Video Gamers Podcast
Changing the Game – Cloud Gaming, Backbone, and the New Era of Play | Gaming Podcast
Tue, 13 May 2025
This week, Ryan and John sit down with Maneet Khaira, founder and CEO of Backbone, for a wide-ranging conversation about the evolution of mobile and cloud gaming. We dig into how the video game industry is shifting—from the rise of Game Pass to cloud-first experiences—and what it means for how, where, and why we play. We also explore how Backbone fits into this movement, what it’s like building a hardware company from the ground up, and how cloud gaming might just change the console wars forever. MORE INFO ON BACKBONE: url: https://backbone.com Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/backbone?igsh=bmx0eWZvZGo3NDY2 Your weekly hit of everything video games—from the Video Gamers Podcast. Thanks to our MYTHIC Supporters: Redletter, Disratory, Ol’ Jake, and Gaius Connect with the show: Support us on Patreon: patreon.com/videogamerspod Join our Gaming Community: https://discord.gg/Dsx2rgEEbz Follow us on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/videogamerspod/ Follow us on X: https://twitter.com/VideoGamersPod Subscribe to us on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@VideoGamersPod?sub_confirmation=1 Visit us on the web: https://videogamerspod.com/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
What inspired Maneet Khaira to create Backbone?
No, I think, first of all, I'm always flattered because as they say, imitation is the highest form of flattery. Like not just the small companies, but large companies take a lot of inspiration from the things that we do in terms of like product innovation. Um, I think that, uh, our view is that like, first of all, this product is so complicated design.
I think it would be much more difficult to pull something like that off. Um, because, you know, I described how we had to make it comfortable in handheld mode. We also had to make it comfortable in wireless mode, right. Where it also has to feel sort of native, uh,
you know, to kind of playing like on a regular game controller independently, which meant that the device weight had to be exactly, we calculated around 200 grams. So if you remove kind of the magnetic parts, it's exactly 199, which means if you couple it with the mass of the phone, it's still a good weight. But if you use it independently, it's not too light and it's not too hefty.
It's like the kind of ideal weight for both modes of gameplay. So you can see how constrained this gets and how much engineering had to happen to like even get it to fit inside something like this.
Well, right. But you've done all that work now. You know, like it's a lot easier to reverse engineer something, you know, like for me, it would be, I'm, I'm like, I'm a dummy. I, you know, I didn't know what the Z whatever thing you, the Z dimension you guys were talking about. But I feel like I could have a much better go at copying this thing than I could at creating it initially.
You know, you would think so, but still, I mean, because it's finessed down to like the sub-millimeter level.
Just tell me I'm really smart, Meneath.
You didn't even know Z-axis. What are you talking about? Shut up, Ryan.
Yes, I think I say it's it's there's still a lot of complexity to it because you know You have to like down to a sub millimeter level like even if you change the ergonomics in a very slight way It'll feel different right like that's how much gamers care about this stuff Oh, yeah controllers are especially hard to copy for this reason like you you can buy lots of controllers that look like an Xbox controller online But they don't feel as good as what Microsoft created right and it's the same principle here
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