The Byteside Newsletter
Bits (podcast) and pieces
My new Bits podcast is now four weeks old. If you haven’t checked it out yet, please do! I’m feeling more in touch with the daily tech news world just by making it. I hope listeners feel the same. Eight headlines every morning of the week in under
So polished it's lifeless
The past few weeks watching PM Morrison flounder has been a textbook lesson in how media training has gone so terribly wrong in corporations and politics. The effort to be so good at only ever saying the thing you’re prepared to say – to “never accept the premise of the
Taking the fun out of fungible
Let’s cut to the chase: a lot of people who think they’ve recently bought digitally verified unique artworks will soon discover these artworks are not as permanent or as verified as they’d hoped. The whole non-fungible token craze is a mess. The technical concept? Very sound. Entirely
Ruslan Kogan on the 15th anniversary of his online retail empire
From failing to launch one of the first Android phones to battles with Gerry Harvey, we talk to Kogan himself about all things Kogan.
There and back again
We skipped last week in order to move back to the Revue newsletter platform. I hope it’s a lesson in not being afraid to explore opportunities and to feel comfortable saying ‘Nope!’ and resetting things if it just doesn’t feel right. I think it’s also a lesson
Bad bargain, wrong code
This media bargaining code battle has been running for about three years now, and the closer it gets to the finish line, the more everyone involved look like assholes.
Too many people think they know what went wrong with Cyberpunk 2077
Instead of pretending we know what really happened behind the scenes, it's more valuable to consider the complexities of making games.
Sales vs success vs Cyberpunk
I’m reminded of the Aesop’s Fable “The Dog & His Reflection”. CDPR chased the bigger bone, the desire to release simultaneously across PC, Xbox Series X, PlayStation 5, Xbox One, and PlayStation 4.
Addicted to addiction rhetoric
Communication is unfailingly the solution to keeping someone on the right path to building great relationships with games. To know how to stay focused on all the benefits and values they can get from loving games, and where the pitfalls lie and how to avoid them.
The right time for a new era
When is the right time to do ‘the new thing’? Whatever that may be? I’m a big fan of using the New Year as a launching pad for new ideas, new goals, new efforts. It’s arbitrary, but our brains still really like latching onto milestones as starting or
Fighting the Unlightenment
By every measure, the future demands creativity. It demands a return to the raw pursuit of ideas. And supporting nerds in their pursuit of amazing innovations is fundamental to the problems we face.
Faith in numbers
Criticism, skepticism, negativity. When the numbers start talking it's OK to start to get excited about what's really happening.
Free as in anti-competitive
There's big questions in what it means for Google to offer free cloud photo storage and then take it away when the free service spoiled the market for paid competitors for so long.
The last Xbox
The demand for higher resolutions and faster refresh rates and more data throughput is cresting, creating the chance for smaller and smarter hardware in future, or even the potential for future mobile devices to bear the load instead of needing big boxes under our TVs.
Attention, distraction and Quibi
It will go down in history as one of the great failures of the digital age. Almost $2 billion spent on a Hollywood-backed, highly-polished, mobile-only, episodic streaming video service that will be long forgotten with no sense of loss whatsoever. We talked about Quibi on the Byteside podcast a lot
Prideful sharing
It’s been a crazy week and I’m genuinely sorry to say that I don’t have a column this week. I love writing these and your feedback is always thoughtful and insightful and helps me to keep building on the ideas I try to express here. It’s
Industry bit rot
More Australian media job losses in tech and gaming show a fading of local nuance as global dominance grows.
Arhythmia
Routines, rhythms and the systems we use to keep things moving at the right pace.
It's all about the Game Pass
Forcing exclusivity onto Bethesda, or iD, or Arkane, just isn’t Microsoft’s games strategy anymore. For Microsoft, owning games studios now serves its core long-term ambition of building out a dazzlingly good value subscription service through Game Pass.
Cat photos matter
The greatest cliche of the internet is too many cat photos. It partly made me want to be careful about overloading my own social media with cats. Until our beloved Sylvie suddenly died.
