Delicious Digest #29 - Goats, Baby Sharks, and American Internet

A tasty newsletter of what I’ve seen in (mostly) tech & games and thought was interesting. This week: Goats, Baby Sharks, and American Internet.

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😳 Must reads of the week

◼ “The end of the American internet”. Link

◼ Genshin Impact, a Chinese free-to-play open-world RPG, has grossed over $100m in two weeks. One to watch. Link

🗞 News

◼ “The Psychology Behind TikTok’s Addictive Feed” (via Tom Storr) Link

◼ “U.S. life insurers are paying out far fewer Covid-19 death claims than initially expected, largely because the new coronavirus is disproportionately killing people with little to no insurance”. There’s a cynical joke here somewhere, I just don’t have the heart to find it. Link ($)

◼ Spotify, one of the founding members of “Time to Play Fair” lamenting “Apple’s anticompetitive behavior”, just banned SongShift from helping customers transferring playlists and other metadata from Spotify to other streaming services. As we say in German: “people who live in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones”. Link

◼ Speaking of Apple and App Stores, John Gruber has a funny “Translation From Adorable Bullshit to English of Microsoft’s ‘10 Principles for the Microsoft Store on Windows’”. Link

◼ If “feel-good messaging” feels disingenuous, it won’t motivate employees and can backfire. Motives matter. Link

◼ “Facebook bans QAnon across its platforms”. This deserves a finally. Link

◼ NVIDIA Research is using AI to reduce bandwidth need for video calls while also improving quality. Question is: can it take my calls too? Link

🕹 Games

◼ Mobile app usage grew 25% year-over-year in Q3 and mobile games spend was more than $20b. Apps | Games

◼ Amazon’s second game, the F2P team-shooter Crucible, has been cancelled only five months after launching the initial beta. Link

◼ Epic vs Apple: the presiding judge refused to grant epic an injunction forcing Apple to reinstate Fortnite into the App Store. In turn, Apple may not revoke Epic’s developer certificate for the Unreal Engine. Meanwhile, this whole thing is costing Epic a lot of money. Link
See also: “Epic vs. Apple judge warns of ‘serious ramifications’ for console makers”. Link
And: “Epic vs. Apple is losing PR steam” Link

◼ Interesting year-on-year revenue analysis of iOS games in China between Q2 2019 and Q2 2020. But Genshin Impact will probably change a lot of those conclusions on genres quickly. Link

◼ Roblox and Mobile game publisher Playtika have both filed for an IPO. Roblox | Playtika

◼ Sony will start auto-recording voice chats on PS5. So if players file complaints or harassment reports about other abusive players, moderators have an actual clip. And you cannot opt out. Personally, I think this is a good idea if done right. Link

◼ I’ve missed this in the last issue: “Ex-Blizzard vets, including former CEO Mike Morhaime, start new game company”. Link

◼ “What if cloud gaming doesn’t catch on?” It’s an interesting op-ed but I think that, contrary to VR and AR, it’s not a question of “if” and just “when”. At least in a technological sense – whether that will be soon enough for the Stadias and Gefore Nows of today, is a different matter. Link

◼ Unity has launched a program to support mobile free-to-play titles in their scaling efforts. Link

😋 Tasty Tidbits

◼ Goat up your Zoom calls. Literally. Link

◼ “Alpine landscapes turned alien worlds through infrared photography”. Who needs a rocket, Elon? Link

◼ Food porn of the day: “How Traditional French Butter Is Made In Brittany”. Link

◼ Great explanation of the infamously unintuitive Monty Hall Problem. I once spent a whole afternoon vehemently arguing for the wrong case. Link

◼ “The Fungus in Your Cheese Is Having Weird Sex”. Headlines don’t get better than that. Link (via Xavier Guardiola)

◼ Jail employees used the “Baby Shark” children song to punish inmates by handcuffing them to a wall and forcing them to listen to the song repeatedly. Any parent with small children can relate to the horror of that torture. Link (via Vanessa Alcocer)
See also: Holy smokes, that song has 6.8 billion views on Youtube! Link (Video)

◼ Finalists for the Comedy Pet Photo Awards 2020. Link

◼ Even better: Finalists for the 2020 Comedy Wildlife Photography Awards. Link

I work for King. All views in this newsletter are personal and my own. They do not represent the views of King or ActivisionBlizzard. This newsletter is provided for informational purposes only and no investment advice. This newsletter links to other websites and information obtained from third-party sources and I cannot ensure nor verify accuracy of the information or its appropriateness for a given situation.