Ben Thompson Explains the XBOX Disaster

**John Coogan** (0:00)
Ben Thompson, the founder of Stratechery. He's been on an absolute tear during a slow news cycle. Does it feel like a slow news cycle to you?

**Ben Thompson** (0:10)
I don't know. And the summer's always slow. I take a couple days. All right, I slow down a little bit myself.

**John Coogan** (0:17)
I feel like you've done a good job of providing really insightful and interesting pieces during a slow time where I didn't know that I wanted to.

**Ben Thompson** (0:26)
I was gonna say, I'm doing you a favor.

**John Coogan** (0:27)
Yeah, you are.

**Ben Thompson** (0:28)
Is that what I'm hearing from you?

**John Coogan** (0:29)
I didn't know I wanted you to adopt the voice of Mark Zuckerberg for 20 minutes and go on a tour. But it's not like that was driven by a specific, okay, there's a Wall Street Journal article where Bloomberg has a scoop and we need to know this. It's more just resetting on the meta narrative. I want to talk about the meta narrative, but can we start with Xbox?

**Ben Thompson** (0:49)
Sure.

**John Coogan** (0:50)
I want to know, first, let's go back in time a little bit and I want you to really check me on the story I tell myself about, how Microsoft wound up in the situation it wound up in with Xbox, and I think it stems with DirectX, it's the graphics layer that allowed games to be run on multiple graphics cards. So that was a Microsoft licensed piece of property. So this is why we don't have the Chrome box.

**Ben Thompson** (1:21)
You ought to go really far back.

**John Coogan** (1:23)
Like, because we didn't get an Amazon gaming console, we didn't get a Google gaming console, right?

**Ben Thompson** (1:30)
Right.

**John Coogan** (1:30)
Like, why Xbox?

**Ben Thompson** (1:31)
Well, DirectX is interesting. So you go back way back, I mean, we can go really far back.

**John Coogan** (1:35)
Please.

**Ben Thompson** (1:36)
I mean, back in the day, the main technology for doing 3D was coming along was OpenGL. And OpenGL had various pluses or minuses.
It was, you know, we're way back in history, but this is the origin of the Nvidia story, making cards to do 3D graphics. You had like the Riva, the 128, then you had the TNT, then you had the GeForce. And like, we're talking back in the 90s when I was, you know, your guy's age or whatever, in college. And, you know, making the first, you know, Quake comes out, like the real first 3D game, you know. There's actually a really interesting Twitter back and forth with the old id people talking about Quake and how basically they obliterated the company by burning everyone out by watching it. But super fun, super fun back and forth. But Microsoft comes out with Direct3D as an alternative to OpenGL that was, I think, and this is a little out of my area of expertise, but I think was a little easier to use, more niceties, was more tied into the platform. But this is all PC gaming.
The Xbox, the way I think about it, and a lot of gamers get annoyed and write about the gaming stuff because I don't really care about the game part of it. I'm more interested in the strategy and how that fits in the overall company.

**Jordi Hays** (2:53)
What is your review?

**John Coogan** (2:54)
Yeah, can we get a GTA 6 review?

**Ben Thompson** (2:57)
No.
I feel compelled. Number one, Rockstar, I think, is charging way too little for this game. They're charging, what, $80? Yes.

**John Coogan** (3:06)
You're going to get canceled for this. This is a nuclear take.

**Ben Thompson** (3:10)
No, they should be charging $200 for this game.

**John Coogan** (3:13)
I know.

**Ben Thompson** (3:13)
GTA 6 is like the last great game. Yeah. You think about everything. It was mostly all made pre-AI. It is the pinnacle of this AAA craftsmanship, years and years and years of blood and sweat and tears. To the extent where you have the Twitter analysts, counting cigarette butts outside of the offices to see how much crunch are they in right now.

**John Coogan** (3:41)
I don't even think he's trading the stock. I think he just wants to know what GTA 6 is. The love of the game, literally the game.

**Ben Thompson** (3:46)
Gamers are insane. I always tread in this water very, very carefully.
I feel compelled to buy GTA 6 just in honor of it existing, even if I don't know if I'm ever going to play it. So I'm definitely going to do that and I'd be happy to pay, yes, $200. $80 is ridiculous, there's a charge of work. Anyhow.