 This 10th year of Daily Tech News show is made possible by its listeners, thanks to all of you, including Hector Bones, Tim Ashman, Johnny Hernandez, and our new patrons, Andrew and Edward. Welcome! On this episode of DTNS, the Zelda movie is coming, Grand Theft Auto 6 is also coming, and Epic Games will not be ignored! This is the Daily Tech News for Wednesday, November 8, 2023. From Studio Seeker, Punker, I'm Sarah Lane. From Salt Lake City, I'm Scott Johnson. And I'm the show's producer, Roger Chang. Oh, Scott Johnson, if there was ever a day to have you on the show, today is that day. Today is that day. I mean, I'm looking at the roundup right now going, this is a good day for me to be here. It was as if, as if somebody said, let's just dress Scott Johnson in the best tech stories. And he's just going to strut around and know his things. For anybody who's like, what in the heck is going on? Real quick, Windows Central sources say that Microsoft plans to add Windows Copilot to Windows 10 in an update that's coming soon after adding the AI Assistant to Windows 11 back in September. But we've got some quick hits to get through, so let's do it now. Google is asking European regulators to make Apple open up iMessage after attempts to get Apple to adopt RCS. Have not exactly panned out. Google, along with a group of European telcos, sent a letter to the European Commission, or the EC, claiming iMessage serves as an important gateway between business users and their customers and should be regulated as a core service under the EU's new Digital Markets Act. The commission is also looking into whether iMessage should be considered a core service. And Apple has argued in the past that iMessage is designed and marketed for personal use and not popular enough in Europe to force changes. Also basically, Apple saying not a core service. A decision from the commission is expected by February. In Tuesday's show, you guys talked about General Motors' Cruise Autonomous Vehicle and that unit facing some safety issues. Well, today the company announced it's recalling all 950 of its cars to update software after one of the cars dragged the pedestrian to the side of a San Francisco street in early October. Cruise has already taken steps to assure this doesn't happen again, they say. In documents, U.S. Safety Regulators posted on Wednesday that with the updated software, cruise vehicles will remain stationary and should a similar accident occur in the future, they'll hold still. Amazon announced on Wednesday that prime members can now buy one medical membership for $99 per year. That's down from $199. One medical has a series of brick and mortar clinics, health clinics, in only 19 major cities across the U.S., so obviously it's not going to be affecting everybody that is an Amazon Prime customer. But the company has reportedly been ramping up its telehealth offerings that does include services like virtual appointments according to a source speaking to the Washington Post. What's app is rolling out a new privacy feature allowing Android and iOS users to hide their location during phone calls by relaying the connection through WhatsApp's servers. Users location is hidden from other callers by switching from the standard peer-to-peer direct connection between callers using the company's servers to obfuscate IP address metadata. WhatsApp says all calls are end-to-end encrypted and group calls are always relayed through its servers by default. In response to reports on Tuesday that Meta would not allow its generative AI tools to be used on political ads, the company announced Wednesday it will indeed require advertisers to disclose when they run political ads with any media that has been AI generated ahead of the U.S. presidential election in 2024. So we've got about a year to figure this one out. The new policy goes into effect in January. All right, Scott, let's talk about the Legend of Zelda live action. Who, who's in? Okay, so let's back up a little bit. Nintendo announced that in partnership with Sony, it will develop a Legend of Zelda movie. The film will be produced by Super Mario creator Shiguro Miyamoto and Avi Arad who produced movies such as Spider-Man into the Spider-Verse and will be directed by Wes Ball whose movies include the upcoming Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes. Yep, the Super Mario Brothers movie, which was the previous film animated, of course, not live action, now has grossed $574.9 million in the United States and Canada and $787 million in other territories for a worldwide total of a whopping $1.36 billion. That is what they call a successful film. It made it the highest grossing film based on video games ever just after one week in release. This is all super interesting because this is a sign that Nintendo wants to take their other properties and move them into film projects. Many of us, myself included, assumed that a Zelda project would stay animated. I don't know why I thought that, I just did. But if they're going to go live... Well, and I don't know why I thought it was live action. I mean, I kind of want it to be, but even if it isn't, you're probably going to have some big stars voicing the main actors. Yeah, for sure. Like, it would be a big production regardless. It would be a highly anticipated thing, live action or animated or not. But I think the part, I don't want to skip over too hard here, is that this is a, and you said it in your first line, this is a partnership with Sony Pictures. Now, that will be interesting to long-time gamers and people paying attention to sort of the console wars of the 90s when Nintendo partnered with Sony to make an add-on device for the Nintendo Entertainment System, excuse me, Super Nintendo Entertainment System, or the SNES as some call it. And that SNES was going to have this attachable optical drive called the PlayStation. It would be called a Nintendo PlayStation. And it was designed by Sony. It was all part of an agreement between the two of them. There were only one or two prototypes ever made. As far as I know, only one prototype still exists out there. It was sold for a lot of money recently. Anyway, things broke down. Sony and Nintendo could not play nice. And they broke things off before any of that happened. Sony said, well, we've done all this. Why can't we enter this market? It seems crowded with Sega and Sony or Nintendo kind of dominating things. Why can't Sony get a piece of this? And boy, howdy did they get a piece of it. They released the PlayStation with that name later on and became easily Nintendo's biggest competition that they had ever seen and still to this day remain very dominant. I just think that that's a fun bit of irony that they're going to have to work with Sony to produce this film. Normally, I would say, well, gosh, I mean, if Sony is your partner with promotions for a movie like this, like what a great partner. But when you're Nintendo, you don't really need you don't need anybody if you're Nintendo, because you're Nintendo. But the fact that the two are are are are going to make this movie, which by the way, I mean, why was Zelda not a movie like 10 years? I had 20 years ago. I don't know. I mean, the fact that this has just now started to finally come to fruition leads me to believe that people have been arguing about who makes this movie when and how for quite some time. Yeah, for sure. I mean, in Nintendo, at Nintendo, they attempted to do the Mario thing back in the 90s and did. So they made that movie with Bob Hoskins. Yeah. And it was bad. It was terrible. Yeah. Well, I think they I think they felt the sting of that for a long time. And finally, they're kind of getting their their chance. And I mean, the other thing is that the ground wasn't fertile enough. You know, at least they believed to do a video game property or multiple video game properties and expect a decent and when I say decent, I mean, they expected Super Mario Bros. movie to do well. It did a lot better than what they they anticipated. And so with this with the Sonic movies and with a few other video game properties that have done very well, both in streaming but also on on the big screen, there's now a feeling that these are things, projects that can go ahead because they have legs, they have an audience that's willing to pay money to go sit down in front of the screen and watch it. And especially with so much of the current, you know, a blockbuster discourse, either some sort of Warner Brothers comic book, DC comic book, spinoff or a Marvel movie. A lot of the air has been focused on those kind of properties where the IP has already been locked up either by by Disney by Warner Brothers or some other big player. This allows basically a company like Nintendo who has a very popular franchise to leverage that in a way that it gets people to go to the theaters and investors in movies love that. I think the simple view of it also is this because I agree with everything you said. There's the MCU is an example of this. It took a number of generations to grow up reading comic books before we got we started getting good comic book movies. And even if you start counting the Tim Burton stuff with Batman or something a little earlier or the Sam Raimi Spider-Man movies, we were finally at a place where not only were the people who wanted to consume it grown up with expendable income, but you had people making the films and producing the films that also grew up with it. And that is happening with games too. People who grew up with games, they grew up with Nintendo in particular. They're now the ones with the power with the creative, you know, the creative wherewithal to get stuff done. And now they can get stuff done and they can make it profitable and make it good. That's the important part of this. There are plenty of the world is littered with bad video game movies. I hope that we're near the end of that and I hope Zelda can can be an example of it. Scott, besides yourself, who would you would like to play Link the most? Oh my gosh, Link the hero Link. I haven't thought very hard about this, but I think there are options. I wouldn't even mind like, okay, Princess Zelda. You get, I forgot her name. Taylor, on it, on your Taylor joy. That's what I'm trying to say. She's your princess. She could be your Zelda. She's your Zelda. And then Link, I don't know, you know what, Tom Holland to be a pretty good Link. No one's going to like this suggestion because they're sick of the Spider-Man. I loved Tom Holland. He'd be a great Link. This is good stuff. All right. We've got our film. It's done. Get that made. Mr. Holland, please, you know, talk to your managers and let's make this happen. Good stuff. This could be Mr. Holland's opus. Sorry, I couldn't help it. Go ahead and continue. Well, we have sort of a game theme going on on the show, but let's talk about the Google versus Epic trial that kicked off in court on Monday with Epic Games presenting evidence as what it says is Google's anti competitive behavior with the Google Play Store. We promised we would talk about it more on today's show. So we're doing that now. Epic Games allege that Google's project hug campaign was part of Google's effort to bribe or block game developers from launching their own app store. They showed the jury, internal emails and documents from Activision's King unit and Riot Games considering launching their own stores. They also brought up internal Google emails they said showed intent by Google, intent keyword here, to discourage game developer Riot Games from setting up its own distribution platform. Well, Lawrence Co, former director of games business development for Google Play, countered that the policies were in line with competitors at Apple's App Store, Samsung's Galaxy Store and the Amazon App Store. The company also emphasized it did not, in any of its agreements, prevent developers from creating apps or alternative app stores, that is to say. And that project hug was about attracting developers to the Play Store itself. Gosh, I mean, can you call it anything besides project hug? I hate the name. It's too weird. I mean, you know, come on, you're Google. It's weird. Let's not. Yeah, it's a little bit weird. You're Google, you're big. You don't have, you can come up with a better name. Yeah, we're not, you know, touchy-feely. No, that's not what's going on here. What do you think is going on here, Scott? But, you know, Epic obviously has been fighting with Apple. It's fighting with Google. It's saying we want to be able to have our own alternative app store. Epic has, you know, as part of the recent trial with Google has said, we are not profitable, you know? And so there's a little sort of like snicker-snicker, you know, going on with people who don't think that Epic should run its own app store. But what do you think? Well, they, and I think in particular, the disclosure was the Epic store itself is the thing that is not profitable. There are other divisions, the engine, the actual Unreal Engine that a lot of games are based on, Fortnite, that sort of stuff, making money. But that app store has not done what they had hoped. They had hoped to usurp Steam in a meaningful way, and they had hoped to move it to other platforms. And this is kind of part of that. They would really very much like to have an Epic game store on my iPhone or your Android phone, or wherever they can put it. And I don't necessarily blame them for wanting that. But I don't think they're going to get their way. I think these platform holders do not want someone to be able to come on there and become the dominant, prominent app store when they have done so much over the years to develop their own. And you may say, and I agree with this for the most part, that Apple and Google both have a bit of a stranglehold on that market. They do. They're the platform holders. They're not that different. I don't want to get into the legalities of the differences here, but they're not that different than Microsoft in the 90s trying to force everybody to use the same browser. It's a little bit like that, but on mobile and other devices. Obviously, on PC, they were able to do their store as freely as they want to. But on these other devices, it's a different environment. And at least legally right now, nobody's forcing either Google or Apple to relinquish the kind of app store control that they already have. So I think that they're not going to get what they want out of this. I think mostly this is to make a lot of noise to try to get, I don't know, allies in this war with them to go after these guys. If they had their way, they would even ally with rival steam and say, hey, you guys wouldn't mind having a game store on these platforms, would you? Right now, you just have a store where people can buy stuff, but wouldn't it be nice if they could play there? And I think that's probably going to be tempting for the Samsungs and the Amazons and the steams of the world to want to maybe join in. And then maybe you've got pressure, right? Industry pressure. But right now, it feels like the only people really fighting this hard is Epic. And I just don't think it's going to make enough noise or add enough chains. Yeah, I try to, and this is, I try to equate this to sort of like, well, okay, where would I want content? Do I get content on X? Do I get content on threads? Do I get content on someone's personal blog? All of those things may be true. And I would like them all to be offered to me. I think the argument that Epic is making is, well, you have Google or Apple, and you should have more choice. I do not disagree with that. I do not disagree with that. But if somebody is just kind of on-boarding, I want to play a game, what's the best way to do it? Where do I find on my contacts? It is really hard to just sort of launch like, well, we have our game store over here, which helps our margins a little bit more. So please do that. But also, you know, it just like gives you another option. That is hard to do these days. You know, we are, we are in a lot of walled gardens. And even those who don't want to play in them have situations like this where, you know, Epic is sort of like, we want to offer you something else, not really working all that well. So here we are. It's hard because iOS and Android have a lock on the dual platform that is essentially the mobile business. There are other very small instances of other OSes, but they don't have the kind of market share of the dominance. So I understand their frustration. I mean, the only real alternative is the Epic phone. And nobody wants that necessarily. Nobody wants a Steam phone. Nobody wants phones branded to the store they happen to like. Remember the Facebook phone? Oh, yeah. They tried. They tried real hard. So did Amazon with their phone and that didn't work well either. And I'm not saying that I guess maybe my overall take is I do wish there was more room and diversity in phone OS, generally speaking, because I think it drives innovation to have more competition. But also at the same time, I feel like it creates consumer confusion. Yes. Yes. And you and I want to be able to get a thing and have it do the thing we need. And we don't want to be told that there are 10 other things that might also do that. And we need to take time out of our day to figure out which one's the best fit. Exactly. It's starting to be too much, you know? So, yeah. Well, guess what, y'all? We're going to talk about games a little more in just a second. But first, just a reminder, we love your feedback. Your feedback makes the show better. Cannot emphasize that enough. And if you have feedback about anything we talk about on the show, you have a variety of ways to get a hold of us. DTNS audience on the socials can plug DTNS show on X. That's formerly Twitter. Mastodon, M-S-T-D-N dot social on Mastodon. Daily Tech News show on TikTok. And DTNS picks P-I-X on Instagram and threads. And always feedback at dailytechnewshow.com. All right, Scott, we saved the best for last here. Rockstar Games. Perhaps you've heard of it. A division of Take-Two Interactive software and the studio behind the Grand Theft Auto series confirmed on Wednesday. It will begin promoting Grand Theft Auto 6 next month, which would apparently include a trailer for the new game. This is according to a blog post by Rockstar's president, Sam Hauser. The promotion of the new game coincides with Rockstar's 25th anniversary. So the timing kind of makes sense, I suppose. But boy, has it been a while. Grand Theft Auto 5 has sold more than 185 million copies and is the second best-selling video game of all time after Minecraft. But it's been a while, right, Scott? Yeah, I mean, 2012, 2013 is the first time most of us saw Hyde New Hair that game. It's funny to remember. Some may not remember this, but the game originally launched on the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 consoles, which are, you know, we're fairly long in the tooth at that point. But still, that was the launch platform. And pretty quickly, as others rolled out, as well as PC support and this sort of thing, we got more and more versions of the game. Today, that game prints money. Grand Theft Auto 5 is an insane success story in every possible definition when it comes to the gaming business. There's very few examples like it. And not even Minecraft is even in the same ballpark in terms of what kind of game it is. There's other reasons why Minecraft supersedes it in terms of overall, you know, player base. However, if you want to know one sign of how big a deal this is for the next generation of that game, which in a lot of ways is a platform unto itself, is they made an announcement of an announcement. You know what I'm saying? This morning, I was like, wait, so they're announcing that a trailer will come, but they're not announcing the trailer. It's OK. Yeah. No, hardly anyone gets to do that. Sometimes big movie reveals will be like, hey, this Thursday, the new Spider-Man trailer, whatever. Like we're used to that. In some forms of media. But this is gigantic. That game sold more than some countries can claim is the gross national product. It's an insane success story built upon many years of other games, GTA games and other offshoots and stuff. They've built this studio into what it is today. What I was worried about is, OK, well, you're going to announce an announcement, then you're going to give us an announcement, and then a trailer. My prediction was 24 months or more before we actually see the game in anyone's hands. But I was wrong. They have a graphic that is posted directly from all the official accounts of Rockstar saying 2024. They don't give a date, but they give us a year. And I'm kind of shocked by that and glad that it's not some nebulous number way off in the distance. Could be delayed or whatever. But 2024 looks like it's right. It could be the company, you know, just trying to, I don't know, get people to be up in arms. And maybe if it gets pushed, then I don't know. Everybody is still excited about the game. But yes, I have never played GTA. I know it well because I've talked about it for many years. I know what it is. I know that, you know, ethically, it's not for everybody. But I know it's a big deal to the point where I actually had a friend of mine and I were talking about games, you know, because he's always like, oh, Sarah, you're like, such a gamer at heart. Why don't you try more? And I'm like, I like VR games where I'm like exercising. What about like, but like, what about like GTA five? And he was like, it's pretty old. I mean, go ahead and try it. But like it's not like cool and new. Like games are way better than that now. And that was like two weeks ago. And I feel like I spoke it into existence, even though I have nothing to do with it. The funny thing is the game, yes, it's older, obviously. We're looking at 10 years, 11 years in that game now. And somehow nobody's playing the original campaign anymore. That's not what that game is anymore. Now it's all about GTA online, which is the thing that prints money. People are in there doing all kinds of activities, all kinds of crazy stuff that they run. There's modified stuff happening on PC where people are doing huge, you know, multi event role playing cops versus robbers, basically sort of stuff on street. That's another whole aspect of this thing that a lot of people may not even know about. And from an ethical standpoint, and from a business standpoint, there's a couple of things that we should maybe hold their feet to the fire on. Employees have been complained a lot about burnout and the making of Red Dead Redemption 2, which is another massive release for them in 2018 and a huge success. That game really wore a lot of people out in terms of those who made it. So they took a lot of scrutiny for that. I hope that's going better on that front. They claim it is, but I don't know how transparent they're being. Also, they got hacked a long time ago and some very early alpha footage of Six got released. They claimed that a lot of it was just borked and broken and shouldn't be seen by anybody. It's all in process stuff. It didn't matter the internet ran with it. It was crazy. Two UK teens were actually got convicted for the hack in London at the end of the day. So they're not without their controversies. Certainly the game itself has always been a little controversial. It's a very satirical look at America and cities in America and that sort of thing. Well, apparently GTA 6 is going to be a fictional version of Miami. Yeah. So GTA 3 had a spin out called Grand Theft Auto Vice City, which was set in the 80s and in this fictional Miami called Vice City. Vice City is apparently the place we're returning to and I personally could not be more excited. I cannot wait for this. I mean, I'm excited too. Just because so many other people are excited about this because it's been so long, you know, to the point where people are like, is there ever going to be another GTA? I don't know. Part of the reason they can take their time is because it's such a monster. They know that whatever they do, it'll sell like bananas. You're going to hear stories. It'll be like, no movies ever done this well. The entire film industry is less than GTA 6 sales. Like these are the stories you're going to hear about because that's how much power that that brand has. It's big. Well, Scott, you're going to have to tell me about it. I don't know. Maybe maybe it's the game for me. Maybe it's the game for me. Hard to say. But if I if I do want to play a game, I will need a brain. We all kind of need our brains. That just sends us right into the next story. Researchers at the University of Texas's Southwestern Medical Center developed a device that can isolate blood flow to the brain. Which could keep the brain organ alive and functioning independent from the rest of the body for up to several hours. The device was previously tested using pig brains and could help researchers study the human brain in new ways because pig brains often are used in the first studies that end up becoming human studies without the influence from other organs. In an animal model using anesthesia, the researchers redirected the brain's blood supply through a pump that maintained or adjusted a range of variables like blood pressure, volume, temperature, oxygenation, nutrients. Over five hours, the team found that the brain activity and other measurements had minimal to new changes. Pigs of the future. That's just how it is. Oh, man. Yeah, I mean, I read this and I was like, that's crazy. And I mean, I've had like a couple of brain issues of my own in the past where I was like, how does this work? So one of the notes that I thought was interested might kind of get us all to be thinking about this in the right way. The scientists in the study have already used the system to better understand hypoglycema. Glycema, if you're not familiar, low blood sugar. So you can induce hypoglycemia by restricting food intake in humans. But in tests, this is generally done in lab animals, dosing them with insulin. But the body then compensates for this and alters the brain as a result. Now, this device would allow researchers to alter the glucose content directly in blood pump to the brain and not have that sort of, oh, maybe the body is overcompensating and making it harder for us to do something to the brain specifically. That's interesting. That would be great as someone who's got some, in both directions, blood, sugar, alcohol, blood, sugar, glucose issues. I am all for this research. Let's find a solution to my weirdness and anyone else's problem. Stop drinking Scotch at 8 a.m. and you'll be fine, my good sir. Who knows what part of this is habit and some of it's just a mystery, but pigs always had the answer. We just didn't know it. Follow the pigs is my advice. Well, and just being able to study the brain without the brain being, and again, these are early test studies and only for a couple of hours at a time. I think they said five hours total. But for that to be something where you could figure out what fire stuff to the brain, see how the brain reacts without the rest of the body being part of it. That is significant. Pretty cool. Pretty cool. You know who's cool? You, Scott Johnson. You're cool. Yep. I don't know. Yep, you know, put on your cool badge once we're done with the show because it was great, but let folks know where they can keep up with all else that you do. Well, if I seem kind of up today, it's because something really cool happened for the last couple of months. I've had a little secret negotiation going on with Greg Ghostcrawler, street formerly of Riot Games and before that World of Warcraft and Blizzard. And he's starting his own studio, already has started his own studio, called Fantastic Pixel Castle at FantasticPixelCastle.com. They have a brand new game coming out, a big MMO, triple A title called Ghost right now. It's currently just a codename. Anyway, he and I worked out a discussion once about wanting to be more transparent about the development of the product, how they do it, but what feedback do they take and how do they integrate it into the game. Stuff we normally don't get to see. His idea was, why don't we do a podcast? I said, that sounds fantastic. So starting on the 14th of this month and we'll be doing it monthly, at least to start, we're going to have a show called Word on the Street with me and Greg Street over at frogpants.com slash street, S-T-R-E-E-T. You can also find it on their website. And I cannot wait to start digging in. We're going to have artists on, developers on, designers, people with like decades of experience in the industry, just laying it out, telling you how stuff gets made. It's going to be the ultimate how sausage gets made, sort of fest and I'm stoked. So check it out, subscribe as soon as you can, although we're still waiting for some of the directories to get back to us on links. But the RSS feed is there and ready to go. You can find it at frogpants.com slash street. Oh, Scott, this is very exciting. Patrons, I know many of you would be excited about that as well. Stick around for the extended show, Good Day Internet. We'll be talking more about Scott's big announcement, The Street. Plus why Apple says eight gigabytes, totally fine, has nothing to do with Scott. That's just a different story overall, but we'll talk about both. But just a reminder, y'all, you can catch the show live, Monday through Friday at 4 p.m. Eastern. That's 2100, rather, because we're on Standard Time UTC. You can find out more at dailytechnewshow.com slash live. And we'll be back tomorrow with Christian Jutra joining us. Talk to you then. Get more at frogpants.com.