Backbone CEO on Xbox Everywhere, Fortnite's return to iOS, and the Backbone Pro launch

uh, excited to have you here. Welcome to the stream. How you doing? Thanks for having me. appreciate it. I feel like I walked into the middle of an ad read. You did. You did. You did. Uh we are 100% corporate sponsored. Uh in independent media is dead. The future is corporate media and we are leading the charge.

Uh but good to have you here. Uh can you introduce yourself and explain what Backbone is? I'm a fan, but some people might not be aware. Sure. Uh my name is Manife. I'm the CEO and founder of Backbone. Um Backbone is the leading platform for the future of gaming. Mhm.

The way I describe it to people is that every time there's been a shift in streaming media, it's resulted in some of the biggest consumer businesses. So like music streaming, you had Spotify and Sonos, and then in TV streaming, you had Netflix and Roku.

And you can think of Backbone as the analog company for streaming games. Um, we have a number of products. We sell devices that you can use to connect to your phone or any screen and play games on them. And then we also make an app that aggregates all the different streaming services like Xbox Game Pass and others.

Uh so you can access them all in one place. You can buy our products in any major retail store, Walmart, Target, Best Buy, etc. Uh and we're backed by investors like Index. Cool. And um Sound Ventures. Yeah. So I got one a couple years ago.

I was not getting a lot of time in front of the PlayStation 5 and so uh would drop my phone into the backbone and stream from the PS5 over the Wi-Fi to the phone with the backbone. It gives you the whole whole gaming experience. Very fun. Um what has the relationship been like with the uh the big console providers?

Uh can you break us down the different strategies? It seems like uh Sony has been very competitive launching something that's kind of like a competitor with the PlayStation. I forget what they called it, but uh the it it has a screen and and device and does remote play.

Uh Microsoft's taken a much more open uh approach, letting you even stream Xbox games on PS5 and Forza Horizon is on uh on PlayStation now and so uh what what has been the relationship with the different major gaming platforms been like over the last few years? For sure.

So I think uh of course each one has its own strategy. Microsoft in particular is really interesting because um they're running this campaign now called Xbox Everywhere. Yeah. Where the idea is that you can turn any device in your life into an Xbox and run games on any screen.

And the way they're doing this is through streaming games from the cloud. So Microsoft's subscription service, Game Pass, if you subscribe to it, you can basically access the entire Xbox games catalog um on any device that you own.

And of course the devices and software that we're making uh work great with Game Pass and make the experience work really well end to end. So you can do it on things like smartphones.

Um so I think in Microsoft's case um you know their goal is really to drive more Game Pass subscriptions and just gather more MA and DAO for their service and it's super strategic to you know their overall roadmap with cloud and all that as well. Why wasn't Google able to pull it off?

I feel like they were early to that party. uh game streaming. I can't even remember the name of the product, but it never really h hit like major takeoff or do I have it all wrong? And actually, it's better than ever. I don't even remember. So, you're talking about Stadia? Yeah, that's right. Stadia. Yeah. Yeah.

Is Stadia still around? What's that? Is it still around? No. No, it was unfortunately. Yeah. Classic Google. Classic. But but but I mean I mean you would think they have all the resources. They're a hyperscaler. They have GPUs in the cloud. They can do rendering.

And they're also somewhat platform agnostic, so any game developer could go to Stadia. It just seems like super additive. Um, I'm sure you had intimate, you know, interactions with them as Stadia as you were building the company. Uh, what do you why do you think Stadia didn't take off? For sure.

So, I was at I was at Google when they were working on it. Um, that's that's actually was was sort of part of the basis for the idea. Yeah.

Um, I went into the office one day and there was a demo that an engineer had built where you could use Google's cloud technology to stream games to like basically a two generations old Android phone. So, you can run GTA on like a two generations old Android phone. Yeah.

And I picked up this demo and I tried it and I completely lost my mind. I was like, we've seen disruptions in gaming across every single vertical, right?

business model, audio, content, but this has got to be the single biggest disruption in the history of the games industry, at least that I'm aware of, um, in a long time. And so that kind of became the basis for the idea behind Backbone.

I basically made, um, a slide deck on why I thought it would be like a really big opportunity for Google and I sent it to the head of product for YouTube gaming. And then I realized it could go a bit wider.

So I sent it to a bunch of the vice presidents internally and basically a bunch of people ended up reading it and it became one of the most uh viral slide decks internally within the company. Like 15% of the company read it by my last day.

And so I got to meet with some of the executives that are working on Stadia and other initiatives. I think there's no doubt that the technology was incredible, but I think other players like Microsoft just had a better go to market strategy and more content. Yeah, that makes sense.

I mean the content's really really key. Um, switching gears a little bit, how have you seen the industry react to the um, uh, news last week around uh, the app store sort of payment policies. Uh, I imagine you've been hearing a bunch of chatter.

Yeah, I mean certainly if Fortnite were to return to the app store, it' be pretty big. Um, I think it's been like it's under it's it was sub it was resubmitted, right? It hasn't been approved yet. Normally Apple approves in 90% of apps get approved in 24 hours. We're on like hour 46.

So everyone's saying, "Apple, what's going on? Dragging your feet. " Anyway, um yeah, I mean, I think it's huge. I mean, it means that if you're able to link out to external payment systems, you're basically going to be able to take in more margin as a game developer.

And uh I think it'll, you know, but how do you expect how do you expect users to actually respond, right? So, like let's say you download a free game and you're like, "Okay, I want to pay. I'm willing to pay for this game and you get the option to just subscribe in the app.

Maybe it's at one price or subscribe outside of the app at a lower price, right? You'd have to offer, I imagine, have to offer some type of incentive to get somebody to want to go to a separate web page, right? So, I can go outside of the app and I get maybe some So, So, you're splitting the difference.

You're splitting the difference kind of, but then I imagine some users like the fact that their subscriptions are native and they can go into the app store and and churn if they're not using something. And so, how how do you expect that? How do you expect developers to actually play it?

Do you and and do you think it's are they really getting back 30% or is it more like, you know, again, splitting the difference?

Um, so I think what we're seeing right now and in Epic's implementation, they posted a tweet online like the Revenue Cat CEO replied to Tim Sweeny's uh tweet and it was asking like how did you implement this? Did you use an app purchase?

So in Fortnite's case, they show an option to do inapp purchase and they also show, you know, the web flow through Stripe or whatever and that one is, you know, a 20% kind of cash back or something like that. You get like 20% back in Epic credits. Oh, smart.

So there's like an incentive people might have to incentivize customers to transact through the web and that but giving them back in free credit like points in a game which they're going to value on a cash basis absolute dog you know a dog.

Uh I I want to talk about uh the the actual uh technology roadmap or tech tree to make mobile gaming even better. What's more important? Uh, better devices, faster chips, more memory, better screens, or just ubiquitous 5G, Starlink, better connectivity, lower latency.

Um, because uh, Call of Duty, you can stream it on your phone. Probably Xbox, Xbox Game Pass allows you to do that. There's still a Call of Duty mobile that's optimized for the phone, and I think people probably play that one more on their phone than the streamed one. And so we're still not in this fully streaming era.

Uh what are the what are the blockers to get us to just one installation of the game everywhere?

Um, so I mean both of those things are bottlenecks and we we often used to get in these like furious debates internally over like which one was going to overtake the other and then we kind of realized after a while it was a bit aimless because we just want the overall basket to succeed and I think you'll see a lot of like hybridization where you'll have you know games that are relatively like thin clients but like a very significant cloud component to them versus right now we think of this dichotomy of like fully streamed versus native and I think maybe there'll be um some games that flit across the boundary line.

I mean, Fortnite is one such example of that where you there's a pretty heavy cloud component uh to the to the game. What are you playing right now? Right now, uh so I don't know if you've heard about Expedition 33. Oh, yeah. I I I haven't played it, but I heard about it. I'm just about to get into that. Okay.

That's been popping up on the internet. Yeah. And that I've been playing a lot of Fortnite. Yeah, that's good. Um were you what were you surprised about the GTA 6 release date? It seemed like the market had been pricing in a 2025 release and then all of a sudden it was like nope 2026.

Um I mean it takes these games take forever now. The production costs of there's some really great articles uh online talking about like how the development costs for these titles have ballooned because of like this need to have really lielike graphics and realistic gameplay. Um so not surprising. No.

Uh what about tariffs? I'm imagine that that was a tumultuous time for you. Uh obviously sigh of relief uh recently, but what's your outlook and um what did it mean? Take me through the the emotional journey of the last couple weeks of the company. Yeah, I mean definitely short-term painful.

It was awkward timing giving given the um Backbone Pro launch which just occurred this past week. Sure. And this is a huge launch for us. I mean, we generated, I think, around 700 million media impressions, which is more than, you know, Beats and Aura and Sonos generated for recent product launches.

Um, and so it was a big launch and it was an awkward time because of the tariffs that made the pricing strategy a bit complicated. Mhm.

That being said, we think in the long run, anything that promotes, you know, free trade or reduces tariffs like globally um is beneficial to the company because then we can offer our products in more markets um than we do today at, you know, more of a fair price to consumers. Yeah, I got to pick up a Backbone Pro.

I'm looking at it right now. I'm adding it to cart. John has always said the biggest risk to the show is that he just gets sucked into some some It's like my one vice. Like you'll never find me like passed out drunk, but you will find me like 70 hours into like Metal Gear Solid for the third time.

Anyway, uh this is fantastic. Anything else? Yeah. No, I'm happy for for you and the team that uh you get a little relief on the ter congrats on the new launch and uh good luck. I know you guys are shipping in about a week now, so uh I'm sure there's a lot of work to uh get to that point. Head over to backbone.

com, pick one up if you're a gamer. Check it out. Anything else? That's all. Thank you. We'll talk to you soon. Have a great day. Cheers. Bye. Uh, speaking of sleeping easier, post tariffs, eight. Go to eight. com. 5-year warranty, 30 night risk-free trial, free returns, free shipping. Pod 4 Ultra.

I got an 88 last night. 7 hours and 11 minutes. Not too bad. What'd you do, Jordy? Did I beat you or did you smoke me? 100. 100. He knows Brian Johnson's coming on the show. He's prepping. Proof of work. He's prepping. Uh, anyway, we have our next guest coming in. Put it up. Put it up. 100. See, it's not a screenshot.

I'm moving it around. There we go. Yeah, the new app is beautiful. Go download it. Uh, anyway, folks, we got Aaron Gin coming in breaking down a new uh Wall Street Journal article you wrote. Aaron,