Windows Insider Epi.21 Transcript
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Windows Insider Podcast Ep 21: Gaming (Are You Not Entertained?!) (Music) JASON HOWARD: Welcome to the Windows Insider Podcast where leaders from Microsoft and Windows Insiders discuss tech trends, careers, and innovation. I'm your host Jason Howard. This is Episode 21, Gaming (ARE YOU NOT ENTERTAINED!?) Today, we're talking about innovations in gaming with some great special guests from Microsoft's Mixer and Xbox teams. But first, if you're not yet a Windows Insider, head over to Windows Insiders’ website, insider.windows.com, and register for free. Insiders get access to upcoming Windows features before they're released to the public, plus exclusive opportunities to experience all Microsoft has to offer. All right, on to the show. So, for our listeners who may be uninitiated, Mixer is Microsoft's live streaming platform that lets viewers actually participate in gameplay. Through interactive features, viewers can give player boosts, participate in challenges, earn rewards, and do tons of other cool stuff. You can also use Mixer to broadcast to your own community. Our very own Windows Insider webcasts are all done through this platform as well. And with that, I'm very excited to welcome our first special guest for the episode, Tara Voelker. Tara, thanks for being here. Can you please introduce yourself to our audience and share what you do here at Microsoft? TARA VOELKER: Yeah, thank you so much. I'm excited to be here. So, I am a program manager at Mixer and I'm also part of our G4E program – Gaming for Everyone – as the Xbox gaming and disabilities community lead. And I do a lot of work with both, helping define what we're going to be working on at Mixer and helping get that shipped, to making sure that Xbox is a better place for people with disabilities, and making sure that we make things for gamers with disabilities as well. JASON HOWARD: Awesome. So, obviously, we're going to touch a bit here on your work with accessibility. It's a huge priority for Microsoft, right? We're constantly talking about it in the news and all that we do with Windows, right? Even we had a past episode that was focused quite extensively on accessibility. We had Jenny Lay-Flurrie in the studio, super awesome getting to speak with her. She's, like, been this giant champion of this entire effort for the company, so it's always awesome to see her out there, like, making waves and making news and, you know, kind of driving this whole effort forward. But real quick, before we kind of jump into that side of things, it's Mixer's two-year anniversary. So, you know, congratulations. TARA VOELKER: Thank you. It was really, really exciting. I got to be here for both the first, the first birthday and second birthday, and it's been really amazing seeing how much we've grown not just in terms of like people using Mixer or stuff like that, but even as a team, it's been amazing. It was really, really exciting. JASON HOWARD: Yeah, the team has definitely grown and changed over the course of – TARA VOELKER: It's massive. When I first started, like, I – like I knew everyone and we were all, like, squished in the same corner of the first floor of Studio D. And, like, now we're dominating the third floor. And there are people, like, we have new people every month. And I'm like, I have no idea who you are, I don't even know what team you're on. I've got like new friends to make, and then especially right now, we have all the interns because it's intern season. JASON HOWARD: Yeah. TARA VOELKER: But we do have some returning interns, which made me really excited because that meant that we made such a good impression, they decided to come back. So – JASON HOWARD: Yeah, if they want to come hang out again, you're doing something right. TARA VOELKER: Exactly. JASON HOWARD: Yeah, so, you know, as we noted, like, the entire platform is growing extremely fast, and viewership of gaming of any sort, right, on the whole, it's like – it's getting gigantic, right? For everything from Minecraft, to Fortnite, to any other number of games and things that you can think of people are doing on there. I mean, like, as I mentioned earlier, we do the Windows Insider webcast on Mixer, right? So, we're not in the same cycle as a bunch of people, because a lot of streamers, they do it on a daily basis or multiple times a week or whatnot, and like we're over here once a month. So I feel like we're kind of slacking a little bit, but hey, you know, we'll do what we can do. But, really, like, recently there was a forecast that by 2022, so you know, a quick, you know, two and a half, three years from now, there's going to be 300 million people viewing games online that others are streaming. So, looking at the trend, right, from kind of where it started a few years back and kind of where it's obviously going, right, can you talk a little bit about the trend, like, what Mixer sees itself doing in this space, especially as you all continue to evolve game play and viewership overall? TARA VOELKER: Yeah, so it's been really interesting thinking about how watching people play games has been growing, because I think for a long time, people thought of this as like a weird concept, like, oh, my God, you're watching someone else play games instead of playing yourself? But how many of us, like, I know when I was a child, like, me and my siblings, we only had one TV that we were going to get to play video games on, which meant only one person was playing. That meant the rest of us were watching anyway. So, I think that's something that a lot of us have been doing since we were younger, and it's like this weird, like, we're like the old people that were, like, "I don't know this newfangled technology." (Laughter.) Right? So, but it was about, like, everyone kind of had these, like, groups and communities that they were forming watching video games has already – always been a thing and with Mixer, we basically really pride ourselves in helping streamers create those communities, because so often it's more than just watching a video game. It's about having interactions with other people, or friends, or sometimes there's just a game you can't play yourself for whatever reason. Maybe you don't have the money to buy it. Maybe you don't have the time. Maybe there's an accessibility barrier. And so, it's another way for you to experience gaming. And I think for a lot of people, it's really common to even have it just like a second monitor work thing, right? Like, oh, I'm going to be working, but you know what? I'm so into gaming that I need that constant fix, and you can have it up. So, it's been really interesting seeing, like, these different communities grow and really what we want to do at Mixer is like, empower people to have those awesome communities. JASON HOWARD: I may or may not be guilty of doing that very exact thing of work and looking through, you know, Visual Studio, or it's Azure DevOps now, of, you know, looking through bugs and, you know, catching up on some of my backlog. And there may be something else on a second or third monitor at my desk, you know, but you know, I don't want to get myself into trouble here. TARA VOELKER: Well, look, some gamers just have like amazing music, like, I will be 100 percent honest, anytime I find anyone streaming Animal Crossing, I love the Animal Crossing music so much (laughter) that I will put the stream up. I also have, like, an Animal Crossing music extension in, like, my browser and all that other jazz. But, like, there are certain games that even just the ambience can help you work. So, that's how you have to sell it. You're not in trouble, you're being stimulated. JASON HOWARD: So, it's really no different at that point than listening to, like, Spotify or Pandora or any other streaming services kind of in the background while you're kind of clacking away on the keyboard? TARA VOELKER: Exactly. Exactly. JASON HOWARD: And so, and something I want – I do want to say something about. You mentioned earlier about, you know, how is it that you can sit there and watch somebody else play games? Right? And so the best analogy that I've come up with this, because I've actually had this exact conversation with some other people, you know, that don't work at Microsoft, is do you ever watch home improvement shows on TV? Like, on HGTV, which is Home and Garden Television here in the U.S. And, I'm, like, yeah, be, like – and so why do you watch those shows? Well, because I get to see some of the process, and they're picking out colors, and it's kind of cool and I'm learning stuff. And be, like, you realize you're just watching somebody else build a house now, right? Oh.