 Coming up on DTNS, Facebook ends its news blockade in Australia. Mobile World Congress Shanghai is in full swing with AR and VR news. And Kerry Goosecoase is here to talk about how to break in to the video game. This is the Daily Tech News for Tuesday, February 23rd, 2021 in Los Angeles. I'm Tom Merritt. And from Studio Redwood, I'm Sarah Lane. And the show's producer, Roger Chang. And as I mentioned, joining us, Kerry Goosecoase, executive producer Ed Bungie, thank you for joining us, Kerry. Hi, thank you for having me. We were just having a great chat about arcade games and mobile and blogging on Good Day Internet. If you want to get that wider conversation, become a member. Patreon.com slash DTNS. Let's start with a few tech things you should know. Epic has received preliminary approval to settle a U.S. based class action lawsuit over the sale of Lute Lamas for Fortnite. Save the world mode. Epic will automatically give every player worldwide who purchased a Lute Lama in Fortnite $1,000, which is an $8 value. Epic will also give 1000 credits to Rocket League players who bought a randomized event crate. U.S. based Fortnite and Rocket League players can submit a claim form to receive cash payments up to $50. Google released the game journey into the savage planet on Stadia February 1st, which happened to be the same day that Google announced it was shutting down. It's in-house game studio. And now players are looking for bug fixes for the game and are a little confused about who to ask. Google owned Typhoon Studios developed the game and Google owns the code, but there is no studio left to work on it. 505 Games publishes the game on other platforms and Google has said it is diligently working with their partner publisher on a fix. Lenovo announced updates to its ThinkPad laptops. The X, T, L and P series will all get models with 11th Gen Intel or AMD Ryzen 5000 mobile processors and Wi-Fi 6 or with Intel sometimes Wi-Fi 6e along with options for 4G and 5G modems. You'll also have options for discrete Nvidia graphics cards and some of the X series gets 16 by 10 aspect ratios. Lenovo also announced 1339.7 inch ThinkVision P40W 20 monitors with Thunderbolt 4. The ability to split the screen between two PC sources and Intel active management arriving in June for $1,699. Samsung announced its 50 megapixel ISO cell GN2 smartphone image sensor is now in production. The sensor features dual pixel pro autofocus for faster focusing, regardless of how you rotate your device. Smart ISO to use multiple ISO settings to capture a single image and the ability to create 100 megapixel images using an intelligent remosaic algorithm to merge three shots. Apple revoked certificates for developer accounts used by the creators of the newly discovered Silver Sparrow Mac malware. Apple says this will prevent it from being distributed through the Mac App Store and should be detected if downloaded elsewhere thanks to Apple's notary service. All right, let's talk a little bit about peace in Australia. The Australian government has agreed to amendments to its proposed media code and Facebook says that within the coming days, it will no longer block Australia news sources on its platform. The amendments are going to change four things about the news media and digital platforms mandatory bargaining code. That's the one that says you have to pay news publishers in Australia if you're Facebook or Google. Well, it might not apply to Facebook and Google anymore. The first is about how a platform qualifies for the law. One of the reasons only Facebook and Google have qualified to be subject to the code under its original drafting was because of the way they measured significant bargaining power imbalance. Now with these new amendments to designate a platform as subject to the code, the government must also consider not only the bargaining power imbalance, but whether there are commercial agreements being made with news companies already, which as we know, Google has done and now it looks like Facebook is about to start doing so conceivably. The deals Google has made could exempt them from being subject to the code at all. And if Facebook makes the right deals, sounds like maybe they could be exempt from the code. Also, the government now has to give one month notice if a platform is going to be subject to the new code, that probably is to give companies time to strike deals and avoid being subject to the law. Companies will not be penalized for striking different deals with different companies, giving them some latitude to negotiate ahead of time. And if a platform was subject to the code, they now have two months to negotiate a deal before being forced into arbitration. So kicking that can down the road a little even at the very end. Facebook got to work and reached a deal with seven West media already to provide news. Facebook has a special news section to showcase news partnerships in other markets besides Australia and it's expected to launch similar features in Australia. So seven West, the first expect nine entertainment and news corp to follow along if this is all going to go smoothly. The legislation is expected to pass as early as Wednesday after which treasurer Frydenburg would begin determining which platforms, if any, it applies to. We're going to try to get Peter Wells to join us from Australia later this week, you know, once this is potentially passed. But but Sarah, I feel like we should have known Facebook wasn't going to ban news forever. They were just trying to get a better deal. And it looks like they got a better deal. Yeah. I mean, the whole thing was it was drama from both sides, right? The Australian government is like, no, you need to do this. And Facebook's like, here's how the world's going to be if we have to just pull out entirely. And there was, you know, there was a lot of backlash definitely towards Facebook, but also just the situation in general. If like, there are people who are getting their news from Facebook, you can sit back and say, oh, you can get your news at the places, not so for everybody. So it really it really was a situation that had to be resolved. Seems like a lot of posturing on the Australian government's part by saying, you know what, OK, so Google played with us. We kind of left him alone. Facebook didn't. So it was going to be a big thing. But now Facebook's like, oh, all right. Well, what if we just kind of do what Google's doing and Australian government goes, OK, we can work with that. I guess really my my my next question is Facebook and Google obviously targeted because of their size and their reach and their power, you know, what platform is next, you know, and and what platform may want to, you know, is it advantageous to like not be on the radar for being so successful so that you don't have the you don't have to adhere to certain government standards, like is what what's happening. Or if you get to that point, if you're that big, does it really matter? Yeah, this this is all about money, right? News publishers in Australia were complaining that the money for advertising was going to Facebook and Google. That's why it's about Facebook and Google. Who's next? Anybody who's taking too much money out of somebody else who can lobby the Australian government or any government anywhere. So I don't think anyone's next here. I think Australia wanted to force Google and Facebook to the table and it worked. They got Google to pay more than they would have ever paid for news publishers and they got Facebook to pay at all, which they might not have ever done. So, you know, it's it's a big stick to say we're going to try to make you pay for links. It looks like we will have a law on the books in Australia that says you have to pay for links, which is a bad precedent. We don't know what kind of of unintended consequences might come of that down the road. But in the immediate time that we're in right now, I don't think we're going to have any consequences for the moment. Kerry, I know this is probably something you haven't followed, you know, seriously closely, but what do you make of all this? It's I mean, it's funny because I just think about like and this is just as kind of as a user. Like the thing that always was weird for me, I used to work for a game review site and I think that we really held ourselves, tried to hold ourselves accountable to like we are getting the facts, we are displaying this in a way that is correct. We are not saying things that are untrue in any way. And I think the thing that has become really challenged is when we've started to mix platforms where you have both like here is my cat and here is my bowl of soup and here is whatever. And and I want to be funny with my friends and say something ludicrous. And then also here's the news. And I think the thing that really gives me a lot of pause is maybe there is some duty that you have. If you can intermingle both fact and fiction so freely without any sort of duty to that, then maybe you do have to follow some guidelines. But then who's to say that the government is asking the right things. And so I just it swirls me around and goes, nothing matters. Nothing's true. I don't trust anyone but my own brain and my brain is broken. So yeah, it scares me right because information is really hard to get the truth of. Even your own mind placers on you. So. Well, Qualcomm had a couple interesting announcements. It will partner with haptic specialist Lofel to create a universal haptic software framework for Android. Qualcomm also announced a reference design for augmented reality glasses that tether to a phone or a PC by USBC. The XR one smart viewer design looks like a pair of sunglasses with camera sensors in the outside upper corners of each lens for hand tracking and spatial awareness and a cable coming off the rear of one of the arms for connectivity. The XR one design uses 1920 by 1080 led screens 90 Hertz refresh rates in a field of view of 45 degrees. Lenovo's think reality A3 glasses announced at CES are based on the XR one design and expected to arrive mid 2021. All right, coming soon. The XR one smart viewer is a lighter weight version of the Snapdragon XR one and XR two platforms used in devices like the Oculus Quest two. Yeah, so this isn't going to be as powerful as that, but it's also just meant to look like a pair of glasses on your face, not not a headset the way the Oculus Quest is. But I just I mean, this is a step. This is a stepping stone. We still don't have the thing. This is a platform that I'm sure some people will make some like Lenovo some stuff that people will try, but it's not going to take off. If you have to have a wire running off your ear down your back into your phone. Well, you know, it wasn't that long ago that all of our headphones were wired to. So yeah, like you said, it's it's OK. We're getting somewhere here. This is it it'll the wire alone kind of turns me off as well. But it does for everything with wires these days just because we're getting so close to a wireless world. But but yeah, the small form factor, limited use, obviously, you know, the field of view is is not the same as is wearing a true VR headset. But it's a augmented reality. It's come on our way at some point. Yeah, that's about the same as HoloLens too. So it's not making any advancements, but but it's also a lighter weight thing than the HoloLens. Kerry, would you pop a pair of these on? I would try it. And I have an Oculus Rift and I think that it's really good for a very specific thing for me, which is like bringing people in and going, hey, look at this cool thing. It's like I have a lot of gadgets and a lot of old consoles that are are fun for other people to pop on once. But I think to use it over and over again, I think it needs to be more mainstream. And I'm certainly not a person who looks at new tech and goes like, yeah, that's going to be the hotness. So I usually wait and see. Yeah, yeah. Well, we got some other VR news coming from Sony here in a second. President and CEO of Sony Interactive Entertainment, Jim Ryan, told the Washington Post and the Financial Times that supplies of Sony PlayStation Fives will keep improving every month and quote, by the time we get to the second half of the year, you're going to be seeing really decent numbers indeed. He stopped short of saying that everybody who wanted a PS5 would be able to get one by the holidays, though. They tried to press him on that at the Financial Times and he wouldn't quite go that far. Sony also confirmed that it's developing a new VR headset for the PR PS5. If you know the current PSVR, you know it has a lot of cords. The next one is going to have one cord and offer improved field of view, improved resolution, as you might expect. Sony also developing a new VR controller that'll have better ergonomics and borrow some of the features from the DualSense PS5 controller. That all sounds positive. Sony plans to issue dev kits soon, but specs and a release date are still unknown. The PSVR arrived more than four years ago. So it's overdue, in my opinion, for a revolution. But it looks like Sony finally feels like this is worth diving back in on. Hot market. It's also been four years, right? So if there is some, I don't know, I mean, even if it's more incremental than some huge update, it makes sense for Sony to stay in the game here. As a Rift user, I mean, you probably aren't that worried about getting a new PSVR, Kerry, but what do you make of this? No, and I'm a person who is very interested in the game hardware stuff. So I, you know, I got a PS5 the day that the first day that it went on sale. And I feel lucky that I did because even though it was hard then, I had no idea how much harder it was going to be. But I do stop sort of the VR stuff because I find that while they have differences in quality and certainly, you know, different slightly different experiences that the crux of the like excitement of it, you get from any one of them, right? So if you get one and you get to do, oh, I get to do the I'm in space thing or I'm underwater thing or all the sensation of standing and looking down a cliff and feeling sick to your stomach and all of that. And for me, it's like the thing I've actually enjoyed the most is finding really lovely experiences and sharing them with my parents because I think there's something really joyful and gleeful of the like, oh, this is cute or sweet or, you know, surprising but a happy way. And so again, I just think I think I'm excited for people to keep working on do tech because I think it pushes us as game makers to explore outside of our boundaries. And I certainly wouldn't have thoughts that some games that have components of this would have been successful that are. And so I love to see it. I think part of the nature of what I do is to be very practical. So I'll wait. Well, folks, what do you want to hear us talk about on the show? We know you like what we talk about, but we always want to know more. One way to let us know is our subreddit, submit stories and vote on them at DailyTechNewShow.Reddit.com. Well, speaking of video game development, popular career for a lot of folks. You get to be creative, do what you love, but carry knowing a lot more than someone who might be trying to break into the industry for the first time. Does it differ from traditional career paths to get into video game development? You study for it in college, get a degree, apply for a job and you're off and running, or does it does it fall into a different category? I mean, it's definitely changed since I got in. So, you know, the way that I got in was I was I was in college and this was ninety nine and I was at a party at someone's house and they had imported a dream cast and I had played a lot of games and so I sat down and played them all. It's funny, I've been telling the story is like and I beat them all at SoulCalibur, Powerstone or something and maybe I didn't and maybe I should stop telling like that. But I was good enough that they were like, how are you good at this game console that doesn't even exist in the states yet? And I was like, what do you take me for? I play video games and they happen to work at a claim and I think a lot of people who got into games that long ago, that's their story. It's this random tale of I was doing one thing and then I kind of sidetracked into it. I then have taught video game at college or taught at George Mason University. I taught a couple of classes there and and I have definitely had. Oh, no. And and suddenly we've had we have an internet issue. Oh, really? Oh, OK, no, I'm back. Go ahead. OK, OK. So I've taught games and I think I can I have stories, examples of that being successful for some. But I think to your point, I think now that gaming, especially, I think we've passed the point certainly for my parents don't know that it's a career. There's no question anymore. It's not like you have to sell your family on it. And I think most parents realize that they don't see it as just this like thing or happy for kids. I think it is a lot like a normal job. I look for a lot of traits that I think people look for for anyone in a career. And so it's getting more and more like that. When when you hire someone now for a role, I'm sure it's different. I'm sure it's changed over the years. What do you look for? I've always really focused a lot on tenacity and I say that, but I always want to caveat like tenacity without being annoying. So like don't find people on LinkedIn and span them to death. But, you know, I part of how I got into my job at my job at GameSpot where I worked with Roger, you know, show producer, like part of that was I had taken a small break from my job at a claim and I was going back to school and I wanted to stay involved in game somehow. And so I found this website that was just this I found them because Penny Arcade looked to them once and I thought, oh, they're really cool. I like the website very small. So I just wrote them and said, hey, I'll write reviews for you for free. And they let me and over time they started to pay me just a little bit. They give me free games for a bit. Well, I happened upon great because I haven't at the time it was the editor in chief of games.com. Now he run as the creditor. It's a super giant and made bastion and Hades and all that. And I said, hey, I love games and I want to write for you guys. And he said, do you have any reviews? And I said, well, yeah, here's this website with probably a hundred reviews. And so there's this thing about that I have stories like that for other people who they apply themselves in some way. You know, I say to people, you want to design games and design a game in the room you're in right now with the things that you have around you. You know, if you're in an interview with someone, give them an example of what you would do by designing a game in that room that you've never saw before. Just show how your brain works and show that. But I think more than that, it's also like keep trying. There's so many stories of people that have gone on to have other careers and then came back to it. You know, I think that's just one of those things that you just got to keep pushing yourself to do more. I think that crosses all kinds of disciplines, which is if you really want to do a thing, start doing it as much as you can. And technology makes more things possible than ever before. Yeah, and there's some I mean, you could teach yourself unity, you know, which a lot of games just coded right and it used to be that there was a huge gap in knowledge, you know, between an engineer per se who in the old days, we were kind of always looking for people with a four year degree, you know, that new C plus plus and all of that. And I think that there's a lot of that has been democratized with phone games and with, you know, web games and things like that where it's just not the requirement anymore. And so and there's also tons of if unity is even still to John daunting for you, there's tons of intermediary programs. Like I remember someone telling me I don't even know if it still exists of this program with twine or it's just like you make your own stories. You can do anything you can make videos on the internet, you can make your own podcast, anything to show that you are applying yourself. I think it's a lot of the traits that we used to look for in a degree. It's like if you went to school, we knew that you would work hard, apply yourself, meet due dates. It's that kind of thing. And if you even if you don't have a degree because I don't even think about it much anymore, I don't let go scanning for someone's education and like where they went to school. And so certainly I think we're looking for like have you applied yourself and shown that. What are some of the skills that you look for the most, right? So so let's say somebody's like, OK, I'm doing it. I'm making my games. I've got a portfolio. What do you want to see that they've that they're polishing themselves up at? I think it depends on the industry. And so I won't speak much to engineering and art because I think both of those do have really hard skills. And I don't hire engineers and artists primarily. I'm a producer. And so I hire a lot of producers. I've hired a lot of designers in my time. I've even hired testers. You know, I used to be in test as well. And so I think some of what I'm looking for is I'm really working through a theory that one of the only thing that matters in game developments is resilience to change. Because I'm doing the thing right now where I'm trying to figure out what is the perfect way to organize our group, our team. And you can go and read a bunch of books. And I have hired producers who come out of school or who come out of some sort of training or they've gotten a certification of some sort. And they come to me and they say, I've read everything they've said about an agile. I can tell you all about agile. And the thing that I don't respond well to is when someone begins to start reciting to me something they've read in a book, because that's not that hasn't shown me that you've synthesized it. And I have never run a game team that is strictly one methodology or another. And so the thing that I look for and that's not helpful if you're like, but what do I do if I have nothing? It's like, well, read a book. Like read an old book like Mythical Man Month, which I love even though the title isn't really even PC anymore. And read that book, take it all in and then throw it away and then read another book and then read another book and then and and and take what you like from it and let it challenge you and change you. And I think for me, one reason I like listening to you talk about tech is, you know, there's not a complete overlap with gaming and tech, but I I'm hearing about how things are working. It starts to make me think about change. And we're talking earlier about coinop games and how that's influenced mobile. And so I think you should let yourself be inspired by nature and people and all of that. And I think the best way to display that is to show industry. Look at me. I wrote a book. I couldn't get it published so I I brought you a copy. I mean, now anything like that would be crazy to me because it shows just the diligence and effort, but it also shows that you're flexible to change it, that you're willing to be inspired by things outside of your own reach. I get quest for growing and like tech is always changing. You have to be able to move with it. I guess the last question. Yeah, go ahead, Tom. Thanks. So if you, you know, obviously you said, you know, you're running teams. You think about who's the best person to hire all the time? There's a there's a big skill set and it doesn't always have to be the same thing in order to have somebody who's the ideal candidate. But if you are trying to be the ideal candidate, are there companies, trade shows, trade shows are a little different these days or otherwise events that should be on their radar? Not for me personally. And the thing that's I think really hard is it depends on the hiring manager. You know, recruiters will go into a lot of trade shows. And I think getting getting on the radar of a recruiter is always a good thing. I think it is often easier to have someone look at your resume than it is to get past the step where you've you've you've got your resume in front of someone. How do you make it stand out? I'll just give you an example because I'll give it away for free because I have my dream job right now. So I'm not going to be applying for any jobs anytime soon. My cover letter, which I've tailored for every job I've applied for, and I've only done this a couple of times is something I want to say about myself and then the three things that illustrate. So, for example, when I was applying to Bungie, I wrote this story about three things I learned as a competitive counter strike player and what that says about me as a human. And then I used three things and what I was doing was I was telling it to the narrative of playing games so that they knew that I knew a lot about games and I enjoyed them. But then I used it to tell a story about how good I am at certain kinds of leadership or things like that. I think that without being gimmicky, I think what you want to do is get across that thing. But there is so much of right place, right time. And a story that often comes to my mind is I had a student when I was teaching who he just wrote me an email one day and he was just so desperate to get into games. And I wouldn't recommend to people just to do that. But he happened to write it. He was writing it to my school email, but I was looking at a phone in a meeting and I was in a meeting where like we need another community manager, we need someone just to kind of bring on. And I just happened to glance my phone and saw it. I hired him as a community manager, which wasn't what he wanted to do, but he parlayed that experience into getting into the design track. Because once you're in, you're kind of in. And then the studio shut down, but he and a couple of friends went off to start their own studio and they made a game called Enter the Gungeon. And they are now incredibly successful. He's more successful than I am. And it just happened to be a right place, right time thing, which is not a thing that I would say is fun for people to hear, but I think it is a balance of be tenacious, but don't be annoying, make stuff, but don't keep making stuff if you don't think it's going to go anywhere. So I think it is about, yes, go out and create contacts and form contacts. I have found a lot of success in offering up my time. So one of the examples of just the big break I got, I had gotten into a claim after just playing video games with some people and I was a tester. And this guy in the marketing department walks into the test org one day and there's a hundred people in the room and he says, does anybody want to dress up for the New York Toy Fair? And I hand shot up partly because I'm a Hermione, but also because I just wanted to be around games all the time. And I went to this thing and it was 12 hours of me and it was a dream cast game called Fur Fighters. I was in this big costume and it was this cat character and it was this mascot costume, sorry, my camera's doing the thing. And I was like, it was hot, it was sweaty, it was muggy and buyers would come in and I would have to do with Charlie's Angels poses. And at the end of the day, he walked up to me and said, you know, you did that all day and complain once. He's like, you're on the E3 list. And for the rest of the time I worked to claim, every year I got to work at the booth of the claim. And the whole time I was at the booth of the claim, I was resetting consoles and helping people play the games and it was exhausting and tiring, not what I wanted to do, but I had one hour of lunch. And during that one hour of lunch, I would run around and try to find people and meet people. And one of the guys I met helped me get an interview many years later. And so it's just this thing of like offer yourself up to people so it's not like what can you do for me and do stuff to show that you can offer something and also network. And so definitely things like getting of going to trade shows or being available on forums. I've met some of the people I know in the game industry from internet discussion boards where we just happened to find out they weren't there. So there's just so many things I want to say to people, but there is a lot of trying over and over. Yeah. Yeah. Don't don't give up. Just just keep on trying. Yeah. That's good stuff. Real quickly, before we get out of here, I want to mention that OPPO as part of Mobile World Congress posted a video demo of its wireless air charging magnetic resonance technology, not inductive magnetic resonance claims to offer 7.5 Watts of charging at distances of up to 10 centimeters. Now, you may not think that means much 10 centimeters, but hold on. The charging tech was shown while using the OPPO X 2021 rollable concept phone. So they got a lot of headlines because they're showing a rollable. No release date was given for either of these. It's certainly a lot shorter than what we've seen from Xiaomi with the me air charge that uses millimeter wave RF for 5 Watts over several meters. But OPPO solution is cheaper and likely more about not having to worry about positioning your device just right on the induction based charging pads. When you use a pad right now, if you don't put it down exactly right, sometimes it doesn't charge. If you've got 10 centimeters of wiggle room, you throw your phone down. It doesn't matter where you put it because as long as it's within 10 centimeters of the magnetic resonance pad, then it's going to charge. So I look at this as a more practical and more immediate benefit if it becomes a product. Of course, we have to wait for OPPO to make it a product, I guess. Well, if you have any thoughts, comments, questions about anything we talk about on the show or anything we might talk about in our future show, feedback at daily technewshow.com is where to send those emails. Also, our shout out to patron at our masters and grand masters levels today include Carmine Bailey, Eric Holm and Justin Zellers. Also, big, big thanks to Carrie Goose ghost for being with us today. Such a treat, Carrie. Where can people find out all the work that you're doing every day all day? Well, you can follow me on Twitter, although I've just posted videos of my dogs usually. So my Twitter is my first and last name, see goose ghost. And yeah, I just talk about random stuff. But I'm also if anybody really does want to follow up on how to get in the game industry, I'm happy to respond to people on that. Excellent. Hey, folks, if you want an ad free feed of DTNS support us on Patreon, get your own personal RSS feed supported directly by you. If you choose, you can get that wider conversation on good day internet. You'll hear more of us talking to carry on that. Find out more at daily technewshow.com slash Patreon. We are live Monday through Friday for 30 p.m. Eastern 21 30 UTC. If it's not on your calendar yet, make yourself an appointment and find out more at daily technewshow.com slash live. We are back tomorrow with Scott Johnson. Talk to you then. This show is part of the frog pants network. Get more at frogpants.com. I hope you have enjoyed this program.