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After a series of weather-related delays, SpaceX has successfully launched another batch of Starlink internet satellites. This payload of 60 satellites brings SpaceX’s total count to 240, putting it even farther in the lead as the world’s largest satellite operator. Naturally, SpaceX also recovered the first stage booster for later use, possibly on another Starlink launch — the company hopes to have thousands of small satellites in orbit by later this year.
SpaceX initially had the launch set for Monday, but winds forced a cancellation. The Tuesday launch was then called on account of poor weather in the landing zone. Finally, the Thursday launch window worked out, and the Falcon 9 lifted off at about 9 AM from Space Launch Complex 40 at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station. Several minutes after lift-off, the first-stage booster detached and rendezvoused with the drone ship “Of Course I Still Love You” in the Atlantic Ocean. This is SpaceX’s 49th booster recovery, and the third for this particular rocket.
So far, regulators have approved SpaceX to launch 12,000 satellites, which dwarfs the current number of active satellites around Earth at a bit over 2,000. Over 7,000 of those satellites will be in very-low Earth orbit (VLEO) with the rest in geosynchronous low-Earth orbit. The VLEO units will allegedly help SpaceX offer internet access with latency similar to terrestrial connections. Current satellite internet systems often have lag that many times worse than the average cable connection.
Astronomers around the world are beginning to learn that the first few days after a Starlink launch are a tough time to observe the cosmos. The swarms of satellites are more likely to appear as bright streaks in images as they make their way into higher orbits. SpaceX says it will work with the scientific community to lessen the impact of its satellite constellation, but there is concern that 12,000 or more Starlink nodes will cause irrevocable changes in the sky.
SpaceX CEO Elon Musk has said that it will take at least 400 satellites to provide limited connectivity on the ground and twice that many for moderate coverage. At this rate, Starlink service could start rolling out in the coming months. The company is currently aiming for two Starlink launches in February, and that would put SpaceX within striking distance of the minimum coverage threshold.
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Huawei was on-track to become the largest smartphone maker in the world a year ago, but 2019 brought with it new challenges for the Chinese megacorporation. The US government instituted a technology export ban that cut it off from Google services. A Huawei executive has now said the company won’t go back to Google services even if the US lifts the trade ban.
Following the trade ban, Huawei had to launch several devices without Google apps and services. Its sales have turned downward as fewer users are interested in a device that lacks things like Gmail and Google Maps. Yet, Huawei’s sales haven’t dropped as much as many expected. Now, Fred Wangfei, Huawei’s manager for Austria, has told reporters that the company doesn’t plan to use Google services again even if the trade ban ends. For Huawei, relying on Google is just too risky when a new US administration can throw its plans into disarray at any time.
Huawei’s troubles started in 2018 when the US government under Trump stepped in to pressure AT&T and Verizon to cancel the launch of Huawei’s Mate 10 Pro. That device eventually launched in the US unlocked, but Huawei pulled back on its US plans following the last-minute cancellations. No matter, though — Huawei was still selling more phones than ever worldwide. So, it didn’t reallyneedthe US market. It did rely on US technology, and that made Huawei vulnerable. Adding Huawei to the Commerce Department’s “Entity List” in spring 2019 meant US firms couldn’t export technology to Huawei, and that included Google.
The Mate 30 was the first Huawei device to launch without Google apps.
At the end of 2018, Huawei was within striking distance of Samsung, which was the largest smartphone maker in the world. Now, Apple has edged Samsung out to reclaim the top spot as smaller Chinese OEMs increasingly eat Samsung’s lunch. Huawei has fallen to a distant third, but sales were only 7-10 percent lower (depending on who you ask) in the 4th quarter of 2019 compared with 2018. Sales in China, which lacks Google services, probably account for a big chunk of that.
According to Wangfei, Huawei believes it can thrive by building its own ecosystem. Going back to Google could just cause another disruption in its business if the company finds itself in the sights of another president. It has already signed a deal with TomTom to get mapping data, and its custom Android app store is growing. There’s even the Harmony OS platform, which could eventually replace Android on Huawei phones. Executives believe Huawei could experience further sales losses, but it will be better in the long-term if it frees itself from dependence on US tech.
The world’s most important auto show – Frankfurt – is dead. The VDA organizing group (Verband der Automobilindustrie, or Association of the German Automotive Industry) has pulled the plug on the odd-years-only IAA (Internationale Automobil-Ausstellung, or International Motor Show).
Frankfurt was in trouble when the likes of Toyota, Renault, Peugeot, Nissan, Fiat, and Ferrari pulled out in advance of the show, and Frankfurt became a dead man walking as soon as attendance figures came out: down 31 percent in 2019, down 40 percent this decade. What’s dead, actually, is Frankfurt as the site of long-running of the show. VDA solicited hosting bids, got seven offers, and will decide among Berlin, Munich, and Hamburg. That doesn’t mean good times will return in a different city.
Here’s what we can learn about auto shows from what happened to the Frankfurt Motor Show, as well as the experiences of other show facing troubled times, notably Detroit:
The Deuce, Henry Ford II, shows off the all-new Mustang (this from the Ford press release), New York World’s Fair, April 17, 1964. Fairgoers could ride a monorail of Mustangs above the Flushing Meadows site, near where the Mets now play.
1. Nobody Goes to the World’s Fair Anymore
Auto shows were where you went to learn about the progress of the motorcar. Just as people used to travel to the World’s Fair to learn about the march of progress: broadcast TV (New York, 1939), the Ferris Wheel (Chicago, 1893), the Eiffel Tower (Paris, 1889), the Ford Mustang (New York, 1964). Now, you just go find a YouTube video. There hasn’t been a World’s Fair in North America since Vancouver 1986 and the more recent ones have expensive exercises in nation-building and chest-thumping (somewhat like the Olympics).
If you go to an auto show, it’s either out of the thrill of seeing new cars, getting your kids excited about cars, or because you’re shopping for one you’ll buy soon. But you probably know the top lines on what they look like and how much horsepower they have.
Long before Lil Nas X and Billy Ray Cyrus (“Ridin’ on a horse, ha, You can whip your Porsche”), Ram trucks opened the Detroit auto show with a 2008 cattle drive. It was a mega-cold day and you had to get up real early to see this one-time event.
2. Automakers Don’t Exhibit Where Their Cars Don’t Sell
This is what hurt Detroit. For years, foreign automakers – those headquartered outside the US – all went to Detroit (NAIAS, or North American International Auto Show). They wanted to be part of the excitement for the two, or two and a half, press and charity days before the show opened to the public. In Detroit, no matter what Mercedes-Benz showed, local coverage favored the Big Three: Chrysler (at the time), Ford, and GM. But then, who’d want to write up variable valve timing and direct injection in a new Benz when you had Ram Trucks (Chrysler) driving a herd of cattle in front of Cobo Hall? That was in 2008, the year after Daimler and Chrysler ended their 10-year merger.
Basically, the Audi, BMW, Mercedes-Benz, and Porsche market share in Michigan rounds up to about, oh, zero percent. So they stopped exhibiting. Some, like Porsche, stopped exhibiting multiple times. And the internationals stopped underwriting booths they used for two days and the local dealers then used for 10 more. Detroit may well be the worst auto show for automaker ROI because just about everybody works for or has a relative working for one of the automakers and access to employee/family discounts. The odds are nil that someone in a Chrysler family buys an F-150 or Silverado over a Ram 1500.
Most major auto shows also don’t happen when cars are being sold. That’s in the spring. It certainly isn’t in the dead of winter, which is when auto dealers prefer the shows to be held, so they can build a few more sales in December and January, and then hold February sales in honor of – yes, there’s irony – two of America’s most honest Presidents.
3. Auto Shows Are Green, Mobility Shows (Doesn’t Sell)
In an effort to be future-looking, auto shows added components for electrification, sound environmental practices, and mobility services such as shared-ride vans. In some places, it works (Los Angeles); in others, it doesn’t. Regardless, that component is the look-what’s-new part, sort of like what the World’s Fairs used to be. Most Americans are not yet shopping for EVs, not with sales stalled at less than 2 percent of US market share.
This is the stuff that the media wants to cover (some of us, anyway) but the same things we want don’t have crowds clamoring to see.
The Frankfurt Motor Show has been held in Frankfurt since 1951. Cars and motorcycles are shown in odd-number years, commercial vehicles in even years. The chart shows the main, motor vehicle, show attendance in the 2000s. Attendance in 2019 was down by almost a third.
4. Buyers Don’t Like Auto Dealers
The main reason for a major auto show’s existence is not press days but the public days, Friday to the following Sunday, nine to ten days. That’s when the public comes and interacts with representatives from the local auto dealers, plus some automaker reps. It’s not clear how much they learn they didn’t already know from online. And it’s not clear how much the public’s general distaste for the car-buying experience inside auto showrooms rubs off on the auto-show experience. You do get to see almost every brand under one roof. At Camp Jeep and a few others, you can ride on an off-roading-lite trek. If the car is popular, you’ll have to wait in line to sit inside.
Meanwhile, the brochures you could pick up in bulk at the auto show, the same info is online. As far as auto shows being parents-to-children bonding time, people born the last three decades see the automobile as less exciting than their parents did as kids. It hasn’t gone away entirely, but it has slipped enough to affect auto show attendance.
Experiential marketing: Ford Police Interceptor doing its stuff at New Jersey’s Meadowlands. Automakers have expanded their targeted marketing to commercial and government buyers, too.
5. Automakers Invest in Experiential Marketing
Automakers are rethinking where to spend their marketing dollars. They want to focus it on the most likely prospects if they can identify them: people who bought a premium car 2-3 years ago, young parents with a second baby on the way and maybe in need of a safe midsize SUV, somebody who just googled Tag Heuer and Rolex. So they sponsor music festivals, support charities, and cough up $5 million for a 30-second Super Bowl 54 (2020) spot. Or they invite the best prospects to drive the cars at speed in a stadium parking lot (speed is relative), give them lunch and a baseball cap, and check back in a couple of days. They also target likely-to-buy demographics with focused online ad buys. Those activities have better ROI than building a bigger, splashier auto show booth, automakers are deciding.
What’s on the Horizon?
Auto shows aren’t dead yet. But convention centers that look to auto shows to fill two-plus weeks of the calendar (including move-in and teardown days) have to wonder if they’ll soon be renting only parts of their facilities in the future.
Ford and Volvo did not exhibit at the Geneva auto show in February. Geneva is an important show because Switzerland, with no auto industry to speak of, is neutral territory, unlike Frankfurt.
The US has three major shows: New York, Detroit, and Los Angeles; Chicago, Washington, and Miami are mid-majors. BMW ended its presence at the New York Auto Show (NYIAS) in 2019. This year, Mercedes-Benz is bowing out, too. Unlike Michigan, where they sell few cars, metro New York is Mercedes’ biggest market. So leaving NYIAS is not for lack of buyers.
Detroit bailed on its dead-of-winter, just-after-CES date after 2018. This year NAIAS (North American International Auto Show) resumes in June as part auto show, part motorist-participation show, part rite-of-spring, June 9-20. There will still be press days, a technology segment called (wait for it) AutoMobili-D, and public show.
The show to watch as bellwether for US shows is Los Angeles, Nov. 20-29 this year. California is the car capital of the world when it comes to diverse buyer tastes and a diverse population. Also, more high tech work and automotive design is done in California than anywhere else. And the LA show has had a booming green-tech-sustainable-ridesharing segment that is unmatched, called AutoMobility LA. Other than the LA Convention Center being broken up and too small, SoCal is as good a place as any for a forward-looking show.
The most new car tech is displayed at CES in Las Vegas and cars stand out even among the show’s traditional consumer electronics devices, home automation, and the burgeoning health tech exhibits. So far, LA / Automobility LA and CES are co-existing.
We’ll have see how no-longer-Frankfurt fares in Berlin, Munich, or Hamburg.
According to research analytics firm SuperData, demand for Half-Life: Alyx drove VR sales sharply skywards in Q4. Valve, in particular, was the beneficiary of this trend: Sales of the company’s $999 Index VR system more than doubled from Q3 to Q4, specifically because of the HL:A announcement.
It’s hard to believe that the Oculus Rift launched four years ago this March, but here we (almost) are. SuperData’s results show two distinct trends emerging in VR,
with console and wireless sales leading the pack.
Image by SuperData
What would be particularly interesting to know, in my opinion, is how much Oculus Quest sales increased in Q4 relative to Q3, and whether any of that increase is theorized to be from Half-Life: Alyx as well. SuperData claims that “The Index sold more units than any other PC VR headset during the quarter despite a steep price of up to $1,000.”
As of Q4, there’s reason to quibble with that statement. While the Oculus Quest is still primarily an untethered headset, gamers now have the option to tether it to their PCs for playing games like… Half-Life: Alyx. The announcement that tethered support had been added to the headset was covered widely, and the Quest might have seen a sales bump as a result.
Sony, however, continues to rule the relative VR roost, with 338K sales thus far. The company hasn’t unveiled anything about a new PSVR for the PS5, though we know the current model will remain compatible with the system.
One of the differences between Microsoft and Sony is the degree of PC integration they offer. Microsoft’s ownership of Windows has put them well ahead on this front, as far as streaming games locally or via Xbox Game Pass. A future PS5 VR headset that was compatible with PCs and offered access to any unique VR content in Sony’s ecosystem would be a carrot the company could offer interested PC VR gamers that Microsoft can’t match.
At the same time, however, it does seem that sales of the Index were uniquely modified by HL:A. SuperData notes that they believe Valve would’ve sold even more units if it hadn’t run out of stock. There’s no mention of the HTC Vive anywhere, which isn’t necessarily surprising. While the initial Vive sold very well, HTC has taken very little effort to evolve or expand the product. The Vive was arguably better out of the gate, but Oculus is the only company that’s been regularly iterating on multiple designs.
If Half-Life: Alyx can drive this much VR engagement before the game even launches, a smash hit could transform the entire market. It would be the height of irony for Valve — one of the companies that drove the original shift to 3D graphics, courtesy of Half-Life — also provided a title that drove early adoption of a different, fundamentally new approach to gaming.
When Blizzard announced and launched Starcraft Remastered, the fan and critical response was excellent. People were pleased with the product and quality of the remaster and Blizzard was commended for the work it did. When the company announced Warcraft 3: Reforged, it gave fans plenty to look forward to, including more dynamic cutscenes, significant art upgrades, and some lore tweaks to bring WC3 and TFT more into line with later lore established by World of Warcraft.
It was, in short, a very different type of project than what Blizzard had announced with Starcraft, but it seemed like the team had some really good ideas for how to modernize an 18-year-old game.
But Blizzard ultimately didn’t go that route. Instead, the company opted for a minimal facelift on the original game. To see the difference, check out the original trailer released for The Culling, a critical scene in Warcraft 3:
Now, check out the video that’s actually in the game.
The dynamism of the camera is a fraction of what it was, and the overall level of improvement in the scene seems lower. The visual updates aren’t bad, Kotaku reports, tbut they really don’t matter much when you’re practically zoomed out the way you need to be to play the game. Unit animations also still apparently run at 30fps, regardless of game frame rate.
The lack of any real “update” to what was originally billed as a more dramatic overhaul is only part of the problem. With Reforged, Blizzard decided to fuse the clients for Reforged and Warcraft 3 Classic. As a result, a heck of a lot of fundamental functionality just got removed from WC3, even for players who don’t even own Reforged. You can switch between Classic and Reforged graphics in the options menu, but since they use the same client, WC3 owners can’t access the other functions they used to have.
This is a bit like a WoW expansion in reverse. When Blizzard updates WoW for another expansion, everyone gets the same changes, including people who don’t buy the new content. Warcraft 3 Classic had competitive ladders. Reforged doesn’t. So now, WC3 doesn’t have ladders, either.
If you want to submit a map to Battle.net, you’re now required to give all rights to Blizzard in order to do so. The company’s new rights policy regarding custom games states:
Custom Games are and shall remain the sole and exclusive property of Blizzard. Without limiting the foregoing, you hereby assign to Blizzard all of your rights, title, and interest in and to all Custom Games, including but not limited to any copyrights in the content of any Custom Games.
This is to prevent another DOTA 2 from slipping out from under its grasp. Both League of Legends and DOTA 2 descend from Warcraft 3 and its Defense of the Ancients map. Imagine if that custom map had automatically been Blizzard IP from the beginning. (Blizzard certainly has). Blizzard can’t copyright the general concept of a game, but they can claim ownership over all characters, art, lore, and the name of the title. This is entirely different from how the Warcraft 3 Classic community worked.
There are a lot of things people are currently unhappy about, and various people are unhappy about all of them. I don’t blame them. Neither Kotaku nor PC Gamer was overly thrilled with the title as a whole: Kotaku says it “isn’t much of an upgrade,” and PC Gamer notes that in WC3: Reforged, “it’s still 2002.”
I think the difference in fan response comes down to three things: The removal of capabilities in WC3 Classic, effectively breaking that game for a bunch of people who hadn’t decided whether they wanted Reforged, the modding copyright grab, and anger over the changes Blizzard has made to graphics design. There’s a feeling that Blizzard really phoned in the upgrade work after showing off something far more impressive with The Culling back at the beginning of the process. Having established fan expectations that WC3: Reforged would be something new, Blizzard has to deal with having shipped a game that fails to meet expectations in multiple ways while penalizing people who didn’t even buy it. That last point is hard to ignore — a commercially purchased game isn’t supposed to lose major functionality just because a company launches a new iteration of the title.
As for the Battle.net upload policies, I don’t agree with them and never have. I don’t think Blizzard ought to have the legal right to claim complete ownership over a product created with their worldbuilder, any more than I think the authors of rendering and music-authoring software ought to be allowed to claim ownership of the music or 3D art composed inside their product.
I love modding. I’ve written about it on this website more than once. It’s why I’m a PC gamer, first and foremost, and I’ve worked on and led a multi-person modding project that significantly overhauled the balance and difficulty curve of Diablo II early in its life cycle (pre-LoD) in a way I would argue was true to the spirit and design of the title while offering a much more balanced endgame experience.
I am a modder and a Blizzard gamer. When I say I hope the Warcraft III modding scene dies as a result of this land grab, I am being completely and 100 percent sincere. Blizzard can’t assert copyright over the general gameplay/concept of a title, but they can assert copyright claims over the art, name, characters, lore, and art created for a custom mod. They’ve now asserted a unilateral right to do so. The proper response from the modding community, in my personal view, is to completely refuse to engage with Blizzard’s landgrab and to take their talents elsewhere. I’d rather see WC3 modding die than see its IP forcefully “granted” to Blizzard like this.
I don’t like the company Blizzard is becoming. I don’t like it at all.
