Gemini, GTA, and the search for the next big thing

The Verge's Victoria Song and Kylie Robison join the show to talk about all of Google's recent AI and XR announcements, and the company's big and Gemini-powered vision for the future of computing. Then Chris Grant, the group publisher for Polygon and The Verge, explains why GTA VI and the Nintendo Switch 2 are so important to the future of gaming — plus a few predictions about how they'll turn out. Finally, The Verge's Helen Havlak answers a hotline question about how she plans her garden in Figma. Which is a real thing she really does. Further reading: The Vergecast at CES – come see us on January 8th! Google launched Gemini 2.0, its new AI model for practically everything Google’s AI enters its ‘agentic era’ I saw Google’s plan to put Android on your face GTA VI: all the news on Rockstar’s next entry in the Grand Theft Auto series Switch 2: all the news and rumors on Nintendo’s next console Email us at [email protected] or call us at 866-VERGE11, we love hearing from you. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:03David Pierce?

  Welcome to The Vergecast, the flagship podcast of Vaporware. I'm your friend David Pierce, 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.

• 0:46David Pierce?

  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 gonna try it, we'll see how it goes. Anyway, lots coming up on the show today. We are gonna 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 gonna 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 gonna talk about that with Vsong and Kylie Robinson. And then, we're gonna talk about video games.

• 1:30David Pierce?

  So Ash Parish 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 gonna be in Vegas for CES, we are doing a live Vergecast 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.

• 2:15David Pierce?

  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 Vergecast. We'll be right back.

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• 4:18David Pierce?

  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 would very much like that to be Google. So Android XR, Gemini 2.0,

• 5:03David Pierce?

  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 is a Tech Journalist

• 5:47David Pierce?

  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.

• 6:19Speaker 05

  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 Vergecast that you think Project Astra is kind of their whole vision for Gemini in the future.

• 6:34David Pierce?

  Uh huh.

• 6:34Speaker 05

  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, 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.

• 7:04Speaker 05

  But yeah, you know, I got some on rails demos. Something I didn't include in the story is they had this book, 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 for France's special dish, you know, like their local dish, what wine should I pair with that? The only reason I didn't include that is that I'm not a France expert and I contacted Nathan Edwards on staff who said he was semi a France expert and neither of us could deduce how helpful that was.

• 7:42Speaker 05

  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 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. And I'm like, cool. Awesome.

• 8:09David Pierce?

  Yeah. One thing I always wonder 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?

• 8:31Speaker 06

  Astra is, this will take us into the future.

• 8:34David Pierce?

  Okay.

• 8:34Speaker 06

  And Mariner is, there's, it's so new that I think it's not gonna be the future product yet. So yeah, I would say that's, that's where both fall.

• 8:43David Pierce?

  They just like found a thing that can open a new tab in Chrome and like got really excited about it.

• 8:47Speaker 06

  Right, exactly.

• 8:48David Pierce?

  That feels like as far as we've gotten. Yeah.

• 8:50Speaker 06

  Right.

• 8:50David Pierce?

  Okay. All right, V, your turn. Tell us, you, you got to play with hardware, which means you got

• 8:55Speaker 06

  Yes.

• 8:55David Pierce?

  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.

• 9:05Speaker 06

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

• 9:30Speaker 06

  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 a room, just like, ooh.

• 9:42David Pierce?

  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.

• 9:50Speaker 06

  This was a little like that.

• 9:51David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 9:52Speaker 06

  This was a little like that.

• 9:53David Pierce?

  Oh no.

• 9:53Speaker 06

  Because, um, yeah, so I got to try Android XR, which is the broad platform, but they basically want this to be a single platform for multiple devices, which meant I got to try Samsung's, you're gonna love what this is called, Project Muhan headset.

• 10:11David Pierce?

  No, thank you.

• 10:12Speaker 06

  And some prototype smart glasses. So basically, two different visions for what XR is gonna 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 Muhan 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, huh. 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

• 10:57Speaker 06

  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're 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.

• 11:31David Pierce?

  Right.

• 11:31Speaker 06

  This is, 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 gonna 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,

• 11:59David Pierce?

  They're like, we totally meant for that to happen. That was definitely gonna be fun.

• 12:02Speaker 06

  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. Oh, my God, it works. Like that kind of, that kind of energy that was happening in there.

• 12:24David Pierce?

  So I feel like on the, on the spectrum of here's a thing somebody made, do you want to look at it to 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.

• 12:38Speaker 06

  Yeah. I don't know how far into the future, like Project Muhan, 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. A lot of apps to work with?

• 13:04David Pierce?

  Listen, it had iPad apps and that didn't help anyone for any reason, but it had them. The, they were there.

• 13:09Speaker 06

  Yeah. Yeah.

• 13:13Speaker 06

  So, you know, they were very like 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 Muhon arrives in 2025. So that will be coming next year ostensibly, whether they mean January or December, probably closer to December is my guess. 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, 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 for 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.

• 13:58Speaker 06

  So like, I know X Real is working with them, but um, as to when we'll actually see that, ah, it is gonna be in the future is, is what it's gonna be.

• 14:10David Pierce?

  Yeah, the future is a long time.

• 14:12Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 14:13David Pierce?

  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's 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, are smart glasses and, and AI just going to smoosh together across the whole industry?

• 14:45Speaker 05

  No.

• 14:47Speaker 05

  Short answer, no. Uh, 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 Vergecast, 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 I'm my entire life, I'm used to them.

• 15:15David Pierce?

  And you don't need them, they're just purely an affectation. You just, you just wear them because they look cool, right?

• 15:19Speaker 05

  Right. Do I look cool? Oh my God, I'm so jealous right now because I'm wearing contacts.

• 15:26Speaker 06

  Uh, I have to have corrective vision, so I'm jealous.

• 15:31David Pierce?

  Yeah, V is well documented as, as more or less blind here on the first guest.

• 15:35Speaker 05

  No, I'm negative 2.5, negative 3.5, but that, I don't think that's blind enough. I think my mom's negative 6 in both eyes, which is pretty blind.

• 15:42Speaker 06

  Negative 9, negative 8.75 with heavy, heavy astigmatism, babies. Uh, yeah.

• 15:51Speaker 05

  Love that. Um, for the Meta Ray-Bans, um, you, I think negative 6 and above, you, they can't help you. Like, you're screwed.

• 15:58Speaker 06

  No, no, the honest to God, they, when they sent me my prescription ones, they're like, just so you know, we did this like out of house because Ray-Ban wouldn't do it.

• 16:06Speaker 05

  Yep.

• 16:07Speaker 06

  Cause you're so blind. Um, I appreciated it, but it was also just like.

• 16:12David Pierce?

  You're breaking the curve, V, as always.

• 16:14Speaker 05

  Love that. Yeah.

• 16:15Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 16:15Speaker 05

  But, um, so no, I think a lot of people, uh, are not interested in it. Uh, 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, uh, version of this. I think they're gonna have to keep iterating and hardware is hard. I'd be interested to see how earbuds, uh, if that ever drops, that's gonna be very interesting to see.

• 16:35Speaker 06

  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, where that is the key. It was like, they were saying like, oh, well, you know, VR headsets, those are gonna 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 gonna be when you feel like you wanna 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.

• 17:18Speaker 05

  Consume.

• 17:19Speaker 06

  Yes. To your point, I think not everyone's gonna want the glasses form factor, but that form factor is gonna give some advantages that an earbud can't. And that I think in the, the future, their pitching, we'll all have incredible disposable income to have 40,000 different gadgets for different use cases.

• 17:38Speaker 05

  Right.

• 17:39Speaker 06

  So, yeah.

• 17:40David Pierce?

  Yeah. I mean, I think I, I'm of two minds about the glasses thing. As somebody who does not wear glasses, um, cause my vision is sick, like not to brag, but like.

• 17:48Speaker 05

  All right.

• 17:48David Pierce?

  It's pretty.

• 17:49Speaker 06

  Okay, fine. Yeah, okay.

• 17:51David Pierce?

  Uh, I've like some of the best, people are always saying I have like the best.

• 17:55Speaker 06

  The people are saying.

• 17:56David Pierce?

  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 for like pure utility reasons, I think is just never gonna 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 were 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, 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.

• 18:41David Pierce?

  I had this moment of me like, oh, maybe there's something to that, that actually glasses are more 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 correctly, that doesn't work at all because you're gonna have to wear them day in and day out. And, like, I don't know. Did, 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?

• 19:12Speaker 06

  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 gonna be very hard to do. Because, um, you know, like, the science fiction of it, like, I, 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, uh, or the ones that he gives to Peter Parker in one of those Marvel movies, which name is escaping me right now, like, the, 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.

• 19:56Speaker 06

  So they were very excited to show me these prototypes. And they're like, oh, this one prototype you're gonna see, it's a monocular, uh, display, which means it's off to the side. It's 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's 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.

• 20:40Speaker 06

  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. 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. Cause 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?

• 21:22Speaker 06

  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, we're not going to do that.

• 21:47David Pierce?

  Yeah. So it's an easy thing to say, I think.

• 21:49Speaker 06

  Very easy.

• 21:50David Pierce?

  But it is at least, it at least, at least something I'm hap, 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 did you, what sense did you get? Cause I think one of the things Google is pretty clearly pushing towards with something like Mariners, like making it really easy to shop for things, which is one heck of a way to make money. And Astra is, 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?

• 22:24Speaker 05

  Of course.

• 22:25David Pierce?

  Or am I just being cynical?

• 22:26Speaker 05

  No, of course. I, once again, was listening to the Vergecast 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.

• 23:08Speaker 05

  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.

• 23:30David Pierce?

  That's actually your favorite thing to do?

• 23:32Speaker 05

  Yeah, exactly. So like, we don't want to like, you know, freak people out because it's so powerful. However, when I was doing these like research prototypes, I was like, oof, like, this is actually kind of giving me vertigo. This is like, this could be a lot to unleash into the world.

• 23:46Speaker 06

  I had that too.

• 23:47David Pierce?

  How so? What was it, what was it that happened that made you feel like that?

• 23:50Speaker 05

  I think it was just the ways that it could be used nefariously. It's, 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, um, this feels like some huge leaps.

• 24:35Speaker 05

  You know, we don't know when it's coming out, but.

• 24:37Speaker 06

  The natural language thing, it really shocks you when it does work. Because I had, they, 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 they were basically like, I was in the glasses and they were like, oh, why don't you ask Gemini what the title of the yellow book behind you is? And I'm not looking at it and I ask 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 the book behind me.

• 25:17David Pierce?

  Oh, yeah.

• 25:18Speaker 06

  And then I take the book and they're like, why don't, why don't you ask, open to a random page, why don't you ask Gemini to summarize what's on 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, well, 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, college professors and teachers everywhere are cooked because students are just gonna take textbooks and just like go summarize this for me and whatnot. So.

• 25:49David Pierce?

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

• 26:16Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 26:17David Pierce?

  But this is, this is one of the things I've been thinking about this for forever. Like, you, 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 gonna 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.

• 27:02David Pierce?

  That's not a

• 27:03Speaker 05

  No.

• 27:03David Pierce?

  No one ever needs to do that in real life.

• 27:06Speaker 05

  It's a good magic trick.

• 27:07David Pierce?

  It's a great magic trick. But like, just the other day, so there's a, 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, like just the, 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, they're also something more than like ideas.

• 27:51David Pierce?

  And so I think how, I'm, 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.

• 27:59Speaker 05

  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 capacities. 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, it's, it's scary. Like it genuinely is scary. And I, 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.

• 28:29David Pierce?

  Oh, no, it super is. It is, this is like, the, the thing that gives me hope is that this is the same kind of thing we've gone through with every technical development ever.

• 28:40Speaker 05

  Right.

• 28:40David Pierce?

  And, you know, whatever, kids are growing up not learning how to read. So like the, the internet did do that.

• 28:45Speaker 05

  Yay.

• 28:45David Pierce?

  Here we are. But, but we, 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?

• 29:00Speaker 06

  What I will say is like, knowing that my demos were incredibly controlled, they didn't even let me take pictures of anything. Knowing that, seeing everything working, did I feel like Tony Stark and that Gemini was my Jarvis? Yes, that was really frickin', I did, it felt very scary.

• 29:18David Pierce?

  And that's something, I mean, because you were a person who

• 29:20Speaker 06

  I'm a huge skeptic.

• 29:21David Pierce?

  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.

• 29:29Speaker 06

  It was for the glasses, though, just because there is more interaction with the world 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? Hmm, 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.

• 30:12Speaker 06

  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 Z-er saying like, Sigma Alpha Riz, Ohio?

• 30:24Speaker 06

  Like, you know, like that sort of stuff 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 controlled demo, sure, sure, I believe it. But we don't, life is weird.

• 30:42Speaker 06

  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 how, 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 it's also just like I was I was pausing and Gemini says to me, you don't have to say, hey, Google.

• 31:18David Pierce?

  Really?

• 31:18Speaker 06

  I was like, oh, geez, geez, she's so sassy.

• 31:22David Pierce?

  She's like, that's actually not my name. She could just, if you could address me correctly.

• 31:25Speaker 06

  Not my name. And then I said, I was, the the other really creepy thing is I said I was hungry inside of Project Muhan 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.

• 31:44David Pierce?

  That is, that is the slow tilt toward the ad hellscape that makes me worry.

• 31:49Speaker 06

  It is, it is, it is.

• 31:50Speaker 05

  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.

• 31:55David Pierce?

  Yeah, here's what I will and won't talk about Gemini.

• 31:57Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 31:58David Pierce?

  I have, I have, I have rules. Kylie, same question to you with Astro, which I think like, like you're saying is like, Google's most ambitious version of AI things. You've now used the the latest and greatest of Astro. Like, do you, do you see something big inside of that yet?

• 32:14Speaker 05

  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 the, that's real life. So I don't know if this comes out anytime soon. And 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.

• 32:45Speaker 05

  And I think they're willing to really sink it into this. So, yeah, I do, I do see these being really useful. Astro, 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. 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, you know, was bopping between places really 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, you know, at this time? That would be great. It's a very silly thing. But when I saw Product Mariner, I was like, oh, this is like, almost what it's trying to do,

• 33:29Speaker 05

  except you have to supervise it. You would be faster and you have like, 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.

• 33:57David Pierce?

  Yeah, that makes sense. All right. Well, we're gonna 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.

• 34:14Speaker 06

  Multi-modal. I'm so sick of that word. Everyone's just like, it's multi-modal.

• 34:21David Pierce?

  We are a multimodal podcast now. V, you, me and Kylie, we are multimodal. I don't know what that means, but I don't think I'm allowed to say it on a podcast.

• 34:29Speaker 05

  The podcast of multimodal agents.

• 34:33David Pierce?

  All right. Thank you, bud. Appreciate it.

• 34:34Speaker 05

  Thank you.

• 34:35Speaker 06

  All right. Thanks for having me.

• 34:37David Pierce?

  All right, we gotta take a break and then we're gonna come back and talk about video games. We'll be right back.

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• 36:03David Pierce?

  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 VI, 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 Parrish came on the show a few weeks ago and said that the biggest story of the year in gaming was these two things that don't exist yet. Grand Theft Auto VI 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,

• 36:47David Pierce?

  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, 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'd talk about why these things matter so much and where they're headed. Chris Grant, welcome back.

• 37:24Speaker 08

  I don't even know when the last time I've been on the show is, so.

• 37:26David Pierce?

  It's been a minute.

• 37:27Speaker 08

  I'm gonna accept welcome back, but it's been a couple of decades.

• 37:31David Pierce?

  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 is, this happens frequently.

• 37:39Speaker 08

  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.

• 37:47David Pierce?

  Hmm. 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 of 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. 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 VI just won most anticipated game. So let's just start there. Let's just talk about GTA VI, 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,

• 38:27David Pierce?

  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?

• 38:43Speaker 08

  Grand Theft Auto is an older franchise. So it's been around a minute, most notably Grand Theft Auto III, 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 III came out 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 I and I wanted to 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 III 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.

• 39:29David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 39:29Speaker 08

  Video games are entertainment products. They are powered by hardware. They have generational leaps. We'll talk about some of that generational leap 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 sort of legend of some of these games. Why are people excited about Grand Theft Auto VI? Because it's part of the Grand Theft Auto franchise.

• 39:54David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 39:54Speaker 08

  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 three, or they played four, or they played five, and they have memories of playing with their friends, or they played it in their college dorm, and they played it with their buddies after work. They 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 V or GTA Online, but some of that audience for four, and some of that audience for three, or some of that audience for Vice City, or San Andreas, or whatever.

• 40:38Speaker 08

  And how many of those people will trade up for the new one? That's a lot of folks.

• 40:44David Pierce?

  Yeah. Well, but what I wonder about the way you described 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're, we talk about Grand Theft Auto the same way that we talk about those games. Like, nobody is like hanging the future of the gaming and entertainment industries on the success of the next Call of Duty. Hmm, there's something different about GTA.

• 41:17Speaker 08

  I might argue the thesis on Call of Duty a little bit, considering the Microsoft Activision Blizzard merger largely powered by Call of Duty.

• 41:26David Pierce?

  Maybe the next one more than most.

• 41:29Speaker 08

  Call of Duty is a little different because it comes out every year.

• 41:32David Pierce?

  Fair.

• 41:32Speaker 08

  So, you know, if, if the last GTA came out in 2013, which is wild.

• 41:37David Pierce?

  Is that true?

• 41:39Speaker 08

  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 whole world's different, frankly, and, and not to mention video gaming and technology that makes video games possible, which is also sort of a wild testament to GTA V's success that it remains one of the top 10 most played games and best selling games every year in that interim period.

• 42:04David Pierce?

  And I, I confess, I haven't played GTA V in a long time, but from the little bit I understand, it's a very different game now than it was in 2013, right?

• 42:11Speaker 08

  The game is the same as in the single player game. Sure.

• 42:14David Pierce?

  Okay.

• 42:15Speaker 08

  There's 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, uh, you know, games like Madden, games like Call of Duty, they're immensely popular. They sell a ton. There's some of the best selling games every year. Those are the games that people will trade up every year. They have this 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 at the younger end?

• 42:54David Pierce?

  It's an interesting way to think about it. You just pay 60 bucks a year for Madden. That's just how.

• 42:58Speaker 08

  That's your subscription cost. Yeah. And so, uh, Halo, a little different. I think Microsoft wishes it had a Call of Duty or Madden and Halo has not managed to retain that cultural relevance. Uh, but GTA has, and it has in part because, you know, previous GTA four to five, 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 V comes on the tail end of that generation, as in like the very tail end, like the new consoles are coming out and, um, it sets records. Right? It's the fastest selling entertainment product of all time, et cetera, et cetera. Right? 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.

• 43:44Speaker 08

  What's on the PlayStation three hardware? And just like, put that in context. That those consoles, at least the 360 came out in 2005. PS3 came out the following year. That's 20 years ago. Yeah. 20 years before the 360 came out was the NES. Wow. Like. Yeah. I don't want to make ever half the listeners just turn to ash. I'm sorry. That was awful. I didn't like that at all. Should I trigger warning? Liam, let's add a trigger warning before I say that. It's 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.

• 44:28Speaker 08

  We're already on, well, you could say we're on the tail end. You know, in 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? What is that going to mean? I'm sure you've seen some of the GTA V 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 VI 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.

• 45:09Speaker 08

  It's, it's a, it's a make or break kind of moment. The franchise, and then on the other hand, of course, 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 G T A 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 played 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, the point of GTA Online is just go mess around.

• 45:42David Pierce?

  Right.

• 45:43Speaker 08

  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 into 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 when their retirement target looks like.

• 46:21David Pierce?

  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 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.

• 46:58Speaker 08

  I think that there's a couple of 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, Fortnite'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 Bricklife 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 modus back, hugely popular and like Fortnite as a platform. Is a really interesting idea and how it competes in a world of increasing consolidation

• 47:43Speaker 08

  on that end of the market. Is GTA 6 a platform? I don't know. I would not be surprised.

• 47:49David Pierce?

  If you, if you roll back to the way you described the game 20 years ago, like the, the phrase that just popped into my mind is Roblox for adults, which is like a thoroughly fascinating possibility that really doesn't exist in kind of the way you're describing.

• 48:03Speaker 08

  Roblox wants to tell you it exists, but it does not.

• 48:05David Pierce?

  It does not exist.

• 48:06Speaker 08

  Yeah. 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 like all this like clicker game stuff. 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. The low nutritional value, right? Trust that I make Astro Bot available at all times for my family. It's available day or night.

• 48:36David Pierce?

  So you're a good parent. That's, that's the job.

• 48:38Speaker 08

  I'm a good parent. Astro Bot, notably game of the year winner yesterday, last night.

• 48:44David Pierce?

  That's right.

• 48:45Speaker 08

  I don't want to say Polygon got it wrong. It was Bellatro 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, uh, it's going to be fascinating. I think they have a track record that really

• 49:30Speaker 08

  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 six, a news announcement, a trailer, you name it, those things really indicate a level of sort of like latent energy, right? It's just gonna 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, you know, demanded a lot of attention and sort of gathered up a lot of that energy.

• 50:15Speaker 08

  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 Co., sort of shared, Sims 4, Call of Duty, you know, TKTK, Modern Warfare 2, 3, Warzone 2, League of Legends, Valorant, GTA V, and Rocket League.

• 50:37Speaker 08

  That's the top played games. Here's the wild statistic about that. Average years on the market for those games, 9.6 years.

• 50:45David Pierce?

  Wow.

• 50:46Speaker 08

  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 with 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, 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 V audience moves to it, but what does it look like?

• 51:27David Pierce?

  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? Going, doing the thing no one else can do and making a, a new sort of wholly contained game that is good enough to pull this off. Cause I feel like you can, you can put your hopes on either one of those, but maybe not both at the same time.

• 51:50Speaker 08

  No, I'm gonna say both. I'm gonna say both. I'm gonna say that they're gonna make a single player game that's gonna move the needle and sell a lot of units because people wanna play it. And then they're gonna make a sticky multiplayer online experience that is going to be competitive across a landscape that looks like this.

• 52:03David Pierce?

  That would be a hell of an achievement.

• 52:05Speaker 08

  That is going to grow and shift over time because they will continue to iterate on and develop it. Heist for GTA V came out years later.

• 52:13David Pierce?

  Sure.

• 52:13Speaker 08

  Right? And that was 10 years ago. 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're competing against Fortnite. And like they're 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, the pace of development games. I think a lot about the, the new Final Fantasy games that have come out and how they've really been struggling to, I think, meet some sales expectations. One of the things that was crazy is the, the last

• 52:57Speaker 08

  Final Fantasy game, 16, which struggled on a PlayStation exclusive, a weird concept these days, 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. Something that a lot of gamers would turn their nose down at.

• 53:32David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 53:32Speaker 08

  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, Fortnite really popped off. Again, GTA V, 2013, like, how much has changed since they even started development on this game? And I think that's part of the expectation. That's part of the anticipation. 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.

• 54:07David Pierce?

  Yeah, you've you've tracked the hype cycle of games like this many times over the years. But are like, should people keep their hopes high on this one? Do you feel like like is it? It does seem like if historically speaking, if anything is going to live up to this kind of hype.

• 54:25David Pierce?

  GTA has as good a shot as any, but also kind of like you said before, like maybe nothing can be as good as we're sort of expecting this game to be.

• 54:33Speaker 08

  My general point of view is you shouldn't get hyped about anything.

• 54:39David Pierce?

  That's nice. Just a touch of nihilism.

• 54:42Speaker 08

  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. Right? I think that they've had a kind of impressively consistent hit rate.

• 54:59David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 54:59Speaker 08

  For that entire series.

• 55:03Speaker 08

  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. It's 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 is no competition for GTA in the market.

• 55:33David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 55:33Speaker 08

  They don't need to release it. Nobody is nipping at their heels. They're still banking cash on five, 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, et cetera.

• 56:19Speaker 08

  Will it do that? Does it have enough juice to continue to grow over time? Uh, instead of just keep what they have. And that's the big question for me. I don't know.

• 56:30David Pierce?

  Yeah. Yeah. I think to some extent the, the like, we're just going to make a slightly better new game every year is like an actually easier strategy.

• 56:39Speaker 08

  Yeah. The iterative year by year strategy is like expensive and difficult in its own way, but you know, 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 six. 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. So yeah, it's a, 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, there's no sense in taking that kind of risk.

• 57:14David Pierce?

  Yeah. So the, 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 gonna 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.

• 57:44Speaker 08

  If I were to bet, I'm gonna say it's coming in the first half of the year.

• 57:48David Pierce?

  Okay.

• 57:49Speaker 08

  Nintendo's fiscal, I wanna say, starts in Q2 in April. So there's a reason to think maybe they try and get it out just before or just after. We'll see.

• 57:57David Pierce?

  Sure.

• 57:57Speaker 08

  Nintendo will also wait until it's ready. So there's that. The reporting so far has been that they wanna wait until they have enough units, that there isn't any risk of hardware shortages or any other sort of holdup. So they just wanna be sure when it comes out, you can get one.

• 58:13David Pierce?

  Because there was a bunch of that at the beginning with the first Switch, right? Wasn't it hard to get for a while?

• 58:17Speaker 08

  Nintendo historically has struggled with inventory pipeline, right? Remember the Wii?

• 58:23David Pierce?

  Oh, yeah.

• 58:24Speaker 08

  You couldn't buy it for years.

• 58:25David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 58:26Speaker 08

  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 reimagine what that old hardware can do. And that's sort of Nintendo's magic. But it's old hardware.

• 58:40David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 58:40Speaker 08

  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 that's 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.

• 58:58Speaker 08

  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.

• 59:07David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 59:08Speaker 08

  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 a 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 volume 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.

• 59:45David Pierce?

  Right.

• 59:45Speaker 08

  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 their heart of work on it. And that they will announce more when ready. Okay, they 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.

• 1:00:05David Pierce?

  Oh, yeah, that was like on election day.

• 1:00:07Speaker 08

  Yeah, yes, right, yes.

• 1:00:09David Pierce?

  Thanks Nintendo.

• 1:00:10Speaker 08

  What a weird drop. What a like.

• 1:00:13David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:14Speaker 08

  Again, for the calendar enthusiasts, you're looking at a calendar. What day could we pick to put this piece in this, which is generally good news? Why would you not trumpet it? I also and I'll say this about the successor ship. 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 N sixty four.

• 1:00:40Speaker 08

  There's a little bit of a back to back and sixty four, at least from a sales standpoint, followed up with a GameCube. Thanks. Although GameCube heads know, good console.

• 1:00:48David Pierce?

  Also, N sixty, this is like N sixty four slander I was not prepared for and will not acknowledge, but we can just move past that.

• 1:00:54Speaker 08

  I have an N sixty four right here.

• 1:00:56David Pierce?

  Okay, all right, then we're cool. All right.

• 1:00:58Speaker 08

  With library games, I'm gonna not, but if you're gonna prioritize and rank the best Nintendo consoles of all time, inclusive of the virtual boy, the Nintendo sixty four is still gonna be low on that list.

• 1:01:09David Pierce?

  That's fair. I mean, but the most recent one, right? It's like I've heard a lot of people say like Wii Wii U, right? Huge revolutionary hit followed by

• 1:01:18Speaker 08

  Big flop.

• 1:01:18David Pierce?

  Weird new idea on top of it that didn't work.

• 1:01:21Speaker 08

  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 twenty thirteen. GTA V is coming out. 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 the Wii U struggled with that absence of an online function. There was different systems. There was your Nintendo

• 1:02:03Speaker 08

  Network ID and other stuff. It wasn't until Switch Online that there's something that feels modern, right? That you could go on to. One of my examples that I use in this piece from 2013 is that if I buy a book on a Kindle and I lose my Kindle, I just get into Kindle and my books there. Right. 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 having 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

• 1:02:47Speaker 08

  imagine a kid losing something? Never. Never happened.

• 1:02:50David Pierce?

  Purely hypothetically, yeah.

• 1:02:51Speaker 08

  If you lost it and you had digital games that you purchased, they were gone too, tied to the console. What? Like what? I would never buy. To this day, I don't buy Nintendo games digitally. I just don't. I'm like, I'm, I don't know, I'm old. I have a lot of physical games because I'm also old. But also, I just, I 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 in a way that I expect them to be. And this has not happened over

• 1:03:32Speaker 08

  some generations, right? You're, 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 purchased digitally. 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 Matix's dumbass quote.

• 1:03:59David Pierce?

  Yeah, it's not great.

• 1:04:00Speaker 08

  It's not just that it's not backwards, it's the way games work today. They have to be backwards, they have, 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 of forward capacity about how people think about their software and their purchases. They are thinking about it as a successor and not to Nintendo consoles, but as a successor to the Switch, which is an important differentiation. This is not N sixty four to GameCube, 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.

• 1:04:45Speaker 08

  Your games will play, Wii U would play Wii games. It did drop the GameCube support. I think saying that in the three DS played DS games. I think that if comparing it to the three DS and the Wii U doesn't give you a lot of comfort. It 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 hanging out, 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.

• 1:05:30David Pierce?

  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 wifi is actually like the most important one for me because the wifi chip in this thing is old and bad and just does not work very well. 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.

• 1:06:10Speaker 08

  I would like the following things. I'd like it to be more durable.

• 1:06:14David Pierce?

  Hmm. Yeah.

• 1:06:15Speaker 08

  Uh, the JoyCons are kind of a nightmare. Um, if anyone has kids in their household, 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 out?

• 1:06:37David Pierce?

  Sure.

• 1:06:38Speaker 08

  Fuck the JoyCons. 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 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.

• 1:07:05Speaker 08

  Make it more durable.

• 1:07:06David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:06Speaker 08

  This is a console that you're gonna be throwing in your bag. Why is it so fragile? Why are things so wiggly? Um, 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. Um, and I think a lot of families now have a lot of switches.

• 1:07:31David Pierce?

  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.

• 1:07:39Speaker 08

  I know a lot of folks who have kids that have a switch light.

• 1:07:41David Pierce?

  Hmm.

• 1:07:42Speaker 08

  And then there's the switch at home. But why is it, why is my game there? Is it saved? Did it transfer? Is my saved file there? What's my thing? Do I have to download this again? This is my home console, not my home console. It gets like a bit goofy where it has to always be online if it's not the home console, but then it's a switch light. You're traveling with it. So there's just like some part of managing multiple consoles that I think, you know, especially as these things last longer and people play the games longer, like 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, their yearbook title would be most improved.

• 1:08:19Speaker 08

  Um, 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 their switch to, what are they gonna call it? Uh, Polygon's official vote is super switch.

• 1:08:31David Pierce?

  It's gotta be super switch is the, I don't think they will, but that is the correct answer.

• 1:08:35Speaker 08

  And the super should definitely be the super font from Super Nintendo.

• 1:08:38David Pierce?

  A hundred percent.

• 1:08:39Speaker 08

  I'm gonna say out loud.

• 1:08:40David Pierce?

  Um, we're doing a retro thing in the world right now. Like go, go for it. Go, we're all, we all live in the nineties again. Like, let's just do it. I'm into it.

• 1:08:47Speaker 08

  Look, I love the nineties and it turns out one of the things that younger folks and myself still have in common is they love the nineties now too.

• 1:08:54David Pierce?

  The nineties are so back.

• 1:08:55Speaker 08

  It's great. So let's all just live it and do the super font, please.

• 1:08:58David Pierce?

  I'm in.

• 1:08:59Speaker 08

  Um, and then if it doesn't have a lot of secrets, it doesn't have surprises, right? When the Wii came out, do you remember the Wii's codename Revolution?

• 1:09:06David Pierce?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:09:07Speaker 08

  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 mockups and somebody found a footage, but the lighting is off and you can tell because the direction of whatever. Um, I don't think we have that this time because it's probably just gonna be a big switch. It's gonna be a big switch with some different things. And then is Nintendo, will they feel compelled to add in a goo ga, a whiz bang? I don't know. Is it gonna have like a big radio antenna on the back and it does ham radio too? I don't know. I have like no idea what the thing is gonna 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 Wii.

• 1:09:50Speaker 08

  And they added this goofball tablet that connected locally.

• 1:09:54David Pierce?

  Yep.

• 1:09:54Speaker 08

  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 was it 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 are like, yeah, cable boxes. That's what kids love.

• 1:10:17David Pierce?

  Yeah, right.

• 1:10:18Speaker 08

  Um, I just actually asked the Polygon staff yesterday who, who still had a cable subscription and the only people who did, there's only a handful of people and they have it for just sports. That's it. Like everyone else has been, I've been a cord cutter since 2005, six. 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 like add something fancy. I will also flag one other thing. The Switch is not the best console ever. It is the best Nintendo console ever. The best console is the PlayStation two, but also the DS handheld is still a little bit over. The Switch, the Switch may overtake a lifetime. We'll see, but I do want to find another really notable part about the Switch. It has sold more software than any other Nintendo console.

• 1:11:02Speaker 08

  The Wii sold roughly a billion units of software. The Switch has sold 1.3 billion units of software.

• 1:11:07David Pierce?

  Wow.

• 1:11:08Speaker 08

  The DS sold about a billion units of software too. But there's a, um, a timeline issue with 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. They make a little bit of money on Nintendo online, right? There's other ways to make money.

• 1:11:51Speaker 08

  They got theme parks now, I got Mario movies, Nintendo's doing okay. But I think one of my questions for Switch two, as they continue to consolidate this market and from handheld to console, is how do they again, keep not only the audience it has, continue to grow audience? And some of that means being increasingly competitive 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.

• 1:12:26David Pierce?

  So 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?

• 1:12:46Speaker 08

  Nintendo will always be over here doing Nintendo things.

• 1:12:50David Pierce?

  Okay.

• 1:12:50Speaker 08

  Like, they can't help themselves.

• 1:12:52David Pierce?

  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.

• 1:13:08Speaker 08

  I like that. That's a fun idea. Uh huh.

• 1:13:10David Pierce?

  I have no evidence for that theory, but it's kind of what it feels like to me.

• 1:13:12Speaker 08

  The theme parts.

• 1:13:14David Pierce?

  Yeah, right. You know, like, all the people here we've hired to just do whatever.

• 1:13:18Speaker 08

  Yep.

• 1:13:18David Pierce?

  They now do it over there. And then the Switch just gets to be the Switch.

• 1:13:22Speaker 08

  You do hear some reporting and some Nintendo people, me and Moto will talk about the younger designers at Nintendo, right? The younger designers get a lot of credit for Splatoon, Splatoon series, which has its own, just totally perfect vibe. And the Switch gets some credit from the younger designers. And so I think that there is some world in which as the old guard at Nintendo gets older and older, even though, uh, Miyamoto doesn't appear to age.

• 1:13:47David Pierce?

  True.

• 1:13:48Speaker 08

  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. 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, one, two, Switch, like, I miss some of the goofball, again, labo. I miss some of these goofball exercises. And I would really dread having Nintendo product come out with just a triple A Metroid Prime game, a triple A Mario game, a triple A Zelda game.

• 1:14:28Speaker 08

  And that's all great, but what's exciting about Nintendo products are the weird one-two switches or snipper clips or labo.

• 1:14:37David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:37Speaker 08

  Um, and so I, 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,

• 1:14:50David Pierce?

  Understandable.

• 1:14:51Speaker 08

  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 two will just be a gooder switch.

• 1:15:07David Pierce?

  Boy, I hope so. A gooder switch is, is truly all I need in 2025. All right, Chris, we gotta take a break, but thank you for doing this. Good to have you back.

• 1:15:15Speaker 08

  Thanks.

• 1:15:17David Pierce?

  All right, we gotta take one more break and then we have a much requested hotline that I'm very excited about. We'll be right back.

• 1:15:27Speaker 02

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• 1:16:46David Pierce?

  All right, we're back. Let's get to the hotline. This week's Vergecast hotline is brought to you by Amazon Q, the new generative AI assistant from AWS. As always, the number is 866-VERGE11. The email is [email protected]. We love all of your questions. We've gotten a bunch more great ones after the Meta show we did last week that I think have been really interesting and I look forward to finding a way to answer. I will say, we're taking a couple of weeks off after this week, so we're not going to have a ton of time to do hotline stuff, but we're also going to do a bunch of fun catch-up stuff in January, and we will not lose track of your questions. So please, keep them coming. 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.

• 1:17:29David Pierce?

  866-VERGE11, the email is [email protected]. 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.

• 1:17:45Speaker 09

  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, whatever, and I heard Helen Havlak talk about her garden design in Sigma. And like, what the, I gotta know about that. Like, come, I'm a designer, who's all using Sigma. It's a great tool. Like, tell me about one thing about your garden. Mama wants to know. Thanks so much.

• 1:18:12David Pierce?

  Helen Havlak, welcome back.

• 1:18:14Speaker 10

  Thank you so much. It's been so long, one entire week.

• 1:18:17David Pierce?

  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, we got more of this than I expected. So it's, it was just time to do this with you.

• 1:18:30Speaker 10

  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.

• 1:18:44David Pierce?

  The world clearly needs this in a way that I did not understand until this past week. Uh, so let's, let's just dive in. I, 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?

• 1:18:59Speaker 10

  Yes. Well, David, it's a, you might think it's a little weird that we're talking about gardening here at 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 planning. But from December to like February, you are in pure fantasy gardening. This is when you, 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.

• 1:19:42David Pierce?

  You're like a professional athlete in the off season, basically.

• 1:19:44Speaker 10

  So, timing is perfect. Um, 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, some very into like native plants. And my husband, Phil and I were talking about what we wanted to plant and we need to come up with a plan for what we're going to put in the ground. And therefore what did we need to buy? And really, what did we need to buy when like native plant trust pre-orders went live? Which is usually late January, February.

• 1:20:17David Pierce?

  Is that like a big moment? Like, is it a, is it a Taylor Swift on Ticketmaster kind of situation that we're talking about here?

• 1:20:23Speaker 10

  Uh, probably not, David, but um, I should also set a, 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.

• 1:20:39David Pierce?

  That's the dream.

• 1:20:40Speaker 10

  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, uh, 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 to really expensive seats on a software program designed for total professionals. I think many of whom use like SketchUp or other things. Uh, 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

• 1:21:24Speaker 10

  and native plants. So we wanted to be able to put our own plants in.

• 1:21:27David Pierce?

  So in those, you're kind of like dragging clip art onto a thing with some of those?

• 1:21:32Speaker 10

  Yeah. 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.

• 1:21:57David Pierce?

  Okay. Was there, 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.

• 1:22:09Speaker 10

  You know, I looked at some reddits for like, what are, 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 place, 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.

• 1:22:36David Pierce?

  Okay. Were you good at Figma going in? Because I feel like Figma, Figma slightly terrifies me. I'm pretty good at like moving around in Figma, but even that took some work. And the idea of like, really setting this thing up successfully is slightly terrifying.

• 1:22:51Speaker 10

  No, I think key to this is that I am not expert in Figma.

• 1:22:54David Pierce?

  Okay.

• 1:22:54Speaker 10

  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.

• 1:23:05David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:23:05Speaker 10

  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.

• 1:23:18David Pierce?

  That's, that's good. That's encouraging to hear. So this is tough to do on a podcast for a visual design application that you're talking about, but describe the Figma a little bit. What is it? How does it actually work?

• 1:23:28Speaker 10

  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 an architecture design program, Figma does not work in like inches or some of the conventions of like one eighth inch printed equals whatever. Like that's not how Figma works. Figma works in pixels. So you have to arbitrarily kind of 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

• 1:24:10Speaker 10

  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

• 1:24:54Speaker 10

  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 lengths, for example, you can do math in the like 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.

• 1:25:39Speaker 10

  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.

• 1:25:51David Pierce?

  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.

• 1:25:59Speaker 10

  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?

• 1:26:13David Pierce?

  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. Uh, super cool by us. Really happy about that.

• 1:26:34Speaker 10

  Yeah, you know, there's different philosophies of how to think about plant spread. I generally plant things slightly tighter than like the nursery will tell you because I don't like weeding and I don't like looking at mulch. Uh, 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.

• 1:26:56David Pierce?

  Yeah, that's, that's a good rule of thumb. So tell me about the, 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, are you going in and like painstakingly drawing each plant that you might want to, how do you do this?

• 1:27:11Speaker 10

  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 it 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 leotris 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

• 1:27:52Speaker 10

  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 that 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

• 1:28:36Speaker 10

  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.

• 1:28:46David Pierce?

  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.

• 1:28:59Speaker 10

  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 bloom 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, that make a total duplicate of this, and replace all the photos with what

• 1:29:44Speaker 10

  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.

• 1:29:57David Pierce?

  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.

• 1:30:11Speaker 10

  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.

• 1:30:20David Pierce?

  Probably are.

• 1:30:21Speaker 10

  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?

• 1:30:31Speaker 10

  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 like, good enough for an average person who can use basic software.

• 1:31:11David Pierce?

  I love this. What's the big garden upgrade for 2025? What are you working on right now?

• 1:31:16Speaker 10

  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 like converting grass to meadow.

• 1:31:38Speaker 10

  That I would say I'm not planting in Figma. Meadow is just chaos. It is a battle, a constant battle with invasives. Native plant meadows are more of a battleground. They're not a planned ecosystem.

• 1:31:50David Pierce?

  AI can't solve that yet.

• 1:31:52Speaker 10

  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.

• 1:32:11David Pierce?

  Oh dear.

• 1:32:11Speaker 10

  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. With them exist.

• 1:32:54David Pierce?

  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, that's where we're headed. It's like everybody wants the robot gardens to be possible.

• 1:33:11Speaker 10

  Yeah.

• 1:33:11David Pierce?

  Nature is complicated. This is, this is the future.

• 1:33:14Speaker 10

  It seems like robot lawn mowers are getting generally better. I've seen them at some botanical gardens. We're very curious about lawn rubbers. 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 C. Yes. I'm skeptical.

• 1:33:30David Pierce?

  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, [email protected], we will pass them all along. And we will do this again next winter.

• 1:33:52Speaker 10

  I'll try and finally publish a how to in January.

• 1:33:56David Pierce?

  Love it. Everyone needs this. It's, this is, I'm going to get back into it for two weeks like I do every year, and it's going to be incredible.

• 1:34:01Speaker 10

  It's very niche. There's like three people like myself who really need this.

• 1:34:06David Pierce?

  Oh, I don't know. Again, the response to the offhanded thing you said last week would, would speak differently, but, but we'll see. All right, Helen, thank you as always.

• 1:34:15Speaker 10

  Thanks, David. Have a good one.

• 1:34:19David Pierce?

  All right, that's it for the Vergecast 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 Vergecast 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 sigma, 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 VERGE11, email us [email protected]. 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 Poor, and Eric Gomez. Vergecast is a Verge production and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.

• 1:35:01David Pierce?

  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.

• 1:35:18Speaker 06

  That would be a delightful punk album, Multimodal Agents.

• 1:35:23David Pierce?

  Multimodal Agents, that's pretty good.

• 1:35:26Speaker 11

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