(almost) weekly ideas that teach us about tech, niche cultures, history.
❤️🔥 Every video here is a work of passion and dedication, meant to capture fun and share the love-instead of keeping my head down.
🎥 I started making RU-vid videos in 2006, but pivoted to software engineering where I've worked full time since 2017 across Philadelphia, NYC, Rochester, and NJ. I've built hundreds of open source projects, from Minecraft mods to iOS apps, from jailbreak tweaks to video games.
Ever since 2018, while I may have missed their earlier ones, they are really, REALLY good at presenting their material, and this year is no different for Summer Games Fess this year (even if I missed it sadly). If there were E3 Presentaitons before 2018 from Devolver Digital that I missed, I'll have to watch them whenever I can during the summer or late June and such. EDIT: Nevermind, I actually did watch every single one of these because I saw another E3 Presentation which was Devolver Digital. And I did take a crack at watching it, and man, it was "completely" different from Nintendo's, Ubisoft's, Electronic Arts, Sony's, and Microsoft's E3 presentations at the time at Electronics Entertainment Expo (E3 for short) in 2017....And yeah, ever since 2017/2018, I have loved each and every one of their presentations, but I knew the way they did their presentations, it felt like as if it was a movie company....Turns out, they did all the way back in 2012/2013, that I had no idea about prior to their 2017 E3 conference.
Teenage Engineering feels like that company that you just dreamed of and they create those products thats really feels was meant for you. They are 10/10 design and quality company for sure! Best! Love you! <3
No money maker / "celebrity" type of RU-vidrs back then - just people explaining stuff to each other and having fun. I could watch youtube of a sonyericsson symbian phone... I could use facebook on a phone that actually fit in the palm of my hand. I had google maps on that phone... No ads...
Definitely true. Wow, that also reminds me that I used to whip out my TI-83 Plus calculator in high school and play little games on that. Once I learned a bit about programming, I was able to entertain myself in math class trying to make my own little games. I don't know if that'd still be a thing today - even if I'm sure those same calculators are required in class 🤣
Looking forward to your vid on minecraft mods! That was how I got serious about programming was working on teams and solo projects. Was lucky enough to work on Pixelmon and The Aether. Thats 10 years ago now.. Now a founder at a small startup :)
Amazing! Minecraft modding is also how I got serious about programming, especially because they were written in Java, which was luckily what my school offered in its programming class. Then I branched out to Jailbreak tweaks, and app development, and it just kept going. I still miss working on my Reddit app, Submarine. Anyway, for the last ten or so years I've also been working at startups, although now I'm full stack. Maybe someday we'll run into each other in the software dev world!
Oh thank god. A human with a human voice and a human-written video script on a topic I’m interested in has appeared in my recommendations. I’ve only just begun the video but I’d like to say thank you! Also, you /are/ human… right?
Back then, you didn’t have to consider if what you were seeing was a way to give money to another person whether it’s ads or sponsored content. Everything was personal and had a purpose
Absolutely true. There's something we'll never be able to recreate in the pure, wonderful pointlessness in early social media. Why post what I'm eating on Instagram, or what I'm listening to on Last.fm? No reason! Creative expression is all. Just sharing with my friends, or with the nerdy world at large. Yes, it's nice that people can have careers creating stuff online. But we've had to sacrifice that personal, purposeful side of things.
Great video and lovely voice you have! As someone mentioned. When there is more info to work with - more on the R1 and now with Jesper Kouthoofd being their employee - what's next!
Limited Run is fine but my main complaint with them is you better pray to god you can get your hands on their games while they're new because if you don't, you better be prepared to spend a pretty penny if you missed it. River City Girls is a phenomenal title and I tried it out when it had a free trial on the Switch and really wanted to own it, but when I looked up a physical, the only ones in America were out of print LRG copies selling for upwards of $300. A great game, but not a $300 game and so I had to do the only choice, buy it digitally. I'm not saying LRG is all bad, hell as a Persona fan I cannot WAIT until my collectors edition of Persona 3 Portable comes in but what I am saying is that I wish they'd do more reissues so that if you happen to miss a release you don't need to pay out the ass just to get a physical copy, which is their mission. Forever physical isn't very lucrative if you can't afford their games if you discover a game after they're selling it
Fun fact: the valve on the bottom is also because Carmichael believed that, "ultimately, people don’t drink cold coffee from the top; they drink it from the bottom. You have a lid and a straw. It’s how people drink." I also think launching a can into "space" got into his head when developing the nitrogen technique, “You force the nitrogen into the fluid, and then when you open the can, it rushes out. It wants to go back into space." www.profoodworld.com/industry/beverage/article/13277095/valved-can-for-texturized-coffee-is-a-first
Good luck getting these companies to make physical media when the future consoles dont even have a media drive. I said the same thing you are saying when CD's were dying out. Look where we are now? I live in a city of 400 000 people and we do not have 1 place to buy vinyl or CDs and next month our only dedicated Gaming store is closing down. The digital future isnt a future anymore... Its on our doorstep
They can already yank your rights away on video games.... most game discs do NOT hold the full game on them. Just a small part of it that requires a much larger download or 'patch' and won't actually play unless you are hooked up to an internet connection that is good enough to download it. For a lot of AAA games the disk is really just a token
Just stopping by to "NOT WATCH" and reply to your title and leave a dislike. Also asked RU-vid to not recommend your channel to me. Btw, all digital future is absolutely going to happen even if consumers don't want it to.
Great perspective and facts, enjoyed your take on this topic - which is mostly presented in either in the fear mongering camp or the digital revolution one. Well done.
Thank you so much! It's definitely been a hot button issue, and it's way more complicated than "they're gonna take away our discs." Glad you enjoyed it.
Wow, I love that term, "the new historians of media." You're totally right about that. I also have been trying to collect physical media and use stuff like Plex so I don't have to rely on streaming services.
I've heard companies say people got used to all-digital with music, so they will get used to it with video games too. Except that you can still purchase cd albums directly from artists and download and burn your own copies. With video games, you can't do either one of those, and streaming will probably never work for videogames in whatever current gen people are in. I will always buy physical games and hope they don't go away.
The fact you can download your favourite films and video games within 5 minutes of a google search indicates that even if we went all digital, we would always be able to access the media we wanted on our PCs, handhelds, phones etc
I wouldn’t mind digital purchases so much if they’d let me back up the files onto a BD-R and play the game without having to connect to anything. Sure, maybe encrypt the disc with a key so that I’d have to unlock it while installing, but I’m sure there’s a cryptographic solution for that.
The big publishers that make games are going to stop making discs versions not if but when don't matter how u spin it. I belive 80%+ buys digital and that number will keep growing. The limited run companies are not dependable when they don't put enough games on disc's. Your just giving your subs false hope. All publishers will go digital at some point maybe not a week, month or year from now but its gonna start
GOG and torrent mirrors and many other way to download DRM-free content are ways to make sure we will always be able to own the things we want to access. Flash cards and storage drives will also be able to preserve our digital content and can even be made into physical media
You no longer own anything and younger people did this. They did it when they agreed to pay Valve £50-100 for a digital download. I have games now that are 30+ years old and can still pop in the console and play. Games used to be a work of art, now it is the next disposable 1st person shooter and the like.
I didn't quite understand the last few points. Sure, we have some manufacturers making physical games now while they still are able to be made for the modern consoles, but what happens when the PS6 comes out digital only, or the next Xbox turns out not to exist and has been moved entirely to the "cloud"? The day you stop being able to buy new physical games and ripping them from hacked consoles will also be the day "legal" emulation dies - they'll just put a clause in their license that you have to agree to anyway to play the game on the console that makes you agree to not ripping it for emulation. FPGA and PC/Android handheld emulators are great, but will forever exist in a grey-market area that will never reach the heights that it once existed in. Steam as a platform is no better than the rest in theory, they still hold the rights to take away any of your games at any time, though they seem adamant on trying not to enforce that right while they are still in business. And when physical ownership not only becomes a decision between paying about the same for a digital game now or ordering online and waiting a week, but turns into having to wait a decade for emulation to catch up, only to find out you can legally copy a fraction of the PS5's library onto an emulator without voiding any laws, how bright is this future really?
I think this video make a noble attempt at nuance, but I think it fails to meaningfully address the actual concerns people have around the all digital future. People want Microsoft's/Sony's/Nintendo's future console to have some physical media component not because it'll help preserve older games that already have physical version, but because they want to make sure that the future games of that generation can be easily preserved or even just enjoyed offline. Saying "Well, actually the all digital future isn't real because physical retro sales will continue" is pedantically non-responsive. It is akin to saying that an all digital future of gaming isn't real because people will still make boardgames. While true, it doesn't matter. Even the comparison to music media doesn't hold up under scrutiny because music media wasn't generally platform locked the way games media is. If I bought a Sony Music CD, I could still reasonably expect it to play on my Philips CD Player without any issue. Games are the opposite, if I buy Sonic Frontiers on Xbox I can't take that same disk and play it on my PlayStation, even though the game was released on both platforms and both devices are able to read blue-rays just fine. Even the comparison to vinyl and the nostalgia for old storage media doesn't translate because the market isn't clamoring for Elden ring to be put into a genesis cartridge, and most efforts by the boutique collectible companies just press these games into whatever medium the latest generation of consoles is able to support. Software Emulation (as pointed to by the Steam Deck and Ayaneo Flip) is also a bizzarre non response because these devices cannot interface with physical media in any way, and none of the companies behind these devices are interested in adding specialized physical storage media for the games that they play. There are also real production hurdles to adding the ability to read physical media that I don't think we'll see it any time soon if at all. Software Emulation is great and a wonderful tool for accessibility and preservation, but the all digital future would make that more difficult, especially in the long run. I do think that pointing to Analogue's products and the rise of Boutique Collectable companies as an example of the continued existence of physical media is an interesting and novel perspective. While I don't think moving towards a collectable market is good or desirable, that is a different discussion to have than whether it renders the all digital future untrue. To that end, I think this argument has it a little backwards. Assuming that Hardware Emulation Manufacturers like Analogue are able to legally clone and sell every console that has any kind of physical media component, then a theoretical all digital future means that they'll eventually hit the limit of consoles they'll able to upsell to collectors because it's unlikely that they'd be given a license to access or replicate the server and operating system software necessary for those machines to function. The Boutique Collectable companies are in a similar boat with a potentially more dire circumstances. If the next console generation is digital only, then it wouldn't be feasible or even possible for them to provide physical media for that console generation. If they can't provide collectable games for that generation, then their market will quickly shrink to people who are mostly only interested in collecting older games for older consoles. Those companies will either have to adapt and continue catering to new consoles by providing digital codes (and ignoring older consoles because of their smaller market share) or die. There is no "winning" here, and you only have to look at the fact that most laptops and PCs no longer ship with CD players and the fact that it's increasingly difficult/impossible to get physical copies of PC games as proof that the All Digital Future is already partly here, it's just been coming to consoles more slowly.
How many new modern games have significant gameplay elements that couldn't be reproduced on consoles capable of accepting physical media? Only ones that require extremely specific online tools and the only one that I'd say could be notably difficult to handle is AI neural network integrations. In theory any developer who wanted to make their game available physically would be able to do so on older consoles. This is the most significant part of Analogue continuing forward in creating hardware level emulation, once you're getting PS3 era devices you're able to create modern games. Games get releases on PS5 and Switch despite the gap in power and performance because the gameplay isn't reliant on the performance. So if you can create a device that can play physical games and produce them physically all it takes is someone to chomp the bit. Elden Ring doesn't need to be able to be demade into a Genesis cart but if it could be demade into a PS3 disc or Switch cart that's all you would need. While there's not a market for new PS3 games (at this time) we've seen the Switch get lots of these sorts of downgraded versions. Analogue isn't the only one on this path either, the Evercade is also moving this direction. And while you might not be able to take an Xbox disc and play it on Playstation, you can take a Game gear cart, a TurboGrafx cart, or Gamboy Advance cart and put it in your Analogue pocket. Future analogue releases easily could be taking both your Xbox and PS discs. The retro physical sales are just the current vehicle to the physical games future. There's many new physical games for "old" consoles and "new" consoles for old physical games. I don't think it's unreasonable to say that line could blur to the point there's just new physical games.
@@DanSutherland I think your theory that any developer could make their modern game available on 7th generation consoles is incredibly naive and doesn't take into account that architectural and hardware limitations means that porting modern games to older consoles may not be possible because the hardware specification of said console doesn't have enough available memory or processing power or even hard disk space that it can support. At the very least porting to a console that the game wasn't originally targeted for is non-trivial and may be out of reach of the Boutique collector companies, and given the risk of Hardware emulation being a niche enthusiast market, might not be profitable enough for game development companies to invest it. Regardless, this does miss the broader point: It's not about the old stuff that currently exists, or that shrinking number of things that will come out soon. It's about trying to make sure that everything can have broad physical releases to accommodate a broad range of technological gaps as well as making it easier to preserver it all.
I'm sorry, but retro game speculators, $300 collector's editions, and limited physical releases that sell out instantly mean jack shit. For the 99% of us who can't afford ebay scalper prices, the all-digital future _is_ real, whether we like it or not.
If demand isn't being met then there will be an increase to supply. If there's insane ebay prices being met then that's money the people producing are leaving on the table. This is why the open Pre-order method is becoming more common. Instead of caving in for cheap licenses, save up for physicals. If prices are only going up that also means even if it's expensive you can resell physicals too. Otherwise prices collapse and scalpers are the ones who get screwed. It's not a matter of whether you like it or not, it's whether you act like it matters.
Thank you! I'm so glad you enjoyed it. It's wild just how many projects Teenage Engineering worked on... and I'm sure they're gonna keep at it for a long time based on their success (and passion). Might have to explore more of their stuff in a future video!
Man... what is up with the weird comments here? great vid Julian :) thanks for sharing. I think Teenage Engineering is going to impact a whole bunch of pop-culture design in the future - and personally I can't wait for it. I love everything they touch. I do sometimes wonder if they will stretch themselves too broad at some point. I liked it more when they specialised in Audio-hardware...
Thanks a ton! I couldn't agree more. Hopefully they stay grounded in the playful, intuitive stuff that made them so legendary. I definitely think they've already ruffled some feathers in the past... especially with their $1599 "field desk" that's literally just the tables they have in their office 🤣
It's an interesting point. Right now they are still "playful". But maybe some day they might get so large and involved in so many big projects that they lose some of their "underground" vibe... who knows@@insanj
If I find that a digital game I like or might buy is getting a physical release then I might buy it. I recently pre-ordered a physical Switch copy of Saa of stars. I also have a physical version of Metroidvania advanced collection for my switch.
I got Sea of Stars for free on PS+ and I'm still buying a physical copy for my Switch, because I've seen this shit happen before. It'll be gone _eventually_ and I like to actually keep my games. Or maybe I'll cancel my PS+ sub one day and then I'll lose it anyway.
Physical media will still be offered as an option, but many companies are finding ways to disincentivize getting physical copies. By either requiring an update or some sort of always online element tethered to it.
I would add that besides Netflix. None of the Streaming services have been profitable. If gaming because becomes all digital and even worse mostly subscriber based streaming of games. Than hacking is going to become even more important.
True that! I wasn't sure how many people would be familiar with the term "industrial designer" though so I figured "hardware company" would be an easier to understand term that still described Teenage Engineering, just more broadly. Even though they work in a whole lot of industries, and especially industrial design, they've built hardware prototypes in their studio using a CNC machine - so I thought it'd be fair to say "hardware company."
@@AshleyAmber Thank you so so much! ❤🔥I'm jealous, I definitely want to grab a Playdate one of these days. What a super fun little console. I also had no idea Teenage Engineering were behind Nothing before I started researching... Once I realized just how many awesome things they had contributed to over the past ten years I was blown away (and was really motivated to make a video about it).
I bought their pocket operators and mixer! I ditched my computer totally when I realized I dont need a computer for doing music, I just need TE's analog hardwares! Perfection!
"Viral" implies that their products weren't recognized before, and that their moment in the spotlight is fleeting. That's an inaccurate description of TE.
