GAMING

Multiplayer in the Cloud

The cross-platform cloud gaming Hype Train™ is almost ready to leave the station. In this new era of gameplay, platforms promise to offload on-device processing to servers. Gamers could enjoy console-like gameplay via TV or smartphone.

I am not boarding The Train today—cloud gaming still faces critical bottlenecks. 

A lay of the virtual lands 

The available services: 

• Google Stadia Pro ($10/month) lets users play supported titles in up to 4K resolution...assuming they have strong enough internet connection. Another bottleneck: Stadia’s library has limited offerings. 
• Nvidia’s GeForce NOW Founders ($5/month) lets users play games digitally on laptops only. 
• PlayStation Now is a ($10/month) cloud gaming subscription service that lets gamers stream or download titles. 

Microsoft’s much-hyped xCloud arrives Sept. 15. The game-streaming platform will be bundled with the Xbox Game Pass Ultimate service ($15/month). Players can choose from 100+ games at launch, and play AAA titles like Halo 5 on any supported device. 

• Apple and Facebook have their own gaming ambitions as well. 

AWS is reportedly also working on a cloud gaming service, because of course it is. Jeff Bezos has said he wants Amazon’s cloud computing arm to eventually power “computationally ridiculous games,” the kind that would eat the Xbox Series X and PlayStation 5 for breakfast. 

Back to the bottlenecks

Adoption rates are low, as cloud gaming remains niche. Performance is another bottleneck. Gamers care more about milliseconds and packet loss than anyone. Cloud gaming has bandwidth and latency needs that you can only find in pockets of pockets of the U.S. 

Big picture: Take it from Xbox chief Phil Spencer: Cloud gaming is still years away from mainstream status. xCloud and friends’ guinea pigs early adopters will show us more about how the technology holds up across devices and geographies.

Across the board, 5G could help. Let’s say you’re in your city’s park sometime next year. Your iPhone has 5G millimeter wave connection and, voila, an AAA game designed for consoles works perfectly…

GAMING

...oh, but Wait

Apple has dealt Stadia and xCloud the red ring of death. The company has barred the services from its iOS walled garden on the basis of violating App Store guidelines. For its part, Apple says it won’t allow the services because it cannot individually vet every supported game.

• I recently connected the dots between Apple’s anticompetitive headaches and its iron App Store fist.  

Macworld, not exactly an anti-Apple blog, called the company’s xCloud decision “patently absurd,” with extra color commentary unfit to print here. Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney has heaped criticism on Apple, saying it has “gone crazy” with App Store rev share policies. 

Unsurprisingly, Microsoft criticized the decision. The company has counseled U.S. competition authorities on what it says are unfair App Store practices. 

Unstoppable force meets immovable objects? I’d bet Apple and the cloud players will find a mutually agreeable way forward. The platforms don’t want to miss out on a market of nearly 1.5 billion iOS users, while Apple doesn’t want to risk losing users to Android because they can’t access a new technology.

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GEOPOLITICS

Huawei Is in Trouble

Huawei became the world’s top smartphone vendor in Q2. 

But there was no time to celebrate, because U.S. sanctions are taking their toll. A Huawei exec said Friday the company has “no chips and no supply.” On Sept. 15, it will terminate production of premium Kirin chips, which are made by contractors who use U.S.-origin manufacturing technology. 

It’s not clear what comes next. But let’s use our imagination: 

• Huawei offers soup-to-nuts telecom infrastructure. Its 5G gear sales could partially offset its smartphone woes, as demand climbs in China and countries outside Washington’s sphere of influence. 
• Huawei spends $15 billion annually on R&D, with plenty earmarked for chip development. 
• There’s also outside help: China is heavily subsidizing chip R&D in its bid to establish technological self-sufficiency. The country is said to have roughly 1,300 fabless chipmakers. 

Bottom line: Self-sufficiency doesn’t happen overnight. Since Huawei is depleting its hardware stockpile, it may not be the No. 1 global smartphone vendor for long. 

+ While we’re here: Qualcomm lobbyists are working the phones in D.C., seeking a license to sell 5G parts to Huawei, per the WSJ.

BITS & BYTES

Stat: Sequoia holds a roughly 10% stake in TikTok parent ByteDance, the WSJ reports. That’s worth more than $10 billion, according to recent secondary sales.

Quote: “Words matter. Especially in antitrust law.”—Internal Alphabet doc seen by The Markup. The Google parent has reportedly been coaching employees to avoid terms like “market,” “barrier to entry,” and “network effects” in written correspondence. 

Read: Are humans intelligent? An op-ed from GPT-3, OpenAI’s new language model. 

WHAT ELSE IS BREWING

• TikTok stuff: Twitter and TikTok have held preliminary talks about combining forces, the WSJ reports. Poor Vine. The U.S. intelligence community doesn’t view TikTok as a major security threat, per the NYT. NPR reports that TikTok will challenge President Trump’s recent executive order in courts as soon as Tuesday.
• The U.S. Air Force awarded contracts worth billions of dollars to SpaceX and United Launch Alliance for satellite launches. 
• Taiwanese security researchers recently presented findings on Operation Skeleton Key, a long-running Chinese hacking campaign that stole source code, software development kits, and chip designs from Taiwanese companies.
• Google has discontinued the Pixel 4, in anticipation of the Pixel 4a and Pixel 5 launching. It was a real short run—nine months—for the Pixel 4. RIP.
• Simon Property Group, the largest U.S. mall owner, has held talks with Amazon to convert defunct JCPenney and Sears stores into fulfillment centers. 

WHAT'S BREWING THIS WEEK

Monday: Space Tech Expo through Wednesday; Fortune 500 rankings published; National Lazy Day. To celebrate today’s holiday, I will not be creating my own space convention or corporate power rankings. 

Tuesday: Earnings (SoftBank, Rakuten, NTT, China Tower); IoT World Virtual Conference runs through Thursday; American Sociological Society’s annual meeting, which has interesting tech-society and future of work programming, wraps up today. 

Wednesday: Earnings (Tencent, Cisco, Lyft, Foxconn, China Unicom); Usenix Security Symposium runs through Friday. 

Thursday: Earnings (Baidu, China Mobile); Huawei’s 90-day U.S. license expires. 

Friday: Listening to Friday by Rebecca Black. This weekend, U.S. trade representative Robert Lighthizer will meet with Chinese counterparts virtually to discuss Phase One of the U.S.-China trade deal. 

TECH THINGAMABOBS

For AI’s future: Andrew Ng, a Stanford professor and Coursera cofounder, posed a question to Twitter: "What do you think is the single most important problem that the AI community should be working on?" Check out the responses. 

For Tesla fan-fic: Friday was the two-year anniversary of Elon Musk tweeting “Am considering taking Tesla private at $420. Funding secured.” Tesla’s stock is up nearly 237% since then, so everything worked out okay. In an alternate reality, let’s say Tesla had gone private. Where would it be today?

Reply and send me your most imaginative takes. I’ll include the best responses later this week. 

ICYMI

Catch up on the top Emerging Tech Brew stories from the past few editions: 

• Washington ramps up tech decoupling with “Clean Network”
• Quantum meets the final frontier
• China’s DC/EP could compete with Alipay and WeChat Pay