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Coverage | Newsletter | Intel | Events
Coverage | Newsletter | Intel
It's that time of the week again! No, not when you realize you're more than halfway through the weekend already (but hey, what are weekends these days?) — it's time for some zany patents from Big Tech. There were a few themes that emerged this week: Both Google and Amazon are looking at ways to make voice assistants more conversational, and Facebook and Microsoft are exploring how AR changes the way we interact with the world in the future. And then there's tossing location-tracking beacons shaped like maple seeds from drones — there's really only one company doing that.
And remember: Companies file all kinds of crazy patents for things, and though most never amount to anything, some end up defining the future.
Alphabet
If you've ever used a voice assistant speaker like an Echo or a Google Home, you know it can be a bit of a hassle to access additional services, especially if you're trying to compare one versus another, like calling a ride from Lyft or Uber. In Google's new patent, a voice assistant would be able to hold a conversation with its owner, and the AI could dynamically call upon more than one third-party service easily. In the diagram below, the user compares how long it would take to get a large vehicle to come pick him up without having to jump through verbal hoops like, "Hey Google, ask Uber how long it would take an XL ride to get here, and then ask Lyft the same thing."
In the long list of things preventing drone deliveries from becoming a regular occurrence in the U.S., this is probably pretty far down the list, but it's extremely annoying nonetheless. Drones are, pretty much without fail, extremely loud, and at usually the right pitch to make you think a swarm of angry bees is hovering just behind you. Imagine how that would feel if there were dozens or hundreds of drones zipping by at all times? Wing's new patent is full of ways to get around that, using hardware on drone propellers that can change the pitch of their buzzing as they approach a delivery drop-off, or even play a series of pitches in a row to make a little melody as the drone lands. It'd be like when your washing machine beeps to let you know it's done, but in flying robot form.
Amazon
Drone-deployed navigation beacons that fall like maple seeds
Do you remember playing with maple seeds as a kid, tossing them into the air and watching them float down to earth like tiny helicopters? Apparently someone in Amazon's engineering team does. This patent outlines small devices that could be dropped from a drone, spinning down to the ground like maple seeds. These devices wouldn't grow into magnificent trees filled with sweet syrup, but instead could act as location-tracking beacons for other drones that may have lost their way, possible because of malfunctioning sensors. It's like a very futuristic version of the breadcrumbs in "Hansel and Gretel."
Apparently just like Google, Amazon is working on making its voice assistants more conversational. In its new patent, it outlines situations where a simple question-and-answer function for Alexa wouldn't be enough to answer the user's vague query. In the case of one of the examples drawn out in the patent, a user tells Alexa they're hungry, and then the assistant asks them what they want. Perhaps a little problematically in 2020, its first suggestion is fast food (to which the user only tentatively replies "I guess") and then in a matter of seconds they're off to McDonalds. At least there's all-day breakfast — I guess.
Apple
Typing on tablets or smartphones with glass screens isn't the best feeling and doesn't provide the same tactile response that typing on a keyboard does. It's the reason a small cadre of devoted fans stuck around with BlackBerry long after they should have. But what if instead of bringing a keyboard to your phone, you brought one to your … fingers? This is apparently something Apple is considering, with tiny slip-on wearables for your fingertips that could re-create the sensation of typing even on a glass screen. To be honest, I'd rather just keep tapping away on glass rather than looking like I was playing with snacks.
Apple has been building out the types of exercise it supports on its Apple Watch pretty much since day one, and it added support for yoga a few updates ago, but this patent shows how (and what) it's tracking when you're getting into your downward dogs and your sun salutations:
I'm mainly sharing this one because of the wonderfully creepy mustache on the guy in the patent art, but it also shines a light on how Facebook might want to use augmented reality in its advertising products. The patent outlines either acquiring or building digital models of its advertisers' products, and then using AR software to project those products onto the person looking at the ad. In the patent, the user who sees an ad for a new pair of glasses on Facebook could theoretically click on the ad, see the glasses rendered realistically on their face, and buy them, all without leaving the social network. Having worn glasses my whole life, I'm not sure I'd be so quick to make a big decision like that, but then again going off the mustache on the user in question, it seems like he might not always make the best choices anyway.
Microsoft
Given I've just spent the last few weeks diving deep into the future of health care, this one was pretty interesting to me. Most modern blood-pressure monitors, even the very fancy internet-connected ones, require some sort of cuff to be attached to the wearer's arm to accurately gauge blood pressure. They are far from comfortable to use and not exactly something you could walk around wearing. But Microsoft is apparently looking into a technology called radial tonometry that could replace the cuff with a device worn on the wrist and a patch over the heart. It might not be quite as simplified as what Apple has managed to do to the EKG, but it still seems like something that could be worn around by patients far more easily. And given that heart disease is the biggest killer in the U.S., that could be welcome news.
Augmented reality social networks
If you're like me, you might be great at remembering people's faces, but absolutely horrible at recalling their names. This new patent from Microsoft could be a game-changer for awkward future dinner parties: It outlines an AR system that could allow users to tag people and create social network groups with them, or could recall information about people when seeing them for the first time in person. If you've connected with someone on LinkedIn, for example, and they're at a work event in front of you but you can't just remember a thing about them, you could tap on your AR glasses and pull up their profile without having to look like an idiot and do the "Hey … you!" thing when they approach you and you can't remember your name.
If you were designing a world-changing augmented-reality system, what would be the first thing you'd want to watch on it? Wizards fighting? Yeah, me, too. Microsoft's patent revolves around the world of head-mounted "near-eye displays" — which sounds a lot like the HoloLens — and the machinations required to mix digital content and the real world. But really the main reason I'm sharing this is that when we all have AR devices that we can use to improve our work and connect with the world in more interactive ways, what we're all really going to want to do is watch a wizard toss a fireball at a bad guy. Which sounds like a great future to me.
These are all great initiatives to help foster work-life balance after a stressful year. But if you're worried about long-term burnout at your company, you should also look into ways to prioritize team well-being all year round. Just as with building a healthier lifestyle, enacting measures of support on the day-to-day level is where lasting change is made.
Set healthy communication boundaries — and model them
According to a 2020 report by Aviva, 44% of employees say they feel like they "never switch off from work," while 70% of all workers say they regularly check emails and messages outside of work hours. And these habits have consequences: More than half of employees feel like their mental and physical health have suffered due to work pressures.
When employees may not feel like they can draw a line in the sand between their work and personal lives, it's up to leadership to clearly share communication expectations and model healthy boundaries. Encourage employees to turn off all email, Slack and work app notifications outside of working hours, and ensure that managers aren't reaching out to team members after-hours with requests.
Make sure that your company's leaders aren't just paying lip service to employees' right to disconnect, either. That means everyone in leadership — from the CEO down to team managers — should avoid sending emails during off-hours or reaching out to team members during their paid time off. By living the guidelines, leadership can help employees feel psychologically safe to stick to the recommended boundaries.
Just as with building a healthier lifestyle, enacting measures of support on the day-to-day level is where lasting change is made.
Eliminate unnecessary meetings
"Well, that meeting could have been an email." A recent joint study from Harvard Business School and New York University found that the average number of meetings increased 12.9% during the pandemic, while the size of each meeting grew by 13.5%. Meetings are the first and fastest way for your company to free up valuable team time.
Some companies have decided to implement "No-Meeting Wednesdays" to help employees recover. At Trello, employees will take regular "Maker time," where they forego any meetings to focus on creative work. But another option includes taking a closer look at each meeting on an employee's calendar and asking, "Does this meeting really need to exist?"
While some events should happen in real time — such as one-on-ones or difficult conversations — many other meetings can be carried out asynchronously. A project update is a great example of this. Rather than meet every Monday to discuss everyone's progress on a new project, team members can simply add their weekly updates to a list on Trello and respond to one another asynchronously. Everyone's kept in the loop, and no one has to sacrifice an additional hour of their time.
Companywide meetings announcing a new feature are another example. Rather than ask everyone at the company to spend half an hour in a meeting, consider typing the update in an email, sharing on Slack or adding the recap to your company's knowledge base on Trello. The example above takes advantage of Trello's integration with Loom to record and attach a video update for those looking to save time typing.
Cut down on context-switching
According to Blissfully's 2019 SaaS Trends Report, the average employee uses at least eight apps a day to get their work done. It's no wonder 40% of employees are frustrated by the collaboration and communication tools they're expected to use at work. Because they're constantly switching between email, chat, video, documents and more, employees find it harder than ever to focus on the actual work they need to carry out, which stretches out working hours, wastes time and leads to burnout.
To lower the amount of context-switching team members have to do, decrease the number of tools they need to monitor throughout the day. Make it clear that emails and chat messages aren't emergencies and that notifications can be muted while deep work is being carried out. (This is something Trello employees do by setting their "Slack off" hours.) Most of the time, work won't suffer if employees only check their inboxes or Slack messages every couple of hours.
You can also help employees reduce their context-switching by keeping information organized on one platform. According to a 2019 survey by 8x8, nearly 50% of employees say they spend up to two hours a day looking for the information they need to do their jobs. This cuts into valuable time that employees could be spending doing work that matters to them.
Cut back on the amount of time employees need to spend hunting down information by centralizing as much work as possible in a tool stack that is accessible for everyone. For example, if a project is being tracked in Trello, ask the team to keep all progress updates, questions and feedback within the project board, where everyone can see the same timeline view of the work.
Work from other apps in our tool stack is enhanced through integrations, so documentation from Confluence or tickets from Jira are linked and visible to our projects.
Whichever toolset you choose, consider the "single pane of glass" concept: Your teams operate in a busy workplace, so making information visible and discoverable in as few locations as possible goes a long way in reducing frustration and busywork.
Check in on employees regularly
Saving the most important tip for last, invest in manager coaching and resources for recognizing and addressing the warning signs of burnout in employees. Have them check in on employees' stress levels during one-on-one meetings and encourage everyone at the company to take regular vacation and sick days when needed.
Managers should also keep a close eye on how much work employees are taking on. Star employees will often over-commit to work — without complaints — and burn themselves out, which helps no one. Managers need to step in and stop employees from taking on Herculean workloads because, even if someone can do a lot of extra tasks, it doesn't mean they should.
Fortunately, managers who use Trello can see exactly how much work their team members are taking on using the Dashboard view:
With data on task distribution and due-date management, managers can see who is taking on (and completing) a reasonable amount of work and who might be overextending or falling behind. We use data for every other business decision; why not see how it can empower more equitable team management?
Stop the slow burn
The pandemic may have exacerbated employee burnout, but it was an issue long before COVID-19. Unfortunately, there's no single solution that can extinguish burnout, either. Support your employees' ability to focus and work-life balance by focusing on their day-to-day experiences — and you'll stop burnout from smoldering on for too long.
Trello moves teamwork forward by bringing productivity, collaboration and team spirit together in one place. Get a free trial of Business Class to try out Views, including Dashboard and Timeline. And if you want to see how Trello can be implemented across organizations, check out our best practices for setting up a shared toolstack like Trello Enterprise at scale.
It's not clear what might fall through the cracks if most of the biggest game studios transition away from selling individual games and instead embrace a mix of free-to-play and subscription bundling.
Image: Christopher T. Fong/Protocol
Subscription services have existed in gaming for decades, both for individual games like World of Warcraft and for console platform services like Sony's PlayStation Plus. But a new wave of game subscriptions — Netflix-style, all-you-can-play buffets — have only just begun emerging in the last few years. Now, as these subscriptions are married to nascent but fast-growing cloud gaming services that allow you to stream games to almost any screen, the industry is bracing itself for a potential paradigm shift akin to what happened to television, film and music.
"It's probably the likes of Netflix and Spotify that have ended up pushing us to this point in games," said Craig Chapple, an industry analyst with the firm Sensor Tower. "How many times have you heard, 'When's the Netflix of gaming coming?'" (Netflix, it turns out, is getting into gaming itself, although it's tempered expectations by saying it will focus on mobile games first.)
It's not clear the industry is ready, or that the economics of gaming today can withstand a full-blown switchover to a subscription and streaming-only world. Video games come in many shapes and sizes, and monetize in vastly different ways. One game might cost $4.99, another $69.99. Some are free, while others charge as much as $14.99 a month just to access.
It's unlikely the whole industry would ever shift to subscription bundling because of these factors. But it's also not clear what might fall through the cracks if most of the biggest game studios do transition in some way away from selling individual games and instead embracing a mix of free-to-play and subscription bundling.
"I am reluctant about subscription services. It's worse than in music. The potential risks here are huge," said Rami Ismail, an independent game developer and consultant who co-developed a series of hit games under the label Vlambeer. "The amount of money that goes into a video game compared to an album is relatively large. There are more people working on them, and it takes more time to make them."
Unlike Hollywood or the music industry, which can standardize pricing because the length and presumed value of a single song or movie is more or less agreed upon, the video game industry has resisted distribution models other media adopted more than 10 years ago. Many consumers still buy games on Blu-ray discs sold in shrink-wrapped plastic boxes at brick-and-mortar retail stores.
"We're looking at the same model [as the music industry]," Ismail added. "People aren't going to pay more for the game subscription than they are for the Spotify subscription. I don't think I could meaningfully argue that people play more games than they listen to music."
The perils of subscription gaming
The game industry's slow adoption of new distribution models has helped create an atmosphere of apprehension around subscription services. It's not necessarily because everyone is resisting change, but rather because it seems an almost Herculean task to yank a ship as large as the nearly $200 billion video game business into the future all at once.
"It's very hard to launch a $120 million game on a subscription service charging $9.99 a month," Shawn Layden, a former PlayStation exec in charge of its internal studios, told Gamesindustry.biz this week. Layden's concern is that the kinds of games that are most at home on subscription services — big-budget console games sold for between $60 and $70 nowadays (like the kind Sony still makes) — aren't catering to a large enough customer base to recoup development costs through a subscription service. That's especially true, he said, as the cost of making those AAA games has ballooned in recent years, all while the price has remained in the same $10 range.
A subscription service doesn't necessarily work for all types of games.
Image: Microsoft
"You pencil it out, you're going to have to have 500 million subscribers before you start to recoup your investment. That's why right now you need to take a loss-leading position to try to grow that base," Layden added. "But still, if you have only 250 million consoles out there, you're not going to get to half a billion subscribers. So how do you circle that square? Nobody has figured that out yet."
Layden's math may be a bit of an exaggeration. Microsoft's Xbox Game Pass most likely does not need half a billion subscribers to make it a profitable and sustainable enterprise. But it does need tens of millions, and perhaps even hundreds of millions, to become a true Netflix-for-games platform, one that can recoup investments on all the games Microsoft wants to include on release day, and the many more games from non-Xbox owned studios it will need to pay for to keep people subscribed.
Take-Two President Karl Slatoff expressed similar concerns last fall, saying on an investor call, "We're highly skeptical that subscriptions will be the only way or the primary way that interactive entertainment is distributed." He added that the typical consumption of video games vastly dwarfed how much consumers pay for them, making them a better deal when sold individually than when bundled. "That's because of the way people consume it. And the price point for owning a title, which is very reasonable and very, very low, actually, on a per-hour basis."
Microsoft bought Bethesda Softworks parent company ZeniMax Media last fall for $7.5 billion as part of a strategy to bring more game studios under its wing and release those developers' backlogs and future games on Game Pass. If Microsoft owns the intellectual property, it can release a new title on Game Pass on the same day it's sold for $60 or $70 everywhere else, as it plans to do with upcoming hits like Bethesda Game Studios' Starfield. That's a huge incentive to sign up for Game Pass, and it's a viable strategy because Microsoft earns enough revenue through its other products and services to make up for it.
"Now, Microsoft can say, 'Subscribe to us. We've got all these first-party studios and also third-party studios,'" Chapple said. "Subscription potentially also makes gaming a bit more accessible. You're not forking out that $60 or $70 to play one game. You're forking out a monthly fee that's quite low to access a whole variety of games." But Microsoft will still have to convince many more third-party developers to join Game Pass to keep subscriber numbers growing, and that means compensating them fairly so they keep coming back.
Microsoft declined to answer individual questions for this story, but it did provide Protocol a statement on its stance on subscription gaming and the way it compensates developers who join Game Pass. "We strive to build a platform where our creative partners can find success," a company spokesperson said. "Our model for how we support and compensate developers who participate in Game Pass is designed to be flexible and was built based on partner feedback. This includes options like fees, bonuses based on usage, and more."
The big free-to-play question
Game developers have offset rising development costs over the years through the use of microtransactions, such as loot boxes and the selling of cosmetic items like character skins. In fact, many developers have simply taken the path of least resistance and opted to design their games as entirely free to play, monetizing the experience through in-game purchasing. Those kinds of games — Fortnite, Roblox, Call of Duty: Warzone, to name a few — do not require subscription platforms at all because they are already at everyone's fingertips for free.
"Free-to-play doesn't fit into a subscription," Chapple said. He noted that there could be a world in which subscription services cover the cost of some in-game microtransactions, but that would "destroy the design of the game, and just cap revenue." Genshin Impact and PUBG Mobile didn't need Xbox Game Pass to become some of the highest-grossing games in the world. All they needed were apps on multiple platforms and a free-to-play business model.
It's likely more games in the future are modeled after those free-to-play hits rather than designed to be bundled into a subscription platform. But there will always be an appetite for big-budget console titles like Sony's upcoming sequels to Horizon Zero Dawn and God of War that cannot be given away for free.
The same is true for breakout indie hits like developer Acid Nerve's new action-adventure title Death's Door, which launched exclusively this month on Xbox devices and PC for $19.99. Critically, the deal Acid Nerve and publisher Devolver Digital struck with Microsoft did not include availability on Xbox Game Pass.
"There's always a bag of money somewhere involved that entices people to take that risk with their work. A lot of those deals are what are keeping a lot of beloved studios open right now," Ismail said. "For a lot of developers this is sort of the new reality. We're not in the business of selling to consumers. We're in the business of selling to platforms, and platforms monetize those games and hopefully give a kickback."
Still, Ismail said it's not clear how that translates to subscription services, which risk undervaluing games as consumer products in the same way streaming music and television made it easier for more people to stop buying CDs and DVDs.
"I have no idea where this is going. I understand how exclusives work and how people make money off exclusives. But with the subscription models, things are obviously new and shifting to a new place," Ismail said. "That's where we're headed, whether we like it or not. On Xbox, people pay $9.95 or $15. How am I going to compete with my $10 game?"
What's fair compensation in a subscription gaming future?
Concern for indie developers has been a focal point of recent discussions around subscription gaming, especially regarding how those services share revenue. One model, an engagement-based revenue-sharing system, is one that might gain traction.
Google Stadia recently implemented it for its Pro subscription tier, offering developers 70% of revenue based on how many days a subscriber signs into the game on Stadia. It's extra revenue for game makers, but it also evokes controversial models like that of Spotify, in which musicians are paid fractions of a penny per stream.
"I feared this day. I warned about this for years and feel no one really took it seriously. Devs being paid based on playtime is the true horror of the subscription-based future — it's the death of creativity, of shorter experiences. I hate this with every fibre of my being," gaming news curator Ryan Brown tweeted on the day of the announcement.
Brown told Protocol he now understands that Stadia Pro also involves other financial incentives brokered directly with Google, and that the revenue a game developer earns isn't solely from the revenue share. But, he said, "I still have very serious concerns regarding monetizing playtime like that. Seems inevitable that'll become the future focus of streaming subscription services."
It should be noted that Stadia Pro is much different than Game Pass, and concerns about its revenue-sharing model do not foretell what Microsoft might implement, though the company did tell Protocol it has "bonuses based on usage." Unlike Game Pass or other cloud offerings, Stadia Pro adds a small number of free games every month and advertises its $9.99 subscription mostly as a way to get discounts on full-price purchases and added benefits like 4K resolution support. In that way it is more similar to platform services like Sony's PlayStation Plus and Microsoft's Xbox Live Gold.
"Our goal while creating Stadia's new 70% revenue-share program was to be as fair as possible, with engagement measured via session days to ensure that different types of game genres weren't adversely impacted," said Alan Joyce, Google Stadia's senior product manager. "For example, if we had merely measured engagement based on total time played, then partners offering narrative-focused RPGs might see drastically more revenue than those with games from pick-up-and-play genres like roguelikes."
Joyce said that "ultimately, no one measure approach is perfect," and the company says it has other methods for generating revenue, like a new affiliate program and a more generous revenue share on full-game purchases.
Still, if the industry does shift toward subscription models en masse, it will likely involve standardized rates, something gaming platforms have resisted and game developers clearly fear. "Even if it's daily, a player might finish [an indie game] in one day or several days. They're not coming back day after day every month. That developer gets a small share of the pie," Chapple said. "It's up to the developer to see if that undervalues their product."
"Platforms right now need to aggressively court developers. At some point they're going to hit a critical mass, and they wouldn't need to do that anymore. At that point, we're at the mercy of the people running those platforms," Ismail said. It's not exactly a rosy future, and he admitted it's not one small developers are being given much of a choice about. But he added the silver lining is that game makers are used to maneuvering such tectonic shifts in the business, and that one way or another, the people who create video games will figure out how to survive.
"Games are woefully unorganized. We don't have the protections that movies or music have," Ismail said. "But we are relatively flexible and pretty adaptive."
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