Nilay Patel

but it's always worth pointing out again, the Apple services revenue is not severance.

It's not Ted Lasso.

It's 30% of in-app purchases in games.

Like by far the biggest chunk of Apple's fast growing services revenue is in-app purchases in games.

And they are never going to give that up unless literally the governments of the world demand that they give it up.

If you can buy King and you get Candy Crush and then you can lawyer your way into immediate 30% margin growth, like that's a good play.

It just seems like they couldn't pull it off.

We've talked about Phil as the CEO of Microsoft Gaming, and it's easy and tempting to collapse that to just the Xbox.

We've talked about how it's important now, especially that the Activision deal is closed, that they run a bunch of mobile games too.

They're making some money in mobile.

It's hard to know how much.

Right next to that is Windows Gaming.

And maybe now the rampocalypse means there won't be gaming PCs anymore.

And the idea that NVIDIA is going to sell every GPU in the world to Sam Altman means there won't be gaming PCs anymore.

But that was more than a flicker during all of this.

People buying gaming PCs, playing Windows games, eventually buying Steam Decks.

Just our own audience, every time we covered a Steam Deck or something that looked like a Steam Deck, we could tell people really liked these things.

Why did they ignore that opportunity?

Because it seems like it was right there for them the entire time.

We have to take another quick break.