Category: UNCATEGORIZED

The Vera autonomous, electric truck from Volvo’s trucking subsidiary is not what you might expect in a transport truck – it looks like a road-hugging sportscar, something emphasized by its lack of a place for humans to sit. The real reason it looks like this is that it’s totally self-driving, however – and tailor-made for use in specific situations like serving the Swedish port in Gothenburg where it’ll soon begin operations.

Vera’s inaugural job will be to move goods packed in cargo trailers from a logistics center the actual port terminal, where it’ll be ready to loaded onto boats for transport. This first commercial use of the connected, electric freight moving vehicle will be done in partnership with logistics company DFDS.

Use of the Vera will make up one part of a larger connected system to move goods from the logistics center to distribution destinations around the world. They’ll operate autonomous but be monitored by a central operator working out of a control tower, and they’ll be operating at a top speed of only around 24 mph.

These are basically just heavy-duty land tugs for now, but if successful, there’s a lot of potential business to be had in providing similar services for shipping port facilities around the world.

This year’s E3 was a bit of a mixed bag. Sony was completely absent, Microsoft was looking toward the future and Nintendo, as ever, was all about the games. The show came at an odd time in Nintendo’s release cycle.

The company recently spilled all the details about soon-to-be-released titles Mario Maker 2 and Pokémon Sword and Shield, making Animal Crossing: New Horizons and Luigi’s Mansion 3 the foundations of the company’s big Nintendo Direct unveil on Tuesday morning.

The long-awaited Animal Crossing title, sadly, came with the caveat that players are going to have to wait until even longer (2020), but the company had plenty of playable titles at the show, including the Link’s Awakening remaster and the aforementioned Luigi sequel. That featured arguably was the surprise hit of the show, Gooigi — which, as the portmanteau suggests, is indeed a gooey version of Luigi.

Absent during the event were any new hardware announcements and any new news on the fourth Metroid Prime. The company did, however, have a major surprise up its sleeve in the form of a teaser trailer for an unnamed sequel for The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild.

We sat down with Nintendo’s Senior Director, Corporate Communications Charlie Scibetta following the big unveils to discuss the company’s take on streaming, mobile and what things look like following the departure of Reggie Fils-Aimé.

TC: I wanted to start off by talking about some broader trends. Microsoft, Sony and even Apple see streaming as being the future of gaming. Where does Nintendo come down on that, from both the point of potential hardware agnosticism and subscribing versus buying?

CS: Streaming is certainly interesting technology. Nintendo is keeping a close eye on it and we’re evaluating it. We don’t have anything to announce right now in terms of adopting that technology. For us, it’s still physical and it’s digital downloads through our eShop. Certainly a lot of downloadable content to keep the games fresh, but in terms of streaming as a way to run the games, we don’t have anything to announce on that front.

TC: Hardware’s always been a big differentiator for Nintendo. Do you think we’re moving toward a point of hardware agnosticism? Or is hardware going to be a major differentiator for Nintendo?

CS: Well, we think our games really come to life best on our hardware because our software and hardware developers work closely together to make the best performing game based off the way to bring that software to life. You go back to the Wii, for example, the way it brought tennis and bowling to life was with motion control. That really worked well for that, it was a launch title that came with every system that really sold the system because you understood the value proposition right away. Just even by walking by somebody that was playing that you understood it, and we think we caught lightening in a bottle the same way with Nintendo Switch because it’s a whole console you can play at home, enjoy on a big screen TV, and then you can take it with you.

And the market has responded. As of the end of our fiscal year which, ended in March 2019, we sold over 34 million units worldwide. Fourteen million in North America. People are buying the software. This past fiscal year extended over 70% more software than the previous year, over 23% more hardware. So, people are buying the games to play on the system. And a show like this, at E3, is all about showcasing the games that are going to power that system. So for us, it’s about unveiling games and getting people to interact with the games. They’re going to have a good time on the system.

TC: Obviously the line has softened a little bit on Nintendo’s stance when it comes to mobile. The company had taken a very hard line against that of only offering gaming experiences on first party hardware. How important is mobile? How important are iOS and Android, to Nintendo’s play going forward?

CS: Mobile is very important to Nintendo. You’re right that we did not participate with mobile gaming for a lot of years, but we have jumped in headfirst now and are bringing a lot of our most valuable IP to mobile — Mario Kart being the one that’s upcoming. And what we like about it is, as I was talking about with the combination of the hardware and the software, we only bring the software to mobile that we think you can really play well on a mobile device with the control speed that a phone offers, so not every single IP is appropriate. The ones that have come out are the ones that our developers have determined are appropriate for that. So people can have a good time with our IP on a mobile device.

TC: Sony’s absence looms large on the show. It’s shifted some focus and the spatial dynamic in this hall. Nintendo obviously made a shift into Direct and Treehouse, so all of the content is being fed to the general public, and us as well. How important are shows like this for Nintendo?

CS: We’ve been to many E3s. We’re a supporter of the show. We think it’s a great way for us to interact with people, like yourself, journalists, influencers who make YouTube videos, retail partners and, most importantly, most recently, with consumers. We like seeing the reactions of consumers to our games in the booth. We do interviews here and try to bring those game to life by explaining more; the Treehouse Live approach is nice because we do a Nintendo Direct the morning on the first day. Then, we go deeper on those games with people that are interested in those with our experts and with developers.

We think it’s a great way to showcase, not only our offerings and what the industry is as a whole. We’re part of the industry, so we support the show. Other companies have to make their own decisions based on what’s right for them, but for us, we like E3. We think it does a great job of helping connect us with the consumers and the people that cover the industry so they can learn about the products.

TC: Doug [Bowser] took over for Reggie [Fils-Aimé]. Any time that happens, even with a really large company, it tends to be a good opportunity to reassess things, rethink things, look at the broader context. Do you see there being any change in direction or a reassessment of the role that Nintendo is playing in the industry at the moment?

CS: Reggie was a great leader for us for a lot of years. We wish him well and he’s still a fan, in his own words. He said he’ll always be a Nintendo fan, so he’s always going to be with us. Doug is an industry veteran himself and he’d been with many companies and he’s been at Nintendo for over four years, so he’s well-grounded in the way that we do marketing. I would say that thing that hasn’t changed is that we’re a product-first company. We always like to bring our messages back to what is the game about, how does it make you feel, what is the emotion we want to generate with that game, and so Doug is really carrying on the legacy of Reggie and others that went before him.

TC: There have been a lot of rumors about a Switch Lite and Pro, having the devoted portable, and things of that nature. Does it make sense to have a Switch that is purely portable? How integral is that hybrid experience? And are we getting close to or approaching that point of the life cycle when it’s time to start thinking about new versions of the hardware?

CS: We have nothing to announce at this show in terms of new hardware. We do have over 2,000 games available right now. So we think as long as we have great games to power, the system is going to have a good life. Our developers will have to make the decision when they think that it’s time for new hardware to bring whatever their creative ideas are to life. That’s really what drives the decision on when it’s time for new hardware. Is there something that can’t be done for their creative vision with the current hardware?

Then they take it in a different direction. In the case of the Nintendo Switch, obviously we have the Wii U and our developers wanted to start thinking of gaming in a different direction where you can take it on the go, any time, or you can play at home. So, that’s why the Nintendo Switch was created. That’s why they married the software and the hardware that way. There’s nothing to announce in terms of where we want to go for the future, because right now, what we have on our hands is working really well.

TC: What happened specifically with Animal Crossing? Clearly no one’s really psyched when a game gets delayed. Is there any kind of info you can give, just in terms of why it’s being pushed back to 2020?

CS: We’re not going to put a game out before we think it’s ready to be enjoyed by fans. In the case of a franchise, like Animal Crossing, that has so many loyal fans, we’d be doing them a disservice if we put out a product that was rushed. So it’s a difficult decision for a company to make to move a ship date out. We think moving to March 20 of next year was the right decision, because we needed to give the development team enough time to make it the game we want to make. So, that’s been the Nintendo approach from the beginning and it’s something that we’re going to continue to do. We’re not going to rush a game out until it’s ready because we want to keep that quality bar high.

TC: Metroid [Prime 4] was kind of conspicuously absent. Is there any update on that end?

CS: It’s in the hands of Retro now; they certainly have a historic history with that franchise. They do a great job with it and we’re looking forward to what they do with this version of it. But there’s nothing new in terms of any ship date or any details about the game.

If you follow space news at all, you may have heard of ‘Bennu’ – the near-Earth asteroid that has a slim (but higher than most) chance of colliding with our planet sometime nearly 200 years from now. The asteroid is notable for many reasons, including the recent discovery that it’s actually also “active,” which means that it’s been spewing dust and gravel into the surrounding space as it continuous along its path.

That discovery is what prompted NASA to reduce the distance at which its OSIRIS-REx probe orbits the spacefaring rock. The probe arrived at Bennu late last year to observe the asteroid after a selection process determined which of the known near-Earth ones would be the best candidate for a research mission.

NASA’s probe is now just over 3,000 feet above the centre mass of Bennu, which is closer than your average military attack helicopters fly at cruising distance above Earth, as NASA helpfully points out in the illustrative graphic below.

The mission refers to this orbit as the ‘Orbital B’ phase, and it’s a record not just for Bennu, but also stands as the closes a spacecraft has ever orbited any extraterrestrial body anywhere in the solar system. It’ll remain in this orbit until mid-August, and it’ll focus the next few weeks on photographing the asteroid’s surface regularly to study the dust and gravel ejection mentioned above.

The Toronto Raptors won the 2019 NBA Championship last night, which is probably not news to you if you’re A) Canadian (like me) or B) a basketball fan. But unless you’ve starting your Friday off shopping for Apple gear on their Canadian website, you might not have noticed this subtle ‘Easter Egg.’

If you go to https://apple.com/ca, which is the Canadian localized version of Apple’s home page, you’ll be greeted by a fleeting animation that pushes down from the top of the screen and lasts only a moment – at first I was confused and only half-paying attention so I figured it was some kind of weird Father’s Day promotion.

Then I reloaded and watched again and noticed that the animation was actually made up of swirling dinosaur, Canadian flag and basketball emojis. Because I’m super smart, it only took me about 15 more minutes to put all the pieces together with last night’s NBA Championship final and the basketball team that calls my city home.

Anyways, it’s fun, and probably done with the approval of headquarters in Cupertino – though there’s likely a fair number of Golden State fans there who aren’t thrilled at the reminder of who took home the win.

Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast, where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines.

This week was a lot of fun. We had Kate and Alex in the studio with Chris running the show and reminding half the recording team about English words (immersive, as a spoiler).

This week had a lot to go over. First, Kate went to the Recode + Vox Code Conference in Scottsdale, Arizona where it was very, very hot. She tells us her key takeaways of the event (here’s another spoiler: techlash).

Next, we turned to acquisitions, namely that Fortnite (Epic Games) bought Houseparty (formerly Meerkat, remember that?). Fornite is a cultural sensation that has become just as much a social phenom as it is a gaming powerhouse. Bringing Houseparty’s multi-party and popular-with-the-youth video chat product under its umbrella makes some sense. That Houseparty’s usage growth had reportedly stalled, we’re sure, had nothing to do with the sale.

Moving on, we chatted briefly about the Bird-Scoot deal which we had touched on last week. (Kate wrote about it here and Alex here). Scoot, as it turns out, was having a not-so-easy time raising additional venture capital and sold to Bird for less than $25 million (way under its last valuation of $71 million). Ouch.

From there it was deal city (BetterUp! Tenderd! Others!) before we jumped into the CrowdStrike news. The firm’s IPO is hot (more here, and here), which led to questions about IPO pricing (again. Sorry, we can’t stop) and whether IPO pops are good or bad (yes, this again, too, but it’s worth discussing).

Two topics followed. The success of the Fiverr IPO (and what that means for growth-y IPOs), and the impending Chewy debut + dual-class shares as a concept.

We’ve touched on dual-class stock structures before, but we think there is a lot more to unpack here and unpack we did! Basically, we think Silicon Valley’s founder fetish, as the headline here suggests, infantilizes public companies. Listen to the whole episode to hear our full rant.

All that and we had a lot of fun. Alex is out for a few weeks, but Kate has a bunch of great things coming down the podcast pike. Chat with you all next week!

Tech DIY takes a soft touch toward teaching electronics—literally. Now on Kickstarter, the kit uses sewing to teach kids and adult beginners about electronic and electric circuits by sewing dolls, soft figures and bracelets that light up, move and make noises.

Tech DIY was created by Ji Sun Lee and Jaymes Dec, the authors of “Tech DIY, Easy Electronics Projects for Parents and Kids,” published in 2016 by Maker Media. While working on her master’s thesis and thinking of ways to close the gender gap in technology, Lee began exploring the idea of using textile crafts to teach electronics for her master’s thesis.

Dec is a fab lab teacher at a girls’ private school, while Lee is a professor at a women’s college in Korea. “I also worked in the IT industry for many years, where it had very few women employees. Although both of us teach technology, we feel that the educational content created for female users is minimal and marginalized,” Lee said.

Lee and Dec decided to use sewing for their projects since many women and girls are already familiar with textile crafts. There are already kits that combine electronics with textiles, like Lily Pad and Adafruit’s Flora, which both use Arduino, but the programming required for their micro-controllers is too complicated for most novices, Lee said. Tech DIY’s kits are designed for elementary and middle school students, as well as adult beginners. They can be built with basic sewing skills and the projects increase in complexity, allowing new makers to level up.

Two kits are available for Kickstarter backers. The Joy Kit contains five projects, including an embroidery sampler called My Happy House that teaches about electricity, circuits and basic electronic components, and the Purring Elephant, a pillow that uses a motor to move and vibrate. The Awesome Kit is for more experienced makers and includes components for projects like the Nightlight Cat Bracelet, which uses a light sensor and transistor to light up in the dark, and the Solar Sun Project, powered with solar panels instead of batteries. (If you want to see how the projects are put together, check out the instructions for A Silly Ghost, the Nightlight Cat Bracelet and Purring Elephant Bracelet, which are all available for free online.)

The kits include all necessary components for the projects, thick, high-quality felt and what Lee and Dec describe as the “best conductive thread on the planet.”

As of this post, the Kickstarter campaign has reached more than $18,300 of its $30,000 goal, with less than two days left. After the campaign, Lee and Dec plan to make kits available for sale through Etsy. While Maker Media, the publisher of “Tech DIY, Easy Electronics Projects for Parents and Kids,” recently paused operations due to financial issues, the book is still available for purchase as a PDF through Maker Shed or as a Kindle edition or paperback on Amazon.

The world’s largest crypto exchange is going legit. Binance, which processes over $1 billion on a daily basis and for so long has embodied crypto’s wild west culture, announced that it will launch a U.S-based service — but, in the meantime, it is implementing restrictions for U.S. passport holders worldwide and those based in the country.

The company has grown to become one of the biggest names in crypto by allowing anyone to use its service to trade a myriad of tokens, many of which are unavailable or limited on other exchanges. But over the past year, Binance has matured and begin to offer more formalized services. Following fiat currency exchange launches in the UK, Uganda and Singapore, so Binance is opening a dedicated U.S. exchange to avoid uncertainty around its legality.

This week, Binance announced it is pairing up with BAM Trading Services — which Coindesk notes is FinCEN registered and has links to Koi Compliance, which counts Binance as an investor — to launch a U.S. exchange “soon.” That will mean, however a level of disruption for some U.S. customers in the meantime.

Chiefly, Binance will no longer permit U.S. passport holders to sign up its global Binance.com service. That’s according to the company’s updated terms and conditions — “Binance is unable to provide services to any U.S. person” — which were confirmed to TechCrunch by a spokesperson.

Existing users have a grace period of 90 days after which they will be unable to deposit funds to the site or make trades. Binance declined to state whether those bans will be administered by a geo-block on U.S. IP addresses, but it did confirm that U.S. customers will retain access to funds held in the service.

That 90-day period ends September 12, so that’s effectively the deadline for Binance to launch its new U.S. exchange if it is to avoid impacting its American user base.

The reality is that the situation is more nuanced.

U.S-based users could continue to use the service by browsing the site with a VPN. Binance allows its users to sign up for a limited account without KYC — i.e. providing verification documents like a passport copy — which allows trading but limits withdrawals to 2 Bitcoin per day. That won’t satisfy more professional traders — most of whom you’d imagine would already have an account on Binance by now — but it does leave a loophole for others.

Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao insisted that the long-term pay-off will be worth any compromise.

It’s certainly fascinating to watch Binance, which has historically been one of the most aggressive crypto companies, transition into a more regulatory-compliant business. At the same time, those who have been cautious, such as Coinbase, are beginning to add new assets.

In addition to the fiat ramp exchanges, Binance has launched a decentralized exchange and it is adding much-requested features such as margin trading. The company also took an investment from Singapore’s Vertex Ventures, one of a number of sovereign funds in the country, to develop its Binance Singapore service.

It hasn’t been plain sailing — the firm lost $40 million and briefly paused trading last month following a “large scale” hack.

Cao Xudong turned up on the side of the road in jeans and a black T-shirt printed with the word “Momenta,” the name of his startup.

Before founding the company — which last year topped $1 billion in valuation to become China’s first autonomous driving “unicorn” — he’d already led an enviable life, but he was convinced that autonomous driving would be the real big thing.

Cao isn’t just going for the moonshot of fully autonomous vehicles, which he says could be 20 years away. Instead, he’s taking a two-legged approach of selling semi-automated software while investing in research for next-gen self-driving tech.

Cao, pronounced ‘tsao’, was pursuing his Ph.D. in engineering mechanics when an opportunity came up to work at Microsoft’s fundamental research arm in Asia, putatively the “West Point” for China’s first generation of artificial intelligence experts. He held out there for more than four years before quitting to put his hands on something more practical: a startup.

“Academic research for AI was getting quite mature at the time,” said now 33-year-old Cao in an interview with TechCrunch, reflecting on his decision to quit Microsoft. “But the industry that puts AI into application had just begun. I believed the industrial wave would be even more extensive and intense than the academic wave that lasted from 2012 to 2015.”

In 2015, Cao joined SenseTime, now the world’s highest-valued AI startup, thanks in part to the lucrative face-recognition technology it sells to the government. During his 17-month stint, Cao built the company’s research division from zero staff into a 100-people strong team.

Before long, Cao found himself craving for a new adventure again. The founder said he doesn’t care about the result as much as the chance to “do something.” That tendency was already evident during his time at the prestigious Tsinghua University, where he was a member of the outdoors club. He wasn’t particularly drawn to hiking, he said, but the opportunity to embrace challenges and be with similarly resilient, daring people was enticing enough.

And if making driverless vehicles would allow him to leave a mark in the world, he’s all in for that.

Make the computer, not the car

Cao walked me up to a car outfitted with the cameras and radars you might spot on an autonomous vehicle, with unseen computer codes installed in the trunk. We hopped in. Our driver picked a route from the high-definition map that Momenta had built, and as soon as we approached the highway, the autonomous mode switched on by itself. The sensors then started feeding real-time data about the surroundings into the map, with which the computer could make decisions on the road.

Momenta won’t make cars or hardware, Cao assured. Rather, it gives cars autonomous features by making their brains, or deep-learning capacities. It’s in effect a so-called Tier 2 supplier, akin to Intel’s Mobileye, that sells to Tier 1 suppliers who actually produce the automotive parts. It also sells directly to original equipment manufacturers (OMEs) that design cars, order parts from suppliers and assemble the final product. Under both circumstances, Momenta works with clients to specify the final piece of software.

Momenta believes this asset-light approach would allow it to develop state-of-the-art driving tech. By selling software to car and parts makers, it not only brings in income but also sources mountains of data, including how and when humans intervene, to train its codes at relatively low costs.

The company declined to share who its clients are but said they include top carmakers and Tier 1 suppliers in China and overseas. There won’t be many of them because a “partnership” in the auto sector demands deep, resource-intensive collaboration, so less is believed to be more. What we do know is Momenta counts Daimler AG as a backer. It’s also the first Chinese startup that the Mercedes-Benz parent had ever invested in, though Cao would not disclose whether Daimler is a client.

“Say you operate 10,000 autonomous cars to reap data. That could easily cost you $1 billion a year. 100,000 cars would cost $10 billion, which is a terrifying number for any tech giant,” Cao said. “If you want to acquire seas of data that have a meaningful reach, you have to build a product for the mass market.”

Highway Pilot, the semi-autonomous solution that was controlling our car, is Momenta’s first mass-produced software. More will launch in the coming seasons, including a fully autonomous parking solution and a self-driving robotaxi package for urban use.

In the long run, the startup said it aims to tackle inefficiencies in China’s $44 billion logistics market. People hear about warehousing robots built by Alibaba and JD.com, but overall, China is still on the lower end of logistics efficiency. In 2018, logistics costs accounted for nearly 15 percent of national gross domestic product. In the same year, the World Bank ranked China 26th in its logistics performance index, a global benchmark for efficiency in the industry.

Cao, an unassuming CEO, raised his voice as explained the company’s two-legged strategy. The twin approach forms a “closed loop,” a term that Cao repeatedly summoned to talk about the company’s competitive edge. Instead of picking between the presence and future, as Waymo does with Level 4 — a designation given to cars that can operate under basic situations without human intervention — and Tesla with half-autonomous driving, Momenta works on both. It uses revenue-generating businesses like Highway Pilot to fund research in robotaxis, and the sensor data collected from real-life scenarios to feed models in the lab. Results from the lab, in turn, could soup up what gets deployed on public roads.

Human or machine

During the 40-minute ride in midday traffic, our car was able to change lanes, merge into traffic, create distance from reckless drivers by itself except for one brief moment. Toward the end of the trip, our driver decided to grab the wheel for a lane change as we approached a car dangerously parked in the middle of the exit ramp. Momenta names this an “interactive lane change,” which it claims is designed to be part of its automated system and by its strict definition is not a human “intervention”.

“Human-car interaction will continue to dominate for a long time, perhaps for another 20 years,” Cao noted, adding the setup brings safety to the next level because the car knows exactly what the driver is doing through its inner-cabin cameras.

“For example, if the driver is looking down at their cellphone, the [Momenta] system will alert them to pay attention,” he said.

I wasn’t allowed to film during the ride, so here’s some footage from Momenta to give a sneak peek of its highway solution.

Human beings are already further along the autonomous spectrum than many of us think. Cao, like a lot of other AI scientists, believes robots will eventually take over the wheel. Alphabet-owned Waymo has been running robotaxis in Arizona for several months now, and smaller startups like Drive.ai are also offering a similar service in Texas.

Despite all the hype and boom in the industry, there remains thorny questions around passenger safety, regulatory schema and a host of other issues for the fast-moving tech. Uber’s fatal self-driving crash last year delayed the company’s future projects and prompted a public backlash. As a Shanghai-based venture capitalist recently suggested to me: “I don’t think humanity is ready for self-driving.”

The biggest problem of the industry, he argued, is not tech-related but social. “Self-driving poses challenges to society’s legal system, culture, ethics and justice.”

Cao is well aware of the contention. He acknowledged that as a company with the power to steer future cars, Momenta has to “bear a lot of responsibility for safety.” As such, he required all executives in the company to ride a certain number of autonomous miles so if there’s any loophole in the system, the managers will likely stumble across it before the customers do.

“With this policy in place, the management will pay serious attention to system safety,” Cao asserted.

In terms of actually designing the software to be reliable and to trace accountability, Momenta appoints an “architect of system research and development,” who essentially is in charge of analyzing the black box of autonomous driving algorithms. A deep learning model has to be “explainable,” said Cao, which is key to finding out what went wrong: Is it the sensor, the computer, or the navigation app that’s not working?

Going forward, Cao said the company is in no rush to make a profit as it is still spending heavily on R&D, but he assured that margins of the software it sells “are high.” The startup is also blessed with sizable fundings, which Cao’s resume certainly helped attract, and so did his other co-founders Ren Shaoqing and Xia Yan, who were also alumni of Microsoft Research Asia.

As of last October, Momenta had raised at least $200 million from big-name investors including GGV Capital, Sequoia Capital, Hillhouse Capital, Kai-Fu Lee’s Sinovation Ventures, Lei Jun’s Shunwei Capital, electric vehicle maker NIO’s investment arm, WeChat operator Tencent and the government of Suzhou, which will house Momenta’s new 4,000 sq-meter headquarters right next to the city’s high-speed trail station.

When a bullet train speeds past Suzhou, passengers are able to see from their windows Momenta’s recognizable M-shape building, which, in the years to come, might become a new landmark of the historic city in eastern China.

Game streaming loomed large as the biggest story of E3. Between Google’s Stadia news late last week, Microsoft’s Game Pass additions, a Ubisoft announcement and even the presence of Netflix, the writing is clearly on the wall.

Nintendo, of course, has largely been absent from that conversation. No real surprise, really. The gaming company has always marched to the beat of its own drum, bucking larger industry trends in favor of its own singular vision. The approach has sometimes been to its determent (as is the case with its longtime heel-dragging on mobile), but has largely resulted in a number of the industry’s most beloved platforms, titles and IP.

Given the company’s rich and storied gaming history, a Netflix-style approach to content makes a lot of sense for a company like Nintendo. And certainly, the notion of paying $10 a month for access to 30 years of Mario, Zelda and the like doesn’t seem like much of a stretch. Though for Nintendo, much of the calculation no doubt comes down to whether or not gamers are willing to continue to pay for downloads.

In an interview with TechCrunch this week on the show floor, Nintendo of America executive Charlie Scibetta said that the concept is one the company has been considering. “Streaming is certainly interesting technology,” he told TechCrunch. “Nintendo is keeping a close eye on it and we’re evaluating it. We don’t have anything to announce right now in terms of adopting that technology. For us, it’s still physical and it’s digital downloads through our Eshop.”

The sentiment echos similar statements made by new Nintendo of America chief Doug Bowser, who told The Hollywood Reporter, “We’re always interested in how various new technologies can enable different ways to play games.”