I don't know if that works anymore. The space is too competitive.

If you don't get that and there's a PlayStation 5 right next to it on the shelf, maybe you have to pick that up instead. That has Fortnite on it too. Like, what's the point? And so I do think that they recognize they're in a different environment and that they will need to keep stock and they will need to take advantage of people's appetite to buy right now. Every kid has a tablet. What do they need to switch for? So we'll see. That's one of the pieces that's been reported about the timing is that they're waiting for

to be ready. They have released a couple little nuggets and just for the calendar enthusiasts out there, you know who you are. October 2016, they announced the Switch. Switch came out the following year in April.

There was no October announcement this year. It has not been announced yet. They have announced in a sort of like to shareholders way that there is a successor to the console and they're hard at work on it. And that they will announce more when ready. Okay. They dropped one weird little nugget of news maybe like a month or so ago, which was like random at night. And it was just like the Switch successor will play Switch software. Oh, yeah. That was like on election day. Yeah. Yes. Right. Yes. Thanks, Nintendo. What a weird drop. Yeah.

Again, for the calendar enthusiasts, you're looking at a calendar. What day should we pick to put this piece in? Which is generally good news. Why would you not trumpet it? And I'll say this about the successorship. Nintendo has somewhat of a reputation, especially in modern times, of following up consoles that are hits with flops or duds or disappointments, let's say. Most notably, you have the Super Nintendo followed up with the N64. There's a little bit of a back-to-back N64 thing.

at least from a sales standpoint, followed up by the GameCube. Yikes. Although GameCube heads know good console. Also N64. This is like N64 slander I was not prepared for and will not acknowledge, but we can just move past that. I have an N64 right here. Okay. All right. Then we're cool. All right. With library games, I'm going to not, but if you're going to prioritize and rank the best Nintendo consoles of all time,

inclusive of the Virtual Boy, the Nintendo 64 is still going to be low on that list. That's fair. I mean, but the most recent one, right, is like, I've heard a lot of people say like Wii, Wii U, right? Huge revolutionary hit followed by... Big flop. Weird new idea on top of it that didn't work. A big flop. And I actually went back before this podcast and read some of my Wii U coverage from their launch event in New York. And the piece that I was the most...

upset by the most frustrated by the most sort of like incredulous about was the absence of an online service they announced the wii u and they said we'll make an online service you can't know it's 2013 gta 5 is coming out like you can't you need it now you need it yesterday in fact it's an embarrassment xbox live has been out for a decade like just kind of a bizarre omission and they weren't able to do it they partnered with a third party and

And the Wii U struggled with that absence of an online function. There was different systems. There was your Nintendo Network ID and other stuff. It wasn't until Switch Online that there's something that feels modern, right, that you can go on to. One of my examples that I used in this piece from 2013 is that if I buy a book on a Kindle and I lose my Kindle, I just get a new Kindle and my book's there. This is something that most consumers understand.

What was crazy about Nintendo until the Switch, the Switch is even a little bit goofy with this, but it's okay. 3DS and DS, they're two portable consoles. 3DS also, from a sales standpoint and from an audience, I think, standpoint and critical standpoint, a disappointment relative to the DS. The DS and 3DS were portable consoles, largely targeted at children or younger people, let's say. And if you lost it,

Can you imagine a kid losing something? Never. Never happened. Purely hypothetically, yeah. If you lost it and you had digital games that you purchased, they were gone too. Tied to the console.

Like what? I would never buy. To this day, I don't buy Nintendo games digitally. I just don't. I'm like, I don't know. I'm old. I have a lot of physical games because I'm also old. But also, I just don't trust them still. And so this announcement that my Switch games would carry forward was like, huh, okay. Huh. Maybe it is okay to buy Nintendo games digitally now. Maybe my purchases through Nintendo are, in some cases, like sacred. Maybe too strong of a word, but like respected. Yeah.

in a way that I expect them to be. And this has not happened over some generations, right? Not all of your 360 games work on your Xbox Series X, but a lot of them do. And I just feel like they try and that's been newer for them. But going forward, I think to some sense, your expectation of the things that you purchase digitally is

will retain their value over time and will have forward compatibility. The idea that backwards compatibility is backwards thinking to use, I think that was Don Matrix, dumbass quote. Yeah, it's not great. It's not just that it's not backwards thinking, it's the way games work today. They have to be backwards compatible. Your stuff has to carry forward. This is how and what consumer expectations are. And so I think for Nintendo, that was a huge piece of news that I don't want to diminish. It was a tiny weird drop on election day, but...

The idea that they're thinking about that suggests to me that they are thinking in a forward capacity about how people think about their software and their purchases. They are thinking about it as a successor not to Nintendo consoles, but as a successor to the Switch, which is an important differentiation.

This is not N64 to GameCube or GameCube to Wii. This is more of a Wii to Wii U environment where they're keeping the name there. They're anticipating some consumer adoption based on that name. Your games will play. Wii U would play Wii games. It did drop the GameCube support.

I think saying that in the 3DS played DS games. I think that if comparing it to the 3DS and the Wii U doesn't give you a lot of comfort and doesn't make you feel super confident. My hope here is that they try not to reinvent the wheel. And some of the reporting suggests it will still be a portable console that will be able to be docked.

That it has a bigger screen, which, like, maybe that's weird. It's already kind of a big portable handheld, but so is the Steam Deck, and I carry that around, so maybe it's fine. That it will have detachable controllers. If this sounds familiar, that should be comforting, because it's a bigger Switch with maybe some better hardware and some different games. I've really come around to that actually being my ideal outcome. I don't know how you feel, but for me, like, I still play the Switch a lot, and...

The more I use it, the more I'm like, okay, this thing plus faster processor, presumably more efficient chip, so it'll last a little longer. Better Wi-Fi is actually like the most important one for me because the Wi-Fi chip in this thing is old and bad and just does not work very well.

Uh, and like maybe an upgraded screen, but honestly, even that is like relatively low on my list is like, there's very little else I want from this, like tweak everything, upgrade all the parts to newer versions of those parts and keep it a switch feels to me like what I'm looking for. I would like the following things. I'd like it to be more durable. Yeah. Uh, the joy cons are kind of a nightmare. Um, if anyone has kids in their household, um,

I don't want to say how many times I've taken apart a Joy-Con and replaced and fixed parts of it. It's very tiny. And those screws are very small. And it's all very tightly packed in there. And I'm pretty good at that stuff. But can I say the F word on this podcast? Is that allowed? Sure. Fuck the Joy-Cons. I don't want to see them again. Do not bring them back. I don't want to. Get rid of them. Stop the Joy-Con shit. Give me a better analog stick, please.

Give me, get rid of the IR port, Labo community. I see you. I don't mean any disrespect. Labo is incredible. Everyone else got it wrong. We knew it was good. However, get rid of the IR port, get rid of the complexity, lower the cost of those things. Um,

Make it more durable. This is a console that you're going to be throwing in your bag. Why is it so fragile? Why are things so wiggly? So I would love to see it beefed up. I would love to see multiple switches in your profile travel better. If you have two switches in your house, going between them is not a nice affair. It does not feel good. And I think a lot of families now

I have a lot of switches. I was about to make fun of you for being like the only person on earth who's like worried about managing multiple switches. But you are probably right that there are there are people out there for whom that's a real thing. I know a lot of folks who have kids that have a switch light. And then there's the switch at home.

But why is my game there? Is it saved? Did it transfer? Is my save file there? What's my thing? Do I have to download this again? Is this my home console, not my home console? It gets a bit goofy, where it has to always be online if it's not the home console, but then it's a Switch Lite. You're traveling with it. So there's just some part of managing multiple consoles that I think, especially as these things last longer and people play the games longer, there should be some expectation of it. This gets into Nintendo's profile management, software management part, where I have some confidence that they have

radically improved. I think their yearbook title would be Most Improved. But I think I really want to see that. I think for the big open question for Switch, I don't know if it's or Switch 2. What are they going to call it? Polygon's official vote is Super Switch. It's got to be. Super Switch is the, I don't think they will, but that is the correct answer.

And the super should definitely be the super font from Super Nintendo. That's the other part I'm going to say out loud. We're doing a retro thing in the world right now. Like, go for it. We all live in the 90s again. Like, let's just do it. I'm into it. Look, I love the 90s. And it turns out one of the things that younger folks and myself still have in common is they love the 90s now, too. Yeah.

The 90s are so back. It's great. So let's all just live it and do the super font, please. I'm in. And then if it doesn't have a lot of secrets, it doesn't have a lot of surprises, right? When the Wii came out, do you remember the Wii's codename? Revolution. Oh, yeah. And everyone wants to know what the revolution was. And there was, this was like 2005. So the internet was different back then. But there was all these rumors and mock-ups and somebody found a footage, but the lighting is off and you can tell because the direction of whatever. I don't think we have that this time because...

It's probably just going to be a big Switch. It's going to be a big Switch with some different things. And then, is Nintendo, will they feel compelled to add in a GooGaw, a Whizbang? I don't know. Is it going to have like a big radio antenna on the back and it does ham radio too? I don't know. I have no idea what the thing is going to be or will they just make it a better Switch? Keep in mind, the Wii U, successor to the Wii,

All they had to do was make it faster. And they added this goofball tablet that connected locally to your console. And it created this environment for asynchronous gameplay, which was really cool. And then no games did that. It did give them some of the insight into the Switch, but like...

Okay. And then also it was like a cable box controller, similar to the Xbox One. Which, again, both of those two don't... It wasn't just Microsoft being dumb. Both of them were like, yeah, cable boxes. That's what kids love. Yeah, right. I just actually asked the Polygon staff yesterday who still had a cable subscription. And the only people who did, there was only a handful of people, and they had it for just sports. That's it. Everyone else has been a core... I've been a core coach since 2005, 2006. So...

Wii U had some bonkers ideas about what people wanted in a console, and I'm hopeful that they don't feel the urgency to add something fancy. I will also flag one other thing. The Switch is not the best-selling console ever. It is the best-selling Nintendo console ever. The best-selling console is the PlayStation 2, but also the DS handheld is still a little bit over the Switch. The Switch may overtake it lifetime. We'll see. But I do want to flag another really notable part about the Switch. It has still more software available.

than any other Nintendo console. The Wii sold roughly a billion units of software. The Switches sold 1.3 billion units of software. The DS sold about a billion units of software too. But there's a timeline issue, but the DS and the Wii were out at the same time. So you sold a ton of hardware units, you sold a ton of software units, and you had two hardware lines.

And Nintendo consolidated those in the Switch. So again, for the Switch to be successful, it had to be. This was a consolidation of two businesses into one, the handheld and the console business. And it did not sell as many software units as either of those two separately combined did, and it didn't sell as many hardware units. And so the Switch, while it has been a big hit, has been like a necessary consolidation of its business, but

they make a little bit money on Nintendo online, right? There's other ways to make money. They got theme parks. Now I got Mario movies. Nintendo's doing okay. But I think one of my questions for switch to, as they continue to consolidate this market and from handheld to console is how do they again, keep not only the audience that has continue to grow audience. And some of that means being increasingly competitive and,

in a world full of these other games we're talking about. So I think modernization is something Nintendo sort of has to do while also keeping its sandbox somewhat pristine and clean and like full of high quality stuff. Do you feel like this next era for Nintendo is more competitive because there is this huge...

upswing in the Steam Deck and these other kind of handheld game systems that are starting to come out and do really well? Or is Nintendo, as ever, just kind of like over here doing Nintendo things? Nintendo will always be over here doing Nintendo things. Like, they can't help themselves. Right.

And I do think, to your point about doing all the weirdness, like, one of the things I have wondered about is if things like Alarmo and this museum and all this stuff is, like, Nintendo is putting its weird energy on that stuff so that it can keep the Switch non-insane. I like that. That's a fun idea. Uh-huh. I have no evidence for that theory, but it's kind of what it feels like to me. The theme parks? Yeah.

Yeah, right. All the people here we've hired to just do whatever, they now do it over there. And then the Switch just gets to be the Switch. You do hear some reporting and some Nintendo people in Miyamoto talk about the younger designers at Nintendo, right? The younger designers get a lot of credit for Splatoon, the Splatoon series, which has its own just totally perfect vibe. And the Switch gets some credit from the younger designers. Yeah.

And so I think that there is some world in which as the old guard at Nintendo gets older and older, even though Miyamoto doesn't appear to age, I think, but as they get older and older, like there are younger folks in there who are coming with a different point of view and different set of expectations who can drive the business and the products they make towards an audience that is going to be more compatible with that sensibility. Yeah.

And so maybe there is some world in which those weird experiments go to the side. And the weird experiments are still part of what makes Nintendo Nintendo. And I think that even some of the games, like when the Switch came out, 1, 2, Switch, like I miss some of the goofball, again, Labo. I miss some of these goofball games

And I would really dread having a Nintendo product come out with just a AAA Metroid Prime game, a AAA Mario game, a AAA Zelda game. And that's all great. But what's exciting about Nintendo products are the weird one-two switches or snipper clips or Labo. And so I don't want to disabuse them of any of that whimsy. But I worry...

again about integrating a pinwheel into the console and like understandable um trying to make that a thing um so we'll see i think it will have some surprises in store is my guess whether they are going to add value or be a distraction is a bigger question but i'm i'm pretty confident switch to will just be a

A gooder switch. Boy, I hope so. A gooder switch is truly all I need in 2025. All right, Chris, we got to take a break. But thank you for doing this. Good to have you back. Thanks. All right, we got to take one more break. And then we have a much requested hotline that I'm very excited about. We'll be right back. Support for The Verge Cast comes from Polestar.

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all of your weirdest tech questions. If you're ever like, huh, I want, just pick up the phone and call us or send us an email. 866-VERGE11. The email is vergecastattheverge.com. This week's hotline comes from, I would say, a semi-throwaway line in last week's meta episode that came up a whole bunch, and it's time to dig back into it. Let's hear it.

Hi, my name is Chris. And I'm on vacation right now in the United Kingdom. And I was just kind of like listening on the plane or whatever. And I heard Helen Havlak talk about her garden design in Figma. And like, what the? Like, I gotta know about that. Like, come on. I'm a designer. I'm using Figma. It's a great tool. Like, tell me about one thing about your garden. Mama wants to know. Thanks so much. Helen Havlak, welcome back.

Thank you so much. It's been so long. One entire week. We got so much of this. Like, I sort of assumed there would be someone who was like, oh...

I am also a gardening sicko and I want to know what Helen is up to. But we got more of this than I expected. So it was just time to do this with you. I now feel extra guilty for having drafted this how-to guide for Barbara to publish on theverge.com in 2023 and then never publishing it. I am sorry, world, that I did not give you this weird and highly specific content. The world clearly needs this in a way that I did not understand until this past week.

So let's just dive in. I don't even know where to start because all of this is so outrageously foreign to me. So how did it come to pass that you are a Figma gardener? Yes. Well, David, you might think it's a little weird that we're talking about gardening here in late December, but actually the timing is perfect. We are approaching the darkest day of the year. And what anyone who is a gardener knows is that you do actual gardening from like March to November. You've got spring planting.

But from...

December to like February, you are in pure fantasy gardening. This is when all of your gardening energy is completely thwarted. You can't do shit outside. The ground is frozen. So what you do is you fantasize. This is when you like read gardening books, which you would never do in the summertime. This is when you draw plans for your garden and think about what you're going to do when it's not dark and depressing outside. You're like a professional athlete in the off season, basically. So timing is perfect. So how did this come about?

Well, I bought a house in 2022. It had a very kind of like formal foundation planting that we were not super into. And we were thinking about how to expand it, plant more plants. I went full like native plant rabbit hole, something very into like native plants.

And my husband, Phil, and I were talking about what we wanted to plant. And we needed to come up with a plan for what we were going to put in the ground. And therefore, what did we need to buy? And really, what did we need to buy when Native Plant Trust pre-orders went live, which is usually late January, February. Is that like a big moment? Is it a Taylor Swift on Ticketmaster kind of situation that we're talking about here? Probably.

Probably not, David. But I should also set the stage that I am not a professional gardener. I am a very amateur gardener. And what I have is some books I have read, boundless enthusiasm and no practical gardening experience whatsoever. That's the dream. But my husband and I were, you know, trying to figure out where did we want to plan for what we were going to do.

And he's a front-end web developer, Phil, if I end up mentioning his name. And so we were looking at, okay, is there a good software that will help us do this together? And what we were looking for is

Something free. We didn't, you know, we're not landscape architects. We didn't want a really expensive seats on a software program designed for total professionals. I think many of whom use like SketchUp or other things. We wanted something that was collaborative. We could work across both of our devices and not have to have like access issues.

There's some gardening software out there that have like component libraries, but a lot of those have like really generic plants and not a lot of good like local ecotypes and native plants. So we wanted to be able to put our own plants in. So in those, you're kind of like...

dragging clip art onto a thing with some of those? Okay. So we needed to be able to put our own plants into the system. And, you know, a lot of times you do this fantasy gardening and then you're outside and you have to actually place the plants. And so we wanted something that had a reasonably good mobile experience. And so that is how we landed upon the weird choice of actually Figma was good enough for us to do all of the things we wanted to do in the free version of Figma pretty quickly. Okay.

Was there another set of possibilities that you almost came to? Because I feel like with that...

number of constraints. I can't actually think of all that many things that would work. You know, I looked at some Reddits for like, what is gardening software? There are some that are owned by like plant manufacturers, but that's where you run into like the plant library isn't deep enough. There's some cool startups doing interesting things in this space. I'm going to be real with you. I did not do an exhaustive research of all the software before Phil and I were like,

You know what? Actually, what about Figma? And Figma was good enough to do all the things we wanted to do. Okay. Were you good at Figma going in? Because I feel like Figma slightly terrifies me. I'm pretty good at moving around in Figma, but even that took some work. And the idea of really setting this thing up successfully is slightly terrifying. No, I think key to this is that I am not expert in Figma. All of where I am in Figma usually is reviewing design files that someone else has created. The Verge has...

an incredibly talented design team. And so I've looked at plenty of Will Joel's Figma's. And I was like, if Will Joel thinks Figma's good enough, it's probably good enough for me. But key to this is I am not a Figma pro. And you can get pretty far in garden design with like very little specific Figma expertise.

That's good. That's encouraging to hear. So this is tough to do on a podcast for a visual design application you're talking about, but describe the Figma a little bit. How does it actually work? Okay. So you make a free Figma account. It's very easy. You start a new project. That's very easy. It works exactly like you would think it is. The one pain in the ass part of this whole process is importing your plan and determining a scale. Unlike

In an architecture design program, Figma does not work in inches or some of the conventions of one-eighth inch printed equals whatever. That's not how Figma works. Figma works in pixels. So you have to arbitrarily set up your...

place in what you're working and decide what your scale is going to be. What we did is we took a PDF of our home design. It was pretty basic. A lot of people might have this from a real estate listing of your house if you ever did work on your house.

If you're not planning something that's like a foundation bed around your house, you could blue sky it. But we ended up coming with the arbitrary rule that 10 pixels would equal one inch. Most plant stuff in the United States seems to be in inches. So this will have a 12-inch spread. This will have a 24-inch spread. If you live in Europe, you would pick something different based on metric.

So the most pain in the ass part is taking a PDF, which Figma does not recognize. You have to convert it to a PNG or JPEG and then import it into Figma. We did that in Photoshop. You put it in, and then you take something where you know the length is, and you set that to the scale you want. So if there's a wall of your house, you could go measure it and say this wall is 14 feet wide. Therefore, if my scale is...

10 pixels equals 12 inches. I know how much that needs to be. I set that scale and then everything from now on exists in that scale. One thing that's nice about Figma is when you specify links, for example, you can do math in the field where you use the little star thing to say like,

10 times 12, and it'll just do the math for you. So as you're converting into the pixel thing, you could actually do math directly there. But that's the hardest part of the whole system is importing the drawing of your house or your lot. You could use a Google Earth image of your lot as your opening place. People do all kinds of things. But setting that scale is the hardest part where you take one known measurement, you determine what it should be in pixel land, and then you have to do all of your planning with that in mind.

Okay. But then at the end of it all, you have something like a rendering of your whole space and then you can just start to populate it as you like. Yeah, exactly. So you get a background image that you're planning against that. And things when you, we'll talk about like when you get to planting plants, but what you're generally thinking about is like,

How big is this plant going to spread? Therefore, how do I space it when I'm planting? Oh, yeah. So, okay, this is the thing about gardening. This is why I'm bad at gardening because I just like I'm looking outside. We have a big like raised planter out on our patio and it's like beautiful and made of brick. And we were like, oh, cool.

We'll plant a bunch of stuff in there. We planted it all, as it turned out, too close together and it all immediately died. Super cool by us. Really happy about that. Yeah, you know, there's different philosophies of how to think about plant spread. I generally plant things slightly tighter than the nursery will tell you because I don't like weeding and I don't like looking at mulch.

So there can be advantages to packing a little bit tighter. That being said, especially if it's perennial, it may get much, much bigger and you should think about the future. It's a good rule of thumb. So tell me about the inserting of plants. I'm now obsessed with like, you're not happy with the clip art plants. You want your own. So are you going in and like...

painstakingly drawing each plant that you might want to, how do you do this? So this is very easy. So I use the ellipsis tool and I draw circles and I draw the circles to the width of a mature plant. So if the plant is going to be 12 inches, I draw a 120 pixel circle. Very easy. That's what its spread is going to be. Then if you're using what I do, which is the browser version of Figma that's free,

you can go and say, okay, I want to plant Liatris, Blazing Star, nice native plant. I can just go to Google Photos, copy a photo there, open Figma up, click the ellipsis, paste, and it will fill that little circle with an image of that plant. So if I care about textures and I care about colors, I'm going to have that image there. And then I have a little plant. Now, to be practical,

What I don't want to have to do is like go copy and paste that a bunch of times. Maybe I find out I want to plant a different variety of Leotris and it has a different spread. So you can do something where you right click the ellipsis and you set it up as a component. So there is like a parent object and I place all of my parent objects in like a corner of my canvas. That's like my key.

And I name what it is. So I have the thing. I have a little circle that has a picture of what the foliage looks like. It has the name of the plant and it's set to the right mature diameter in a little like component library key. And then I can just copy paste it in as I'm actually laying out plants.

I feel like you're describing something that is like sneakily a perfect use for generative AI. I just want to like, you're like, just describe the plant that you think it's going to be and just let it appear there. And I'm like, this is what all the image systems should be doing. Yeah. You know, there's, well, I'll say there's like limitations to this and maybe this is where AI can come in. It's like, what I'm talking about is doing a two-dimensional planting plan. Another thing you have to worry about when you're gardening is the height of your plant. This is not going to do height for you. So,

you're going to have to pay attention or have enough knowledge of how tall things grow. You're also not going to get seasonality out of this. So,

Things loom at different times of the year. So if you were really psychotic, what you could do is take your garden plan once you've built it in Figma, choose all of the photos that you've used for your plants of like springtime, then make a total duplicate of this and replace all the photos with what they look like in June.

And then again in like September. But that would be really crazy. And I would say, again, this is not perfect. We are just aiming for good enough for an amateur gardener. Okay. I do feel like 2026 Helen is going to come on and tell me about like how you bought a Vision Pro to do this. So now you can see it all spatially and actually map it in real time as you're walking through the garden. And like, I feel like that's where we're headed. And that is the best possible outcome here.

No, I mean, what this, yes, David, that could be the beautiful future. And I'm sure there's actually a bunch of cool startup garden design apps, maybe. Probably are. How big is your market size of Amateur gardeners with lots of enthusiasm? Trapped in winter, only using your software for two months of the year. Yeah.

But no, I mean, the end output you get here is you get an image of your house or your garden bed, which is your background canvas. You get a little key of all the plants in one place. That's where you've arranged all of your components. And then in your little gardening beds that you've drawn it, you can see how you plan to space this out, how you think layering and interspersing plants should work. And then you can go count how many of these did it take for me to fill this bed? This is how many I need to buy.

before I go put my garden in. So it gets you, again, not a professional garden plan, but it gets you good enough for an average person who can use basic software. I love this. What's the big garden upgrade for 2025? What are you working on right now? Ooh, we planted a bunch of native plants actually in the fall this year, which turned out to be terrible timing because it was a big drought. So...

Please root for me. So this year is going to be more about observing how all the stuff we've already planted now comes up, how it looks. I'm big into converting grass to meadow. That I would say I'm not planting in Figma. Meadow is just chaos. It is a constant battle with invasives. Native plant meadows are more of a battleground. They're not a planned ecosystem. AI can't solve that yet.

AI can't solve that. Phil does constantly pitch robotics for invasives removal and also dealing with some of the problems we now have of invasive pests. So there's something called the jumping worm.

which is exactly what you think it is. It's a worm that jumps. Oh, dear. Which is, one, really gross. It's not fun to have in your land if you're gardening. But also, they really deplete the nutrients from the soil. It's pretty bad. And they're spreading and no one knows what to do about it. And this maybe is like an ideal application for robotics who have enough AI that they could identify and zap jumping worms. Now, how you do that without like starting a fire...

or accidentally zapping other worms. Big question. And then you can really get into like deep in the like

what invasives are bad, what invasives are good. No earthworm is native to the United States, for example, but they're fine. They're good. I do feel like you've just inadvertently started an annual tradition, which is that you and I are going to come on here once a year and we're going to review the whole sweep of technology based on how capably robots can solve your garden for you. Because that's where we're headed. It's like everybody wants the robot gardens to be possible.

Yeah. Nature is complicated. This is the future. It seems like robot lawn mowers are getting generally better. I've seen them at some botanical gardens. We're very curious about lawn mowers. I hear Jen's working on something, though. So hold off and see if Jen tells you whether to buy it or not. There's a lot at CES. I'm skeptical. There will be a lot. I will say I've only heard a little bit about what Jen's working on. When she's finished, she's going to come on and we have a whole thing planned. But I don't.

necessarily think it's going super well. So everybody pray for Jen on that front. All right, Helen, we're going to get some emails. So I'm going to pass them on. If you have tips for Helen on her garden planning software, vergecastwithverge.com, we will pass them all along.

And we will do this again next winter. I'll try and finally publish a how-to in January. Love it. Everyone needs this. I'm going to get back into it for two weeks like I do every year, and it's going to be incredible. It's very niche. There's like three people like myself who really need this. Oh, I don't know. Again, the response to the offhanded thing you said last week would speak differently, but we'll see. All right, Helen, thank you as always. Thanks, David. Have a good one.

All right. That's it for the Verge cast today. Thank you to everyone who came on the show. And thank you as always for listening. There's lots more on everything we talked about, including the information about the CES Verge cast Wednesday, January 8th. Links in the show notes. I'll put all the links to everything in the show notes, all of our Google coverage.

If Helen will let me share her Figma, I'll put it in there too, but you never know. We'll see. And as always, read the website. Keep your feedback coming. We love hearing from all of you. Call the hotline 866-VERGE-11. Email us vergecast at theverge.com. We have one more episode to come for this year, and then we're taking a little break before CES, but we are not done yet with 2024. This show is produced by Liam James, Will Poore, and Eric Gomez. VergeCast is a Verge production and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.

Neil and I will be back on Friday with a bit of a surprise. But if you've been listening for a while, I suspect you know exactly what it is. We'll see you then. Rock and roll. That would be a delightful punk album, Multimodal Agents. Multimodal Agents, that's pretty good.

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