Microsoft teases 8K Xbox
Microsoft is working to create its most powerful Xbox yet as it gears up for the next wave of gaming console hardware. Xbox shared some details on its next hardware at E3 and it sounds appropriately next-gen.
The company teased some huge factoids in a teaser about what it’s calling “Project Scarlett.” The upcoming console will have 8K capability, will be able to handle frame rates up to 120fps and will utilize SSD storage to keep load times low. The hardware will be powerful enough to enable real-time ray tracing.
“This generation is going to be a bigger leap than any generation before,” a video describing the new hardware detailed. Microsoft says the new hardware will be four times as powerful as the Xbox One X.
The next-generation console will be arriving in the holiday season of 2020, the company says. It will be launching alongside a new Halo title, Halo Infinite.
“A console should be designed and built and optimized for one thing: gaming,” Xbox head Phil Spencer said onstage at the company’s E3 presser.
We’ve already heard a bit about PlayStation’s plan for their next generation console, mainly details regarding the system’s transition to SSD storage and its reliance on a third-generation AMD Ryzen CPU.
We’ll see how the systems stack up against each other as we hear more.
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Microsoft’s Project xCloud preview launches in October
Big news out of today’s Microsoft press conference. A few days after Google finally revealed some long awaited details about its Stadia offering, Microsoft just gave us a lot more info on its competitor, Project xCloud.
Announced back in October, the game streaming service is designed to offer a hardware agnostic gaming experience. Unlike Google’s offering, Microsoft’s got the power of its own cutting edge consoles on its side. As such, the company will be leveraging that technology to let gamers use their own Xbox One as a personal cloud server. For everyone else, the computation will happen on Microsoft’s own servers.
A preview of xCloud will be available for E3 attendees this week. We’ll report back as soon as we get some hands on time with the project — including some insight into what the lag is like on the system. For everyone else, a preview version of the offering launches in October — a year after it was first announced.
More information including pricing coming soon, no doubt.
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Microsoft acquires Psychonauts-maker Double Fine Productions
As it did last year, Microsoft used its Xbox E3 keynote to announce its moves in bulking up its in-house gaming content.
At its press conference, the company’s Xbox Game Studios head announced that Microsoft had acquired SF-based Double Fine Productions, a game creator that’s been around since 2000 and was founded by LucasArts’s Tim Schafer. As is the case with past acquisitions, it sounds like Double Fine Productions will continue to operate largely externally, now beneath the Xbox Game Studios entity.
Double Fine’s team
There may be more studio acquisition announcements on the way, we’ll keep this post updated if so…
Double Fine Productions notably raised around $3 million in a Kickstarter campaign to create a title, later called Broken Age. The idea of crowdfunding a game was pretty novel at the time when they did it 2012. It is of course, more commonplace now.
The company’s first title Psychonauts was released in 2005. Following the acquisition announcement, the studio showed off a trailer for Psychonauts 2 which is coming to Xbox Game Pass, Xbox One and PC.
Acquiring a host of small indie game studios seems to be Microsoft’s recent strategy in building out its content on Xbox Game Pass, bringing the service its own constant stream of original content.
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Game Pass Ultimate brings Xbox subscriptions together at a discount
Update 1:38pm PT: At its E3 conference, Xbox announced that the service will also be integrating Xbox Game Pass for PC as well.
Xbox wants the future of the gaming business to lean heavily on subscription services. The company’s Game Pass service has let users download games from a pool of dozens of titles, now Microsoft is trying to make the offer too good to refuse by bundling Xbox Live Gold with the service for $14.99.
Xbox Live Gold offers online play, but the extras included with the subscription like free games and Store discounts represent some of Microsoft’s more aged strategies in getting more revenue per user and building out Xbox loyalists. Game Pass brings users unlimited access to a library of 100+ games that include some console classics.
Live Gold retails for $9.99 per month as does Game Pass so the combo offers a nice discount and will likely be an easy sell to existing Live Gold users who are already ponying up subscription fees to Microsoft.
We’ll hear more about Microsoft’s plans with Game Pass Ultimate at their press conference, which begins soon.
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Watch Microsoft’s Xbox E3 press conference live
This year’s E3 is already off to an interesting start. Sony’s nowhere to be seen, and Nintendo, per usual, has opted to go online only. That leaves Microsoft as the only member of the big three with its own, honest to goodness press conference.
The company’s got a big opportunity here, and we’re hoping for some big things. On the gaming side, we expect some big news about Gears 5, Halo: Infinite and, perhaps, Age of Empires and a new Fable title.
News about the company’s Stadia competitor, Project xCloud, seems like a distinct possibility. We might even get a glimpse at the gaming giant’s next generation console. More info on all of the rumors from next week’s big show can be found here.
The big show kicks off this afternoon at 1PM PT/4PM ET. It’s available on YouTube, Twitch, Facebook and Twitter.
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Microsoft shares pricing details for Xbox Game Pass on PC
Update: The beta is live today.
Ahead of the Xbox E3 keynote this afternoon, Microsoft has dropped the pricing for their Xbox Game Pass plan which gives PC users access to a library of top games. The Service will be launching at a very reasonable $4.99 per month (though they note that’s an “introductory price,” MSRP is $9.99).
The Windows 10 service operates much like the console variety, letting you get access to titles on a subscription basis. Users can play the titles in an unlimited capacity as a subscriber and can buy the games at a 20% discount if they decide they want to own it.
You can join for $1 per month ahead of its official launch though the library looks to have just around ten titles during this period. When the full service launches, the company says you’ll have access to 100 titles and there are some hits among them including Halo: The Master Chief Collection, Gears of War 5 and Forza Horizon.
We’re down at E3 in Los Angeles gearing up for Microsoft’s keynote in a few hours, where we’re expecting to hear a lot about new Xbox services products and a bit about some new hardware on the horizon.
It’s interesting that they are adopting the Xbox branding for this PC gaming-focused service. We’ll likely hear a lot more about the Xbox strategy beyond PC today.
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Week-in-Review: Google makes a losing bet, Bezos plots his space take-over
Hey, weekend readers. This is Week-in-Review where I get hopped up on caffeine and give a heavy amount of analysis on one story while scouring the rest of the hundreds of stories that emerged on TechCrunch this week to surface my favorites for your reading pleasure.
Last week, I talked about the Apple device that was putting a kink in the company’s new pricing strategy. Of course, this week we saw that strategy reach new heights with the Mac Pro, but more on that in a bit.
I’m a couple hours away from flying down to Los Angeles to check out the E3 gaming expo, but one of the biggest gaming announcements of the month already happened this past week when Google shared some more details on its Stadia cloud gaming platform.
Stadia’s approach is far from unprecedented, but Google’s solution might be one of the more thoughtful efforts we’ve seen. We got some more details this week, here’s my story, and here are the top-level details:
- U.S. pricing for the pro-tier is $9.99 per month for unlimited 4K 60fps streaming and access to a library of titles, though you’ll still have to pay for most new games.
- You’ll need a 35 mpbs connection to stream Stadia Pro when it launches in November.
- There’s a 1080p free tier, launching later, that will allow gamers to play titles they buy from the Stadia store.
This is a pretty aggressive showing for Google.
Given the infrastructure costs, $9.99 is pretty cheap and adding a free tier is a bold call. Google’s strategy might be as formidable as they could make it, but that doesn’t mean that they’re going to win the cloud gaming market…
The first thing to acknowledge is that because of the incredibly stiff infrastructure/network demands of these plays, the only companies that can likely take on Google here are Amazon and Microsoft.
The AWS giant is already renting out some very expensive cloud GPUs but they haven’t made any indication of a foray into a gaming-focused subscription, though it may not be long if this market finds legs. Microsoft on the other hand is probably hours away from making its announcement. At 1pm PT Sunday, the company’s Xbox head is expected to share the company’s cloud-gaming plans, I’ll be there reporting on the news.
Google is acting plenty aggressive but Microsoft still has a huge upper hand. Becoming a gaming company is about far more than infrastructure and Google doesn’t have much history on its side when it comes to high-end gaming or… the games.
YouTube Gaming is probably Stadia’s best asset and integrations there can leverage that platform’s reach to encourage experimenting with the platform, but I still don’t trust the company to follow through with the resources to get enough developers to bring their titles to Stadia. The initial market that Stadia is grabbing for just feels so niche and Google hasn’t exactly been known to follow-through on consumer efforts that take longer than a few rounds of internal performance reviews to take off.
The Stadia team has already shown off a few games, but there are tens of millions of Xbox Ones out there filled with purchased titles and Google might just be probably overestimating the appeal of their cross-platform approach.
Google’s understated claim is that this is a limitless platform that can bring your desktop games to phones, tablets, laptops and TVs, but how many places do consumers really want desktop-class games? Can it truly claim to be a mobile-friendly platform when it only supports a few of its own phones at launch? More so, do people want to connect a game controller to their phone? It all seems like a fairly niche grab.
Google’s Stadia marketing seems to be looking to convert console users to ChromeCast users but given that YouTube Gaming is the company’s best discovery method, what’s likely going to end up happening is that Stadia drags in a very niche subset of aspiring PC gamers who don’t want to pay for high-end rigs. This will probably bring in some free Stadia Base 1080p users, but it’s going to be the latency — no matter how minimal Google can claim it to be — that shuts out a lot of PC die-hards from signing onto the Stadia Pro plan.
For single-player experiences, Stadia won’t have too many issues, but a lot of the top game publishers are focusing their full efforts on multi-player. Google barely touched on the topic of multi-player at its event, the fact is if developers enable cross-platform play with Stadia, those users are likely going to be at a tactical disadvantage. For a platform like Xbox One, Microsoft has enough existing reach that they can probably cordon off those streaming users into their own servers and keep the odds even, but Google may have some issues here fresh-out-the-gate.
There is still quite a bit we don’t know about Stadia, and I’m very anxious to see what Microsoft has up its sleeve, but Google just doesn’t feel like the right kind of company to pull this off… Let me know what your thoughts are though.
Send me feedback
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On to the rest of the week’s news.
Trends of the week
Here are a few big news items from big companies, with green links to all the sweet, sweet added context.
- Apple’s hardware finally goes Pro
You might have a MacBook Pro or an iPad Pro but chances are most of you aren’t much in the way of a professional. If you thought blowing $899 on a tablet made you a deep spender, try blowing $999 on the stand for your monitor. At its WWDC keynote this week, Apple went back to basics design-wise on its Mac Pro, but it cranked the pricing up to 11 with a $5,999 starting price for the tower and a $4,999 starting price for its 6K display. This falls in line with Apple’s latest trend towards pushing hardware prices higher, but, Jesus, this took things to a new level for Pros. Here’s our hands-on with the monster. - Looker catches Google’s eye
$2.6 billion is a fair amount of cash but it’s pocket change in the war for the cloud. Google announced Thursday that it was acquiring analytics startup Looker to strengthen its Google Cloud offering in the face of competition from AWS and Azure. More here. - ZuckCoin
Facebook is getting ready to show off its own cryptocurrency later this month. The coin, codenamed Libra, will be getting its own white paper on June 18th and will reportedly be pegged to a batch of current coins and will be managed by an external entity. Read more here. - Bezos takes over space
Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos talked about his plans to create the infrastructure network for space startups at the company’s re:Mars conference. “You cannot start an interesting space company today from your dorm room. The price of admission is too high and the reason for that is that the infrastructure doesn’t exist,” Bezos noted. “So my mission with Blue Origin is to help build that infrastructure, that heavy lifting infrastructure that future generations will be able to stand on top of the same way I stood on top of the U.S. Postal Service and so on.” Check our more of what he had to say in our story.
GAFA Gaffes
How did the top tech companies screw up this week? This clearly needs its own section, in order of awfulness:
- GAFA getting eyed by some three-letter agencies:
[Apple, Alphabet, Amazon and Facebook are in the crosshairs of the FTC and DOJ ] - YouTube pisses off gay creators:
[YouTube says homophobic taunts don’t violate its policies] - Google Play Store gets its antitrust moment-in-the-sun:
[Aptoide, a Play Store rival, cries antitrust foul over Google hiding its app] - Apple pricing gets egregious, earns keynote groans:
[Meet Apple’s secret weapon for keeping Wall Street happy]
Extra Crunch
Our premium subscription service had another week of interesting deep dives. TechCrunch’s Frederic Lardinois wrote about the interesting rise of Kubernetes and chatted with some of the key players involved in its ascension.
How Kubernetes came to rule the world
“…To talk about how Kubernetes came to be, I sat down with Craig McLuckie, one of the co-founders of Kubernetes at Google (who then went on to his own startup, Heptio, which he sold to VMware); Tim Hockin, another Googler who was an early member on the project and was also on Google’s Borg team; and Gabe Monroy, who co-founded Deis, one of the first successful Kubernetes startups, and then sold it to Microsoft, where he is now the lead PM for Azure Container Compute (and often the public face of Microsoft’s efforts in this area)..”
Here are some of our other top reads this week for premium subscribers. This week TechCrunch writers talked a bit about ROI, and how security startups are capturing M&A attention…
- Why four security startups just sold for $1.5 billion
- Is your event strategy paying off? How to calculate your event ROI
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Startups Weekly: The Peloton IPO (bull vs. bear)
Hello and welcome back to Startups Weekly, a newsletter published every Saturday that dives into the week’s noteworthy venture capital deals, funds and trends. Before I dive into this week’s topic, let’s catch up a bit. Last week, I wrote about the proliferation of billion-dollar companies. Before that, I noted the uptick in beverage startup rounds. Remember, you can send me tips, suggestions and feedback to kate.clark@techcrunch.com or on Twitter @KateClarkTweets.
Now, time for some quick notes on Peloton’s confirmed initial public offering. The fitness unicorn, which sells a high-tech exercise bike and affiliated subscription to original fitness content, confidentially filed to go public earlier this week. Unfortunately, there’s no S-1 to pore through yet; all I can do for now is speculate a bit about Peloton’s long-term potential.
What I know:
- Peloton is profitable. Founder and chief executive John Foley said at one point that he expected 2018 revenues of $700 million, more than double 2017’s revenues of $400 million.
- There is strong investor demand for Peloton stock. Javier Avolos, vice president at the secondary marketplace Forge, tells TechCrunch’s Darrell Etherington that “investor interest [in Peloton] has been consistently strong from both institutional and retail investors. Our view is that this is a result of perceived strong performance by the company, a clear path to a liquidity event, and historically low availability of supply in the market due to restrictions around selling or transferring shares in the secondary market.”
- Peloton, despite initially struggling to raise venture capital, has accrued nearly $1 billion in funding to date. Most recently, it raised a $550 million Series F at a $4.25 billion valuation. It’s backed by Tiger Global Management, TCV, Kleiner Perkins and others.
A bullish perspective: Peloton, an early player in the fitness tech space, has garnered a cult following since its founding in 2012. There is something to be said about being an early-player in a burgeoning industry — tech-enabled personal fitness equipment, that is — and Peloton has certainly proven its bike to be genre-defining technology. Plus, Peloton is actually profitable and we all know that’s rare for a Silicon Valley company. (Peloton is actually New York-based but you get the idea.)
A bearish perspective: The market for fitness tech is heating up, largely as a result of Peloton’s own success. That means increased competition. Peloton has not proven itself to be a nimble business in the slightest. As Darrell noted in his piece, in its seven years of operation, “Peloton has put out exactly two pieces of hardware, and seems unlikely to ramp that pace. The cost of their equipment makes frequent upgrade cycles unlikely, and there’s a limited field in terms of other hardware types to even consider making. If hardware innovation is your measure for success, Peloton hasn’t really shown that it’s doing enough in this category to fend of legacy players or new entrants.”
TL;DR: Peloton, unlike any other company before it, sits evenly at the intersection of fitness, software, hardware and media. One wonders how Wall Street will value a company so varied. Will Peloton be yet another example of an over-valued venture-backed unicorn that flounders once public? Or will it mature in time to triumphantly navigate the uncertain public company waters? Let me know what you think. And If you want more Peloton deets, read Darrell’s full story: Weighing Peloton’s opportunity and risks ahead of IPO.
Anyways…
Public company corner
In addition to Peloton’s IPO announcement, CrowdStrike boosted its IPO expectations. Aside from those two updates, IPO land was pretty quiet this week. Let’s check in with some recently public businesses instead.
Uber: The ride-hailing giant has let go of two key managers: its chief operating officer and chief marketing officer. All of this comes just a few weeks after it went public. On the brightside, Uber traded above its IPO price for the first time this week. The bump didn’t last long but now that the investment banks behind its IPO are allowed to share their bullish perspective publicly, things may improve. Or not.
Zoom: The video communications business posted its first earnings report this week. As you might have guessed, things are looking great for Zoom. In short, it beat estimates with revenues of $122 million in the last quarter. That’s growth of 109% year-over-year. Not bad Zoom, not bad at all.
We cover a lot of startup and big tech news here at TechCrunch. Sometimes, the really great features writers put a lot of time and energy into fall between the cracks. With that said, I just want to take a moment this week to highlight a few of the great stories published on our site recently:
A peek inside Sequoia Capital’s low-flying, wide-reaching scout program by Connie Loizos
How to calculate your event ROI by Sarah Shewey
Why four security companies just sold for $1.5B by Ron Miller
In case you missed it, Bird is in negotiations to acquire Scoot, a smaller scooter upstart with licenses to operate in the coveted market of San Francisco. Scoot was last valued at around $71 million, having raised about $47 million in equity funding to date from Scout Ventures, Vision Ridge Partners, angel investor Joanne Wilson and more. Bird, of course, is a whole lot larger, valued at $2.3 billion recently.
On top of this deal, there was no shortage of scooter news this week. Bird, for example, unveiled the Bird Cruiser, an electric vehicle that is essentially a blend between a bicycle and a moped. Here’s more on the booming scooter industry.
Thumbtack is raising up to $120M on a flat valuation
Depop, a shopping app for millennials, bags $62M
Fitness startup Mirror nears $300M valuation with fresh funding
Step raises $22.5M led by Stripe to build no-fee banking services for teens
Possible Finance lands $10.5M to provide kinder short-term loans
Voatz raises $7M for its mobile voting technology
Flexible housing startup raises $2.5M
Legacy, a sperm testing and freezing service, raises $1.5M
If you enjoy this newsletter, be sure to check out TechCrunch’s venture-focused podcast, Equity. In this week’s episode, available here, Crunchbase News editor-in-chief Alex Wilhelm and I discuss how a future without the SoftBank Vision Fund would look, Peloton’s IPO and data-driven investing.
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Maker Faire halts operations and lays off all staff
Financial troubles have forced Maker Media, the company behind crafting publication MAKE: magazine as well as the science and art festival Maker Faire, to lay off its entire staff of 22 and pause all operations. TechCrunch was tipped off to Maker Media’s unfortunate situation which was then confirmed by the company’s founder and CEO Dale Dougherty.
For 15 years, MAKE: guided adults and children through step-by-step do-it-yourself crafting and science projects, and it was central to the maker movement. Since 2006, Maker Faire’s 200 owned and licensed events per year in over 40 countries let attendees wander amidst giant, inspiring art and engineering installations.
“Maker Media Inc ceased operations this week and let go of all of its employees — about 22 employees” Dougherty tells TechCrunch. “I started this 15 years ago and it’s always been a struggle as a business to make this work. Print publishing is not a great business for anybody, but it works…barely. Events are hard . . . there was a drop off in corporate sponsorship.” Microsoft and Autodesk failed to sponsor this year’s flagship Bay Area Maker Faire.
But Dougherty is still desperately trying to resuscitate the company in some capacity, if only to keep MAKE:’s online archive running and continue allowing third-party organizers to license the Maker Faire name to throw affiliated events. Rather than bankruptcy, Maker Media is working through an alternative Assignment for Benefit of Creditors process.
“We’re trying to keep the servers running” Dougherty tells me. “I hope to be able to get control of the assets of the company and restart it. We’re not necessarily going to do everything we did in the past but I’m committed to keeping the print magazine going and the Maker Faire licensing program.” The fate of those hopes will depend on negotiations with banks and financiers over the next few weeks. For now the sites remain online.
The CEO says staffers understood the challenges facing the company following layoffs in 2016, and then at least 8 more employees being let go in March according to the SF Chronicle. They’ve been paid their owed wages and PTO, but did not receive any severance or two-week notice.
“It started as a venture-backed company but we realized it wasn’t a venture-backed opportunity” Dougherty admits, as his company had raised $10 million from Obvious Ventures, Raine Ventures, and Floodgate. “The company wasn’t that interesting to its investors anymore. It was failing as a business but not as a mission. Should it be a non-profit or something like that? Some of our best successes for instance are in education.”
The situation is especially sad because the public was still enthusiastic about Maker Media’s products Dougherty said that despite rain, Maker Faire’s big Bay Area event last week met its ticket sales target. 1.45 million people attended its events in 2016. MAKE: magazine had 125,000 paid subscribers and the company had racked up over one million YouTube subscribers. But high production costs in expensive cities and a proliferation of free DIY project content online had strained Maker Media.
“It works for people but it doesn’t necessarily work as a business today, at least under my oversight” Dougherty concluded. For now the company is stuck in limbo.
Regardless of the outcome of revival efforts, Maker Media has helped inspire a generation of engineers and artists, brought families together around crafting, and given shape to a culture of tinkerers. The memory of its events and weekends spent building will live on as inspiration for tomorrow’s inventors.
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George R.R. Martin’s next project is reportedly the video game, Elden Ring
E3 doesn’t technically start until Tuesday, but the leaks are already arriving fast and furious. Now that winter has come from HBO’s Game of Thrones, creator George R.R. Martin’s got several other projects in the works, including, reportedly, a new video game.
Welp.
Looks like everything is leaking before E3. Elden Ring is probably next up.
— Daniel Ahmad (@ZhugeEX) June 7, 2019
Word is we’ll be hearing more about that last bit on Sunday, during Microsoft’s big kick off press conference. For now, however, we’ve got a smattering of information about Elden Ring from Daniel “ZhugeEX” Ahmed. The perennial game leaker tweeted out a poster for the title, which is said to be a collaboration between Martin and Hidetaka Miyazaki, best known for his role in FromSoftware’s Souls series.
In addition to Xbox One, the title is also set for release on PS4 and the PC. Supernatural powers and monarchical kingdoms abound, making this pretty standard fare from the A Song of Ice and Fire writer. Beyond that, details are pretty thin at the moment, so stay tuned to TechCrunch’s E3 coverage, which kicks off in earnest on Sunday.
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