Back by Popular Demand—Dolby's Tullis on Games
Dolby Podcast Episode 50 - October 23, 2008
Matt Tullis, Senior Manager in the Games group at Dolby, updates us on what's hot in video gaming right now. In this episode, Matt shares:
- the video games he likes – just in time for the Christmas shopping season,
- ways to play video games online – different types of online gaming (via a game console, MMORPGs, MMOFPS…) and how game developers manage all those people, and
- surround sound headsets – headphone and microphone in one unit – with Dolby Headphone technology that make online game play more realistic.
Plus, get one great, quick home theater fix-it tip from Craig.
Mentioned in this Episode
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Craig Eggers: Streaming to you from our headquarters in San Francisco, this is Dolbycast, the insider's guide to entertainment technologies from the experts at Dolby Laboratories. We're here to give you the straight talk and news on everything you need to know about technologies that excite your eyes and ears.
Welcome back to Dolbycast, your source for all things audio and video. It was a very interesting weekend at my house. I was watching my television set in my theater system upstairs, and I was switching between my Blu‑ray player and my Comcast [cable TV –ed.] box. All of a sudden I lost the picture on my television set, which was very interesting.
So I tried all my different sources, no picture. Pressed the menu button on my set, and 'voila', I get a menu screen from the television set, but none of my sources would actually come through the display device itself.
So I used an old trick, in this CE business, and that is to unplug the device. Left it unplugged for about 10 minutes, plugged the TV set back in, and guess what? Everything worked.
So for you enthusiasts out there, before you call the service person, unplug that device, plug it back in, see if it doesn't work. It's an old CE trick, and it continues to work, even to this day.
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Video games today are increasingly becoming part of the multichannel high definition audio and video experience. You've got high definition video on PS3, PC, and Xbox 360. The fact is that more than 50% of gamers out there are now connected to a multichannel audio system, and games just aren't for teens anymore. The fact is the gaming population is growing greater and greater as a lot of gamers that played 10, 15, 20 years ago, still make that part of their entertainment experience today.
Well, to talk about games, we thought we would bring back a real expert about games and the gaming business. Mr. Matt Tullis who is the Senior Manager of the Games Marketing Segment of Dolby is here to join us. Matt is here to update us on some of the new things that are happening in the gaming world, and with the holidays upon us, it's a great time to have you back. Matt, welcome back to Dolbycast!
Matt Tullis: Hey Craig, thanks for having me here.
Craig: Hey, so Matt, talk about some of the cool things that are happening in the games business right now.
Matt: Well, I mean coming into the holidays we've got a lot of good stuff to look forward to. Real quick, I just wanted to say that having to turn your system off and back on to get it to work is definitely occurs in the game space as well.
Craig: And you've done that?
Matt: Yeah, many times, many times.
Craig: Cool!
Matt: Occasionally, the console will freeze or hang, and so then you'll have to boot it down and then boot it back up.
Craig: Works all the time, doesn't it?
Matt: It does, it does.
Craig: Cool! So tell us about some of the new holiday games, because I understand there's a great bunch of games coming up.
Matt: Yeah, so there are big things for all the consoles and the PC this year. The PlayStation 3 has got a pretty stellar lineup. LittleBIGPlanet has made a lot of headlines recently. That game is coming out soon, and it's going to be a real fun, cooperative online game play. They're kind of bringing in new types of game play, where you can create your game as you're playing it, in essence.
Craig: Wow, interesting.
Matt: Yeah, it's pretty cool! In addition to that Sony is kind of expanding their user base again with Sony's "Home", which is a virtual world for PlayStation 3 consoles. So I think some of our users have heard of Second Life or some of these other virtual worlds. So, Sony's bringing that right into the PlayStation 3.
Craig: So, our old friend Jack Buser is involved with that, isn't he?
Matt: Yeah, so Jack Buser's the Director of Home at Sony, here in North America.
Craig: Cool!
Matt: So, yeah. In addition to that, the PlayStation 3, they have a couple other big exclusives coming out SOCOM [U.S. Navy SEALs] Confrontation and MotorStorm Pacific Rift. So, those are two other games that are Sony specific that are coming up.
Craig: MotorStorm, what's that about?
Matt: So that's a racing game, a racing game moving off‑road style racing, but it gets a little violent, a little aggressive.
Craig: [laughs] Cool!
Matt: So yeah, in addition to the PlayStation 3, the Xbox 360 also has a big holiday season ahead of them. They've brought in a new "Xbox Live Experience" they're kind of pushing right now. They have avatars that you can create for your player, similar to how Nintendo does it with the Miis on their system. You can create this own personalized avatar, and that can be your online representation as you play online with other people.
Craig: Interesting.
Matt: Yeah, so then in addition to that Xbox Live Experience, they have Gears of War 2 coming out, which was a massive hit for them the first time, and it's probably going to be just as popular this time.
In addition to that, then we've got Left 4 Dead and Fable II that are also some big games coming out.
Craig: Left 4 Dead. [laughs]
Matt: Left 4 Dead, that's coming from Valve actually.
Craig: Yeah.
Matt: Valve's the company that made Half‑Life originally, and they make some great games. They have a first‑person shooter called Left 4 Dead.
Craig: Interesting.
Matt: Yeah, it focuses on cooperative players, so it's all about four players playing together.
Craig: Oh, really?
Matt: Yeah, and really if you don't play with the people, then you're going to be Left 4 Dead.
Craig: Now when you're playing with the people, are you playing on your console in your house, or is this an online thing?
Matt: It can be both, right? So you can play on the couch right next to your buddies and play four players there, or you can play online. It's really focusing on the cooperative aspects.
Craig: Cool!
Matt: So moving on to the Wii, they obviously have some exclusives. The Wii Fit has been all the rage lately. It's still sold out at all the stores, so I think that's going to be a big thing for the holiday.
Craig: I haven't gotten mine yet. I think I need to.
Matt: Oh, yeah? [laughs]
Craig: [laughs]
Matt: There's a lot of people out there in America that need to get the Wii Fit. So if you guys haven't heard about it, it's a little balance board in essence, where you can control your player on this balance board, they have you have do different movements and things, that essentially replicate a lot of exercises.
Craig: You know what's interesting about Wii is, not only is it a personal game, it's also a family game, but you're also seeing Wii now being integrated. Senior citizen centers for example, are now starting to use the Wii to encourage fitness, and some of the interactivity that comes with that.
Matt: Yeah, there's a great YouTube video from this one senior citizen center. I think they have four different centers throughout the Southeast, and they actually had a bowling tournament, where they had the different centers all had teams of four people that entered a bowling tournament. They all competed and eventually got down to the championship.
Craig: How cool is that?
Matt: Yeah, it's great, it's great! We're really seeing games really targeted towards people of all ages. I mean, I think that's been the big movement over the past year or two years in games is bringing the whole audience into it.
Craig: How do you get past the addictive side of games though, Matt? I still haven't done that yet.
Matt: I think that happens when you got to go to work the next day.
Craig: [laughs] Yeah, there you go!
Matt: Yeah, so now that we've talked a little about the consoles, I'll talk a little about the PC, and then I'll talk about some of the cross-console games that are coming out in PC.
Craig: OK.
Matt: So, the PC has got a couple big coming out. I think we've all heard of World of Warcraft. It's a massive game. They're releasing their new expansion pack, Wrath of the Lich King, and it's coming out this November. Then another game, interestingly enough called Warhammer Online, a similar style game to World of Warcraft. It's an MMORPG.
Craig: Stop there. What's an MMO and what's MMORPG?
Matt: OK, so MMO is "massively multiplayer online."
Craig: OK, so what does that mean for our listeners?
Matt: So that's a lot of people playing online at once, not just you versus another player or you with 12 players online. I mean, this is you and 1000s of other people.
Craig: The game was actually designed to give a better experience, be more functional when there's more people playing?
Matt: Yes, exactly.
Craig: OK.
Matt: So the idea is that you're in these large, vast worlds, and you're going to compete against all those people or you could, or you could join up and compete with them against other people.
Craig: Cool!
Matt: So yeah, Warhammer Online is another MMORPG. So RPG is "role‑playing game". So you can have MMORPG, you can have an MMOFPS, which is like a first‑person shooter.
Craig: OK.
Matt: So, yeah. So Warhammer Online, a lot of people are excited about it. It just recently launched, and I think they got a few hundred thousand people within just a couple of days. So, I mean there is a lot of people with a lot of excitement about that game.
Craig: Wow, wow!
Matt: Yeah. So some of the cross‑platform titles, these are titles that you'll see on either the majority of the consoles, all the consoles and PC. I mean you'll have to look into these games, but some of the big ones coming up are Fallout 3, which is another RPG [role-playing game –ed.], but not an MMORPG, this is more of a single player game.
Craig: OK.
Matt: In addition, Dead Space, Call of Duty: World at War. So the Call of Duty franchise is a really popular first‑person shooter.
Craig: Yes.
Matt: Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare was one of the best selling hits of last year, and this is the follow up to that, and that's Call of Duty: World at War.
Craig: So again, let's backup just a second. A cross‑platform game, what does that mean?
Matt: So that means that the game comes out for use on the PlayStation 3, the Xbox 360, maybe the Wii and the PC [computer –ed.]. Now usually this doesn't mean you can't play across consoles, right? So you can't play someone…if you're on a PlayStation 3, you can't play someone on the Xbox 360.
Craig: You can't?
Matt: You can't, but there are certain games, there are a handful games now on the Xbox 360 and the PC, where you can actually play across between the PC and the Xbox360.
Craig: Interesting.
Matt: That's just a handful of games, although I think that there's going to be more coming down that way.
One other thing that people should look for this holiday season is, because I know one of your personal favorites is Guitar Hero World Tour, and Rock Band 2 are both coming out.
Craig: Matt.
Matt: Yes?
Craig: As a musician, that is so wrong.
Matt: It's expanding the audience, right?
[laughter]
Matt: Instead of having to spend 12-16 years of your life trying to learn an instrument, you can just pick it up.
Craig: Playing guitar for 8 hours a day, you know, trying to get good.
Matt: Yeah, that's right, but now you can have that same experience, that same fun, in just a couple hours playing Guitar Hero or Rock Band.
Craig: It's just wrong. It's just wrong. You know what's amazing, though? Every time you go into a store, anytime they have got Guitar Hero or, what is it, Rock Band?
Matt: Yep.
Craig: You know, there's a crowd, there's people waiting in line just to get up and sample the game. It's absolutely incredible. It's a big hit, isn't it?
Matt: Yeah, it's awesome. It's for the people out there that are never going to spend that time, maybe they don't have the skills to become the Guitar Hero, but playing the game Guitar Hero at Best Buy, they can live the life. You know, they can have people watching them. They can rock out.
Craig: Go out and buy the leather pants. Rock on.
Matt: It can happen.
Craig: Well listen, we're going to take a quick break and when we come back, I'd like to talk to you about online gaming. We had a discussion about online gaming earlier in an earlier podcast, but you've got some updates for us. So, we'll be right back at Dolbycast.
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Voiceover: This is Dolbycast.
Craig: Hey listeners, got a question for Dolbycast? Contact us at dolbycast@dolby.com, or our new toll free number, 888‑6‑DOLBY‑C.
And we are back at Dolbycast with our very special guest, Mr. Matt Tullis, Senior Manager of the games market segment of Dolby Laboratories. Welcome back, Matt.
Matt: Hey, Craig.
Craig: Hey, I should tell our listeners that we referenced an earlier podcast that you were on. It was way back in August 2nd of 2007, it's been more than a year since you've been here.
Matt: Yeah, it's been a while.
Craig: But anyway, you did a really great job of talking about online gaming. And for our listeners, reference that if you're interested in learning more about online gaming and quite frankly we're going to learn even more today, aren't we, Matt?
Matt: Yeah. So I think at the stage of our last podcast, we talked a little about the PS3 and the 360 and the PC. And at that time there hadn't been any Wii games out online.
Craig: Right.
Matt: So now that the Nintendo Wii is just taking the world by storm. It's the #1-selling console. I think we should talk about how it's gone online and some of the games there that have gone online.
Craig: So tell us about it.
Matt: Alright. So there's 2 games that are really the key online games for the Nintendo Wii. The first one being Mario Kart. So this is a game that's been around for years. I mean over a decade now since the Super Nintendo Mario Kart was out there. And so Mario Kart for the Wii actually allows you to go online and race against other people all across the world.
Craig: Oh, cool.
Matt: Yeah, that's really cool and it's a lot of fun. That's the most fun game on the Nintendo Wii.
Craig: So let me ask you a question. In our earlier segment, we talked about the senior citizen centers and a bowling game. Do you see someday that we might have an online component to the bowling game, where different senior citizen centers could challenge each other?
Matt: Oh, I definitely see that coming. I mean, right now you can see not necessarily on the Wii, but you see Tiger Woods is online so you can play golf versus other people on some of the other consoles.
Craig: On Wii?
Matt: I don't think it's online with the Wii yet.
Craig: OK.
Matt: It probably will be coming there shortly but right now it's online on the other consoles.
Craig: Sweet.
Matt: So yeah, I could see how bowling will be a natural fit to play online versus someone else.
So another title I was going to mention is Super Smash Brothers Brawl for the Nintendo Wii.
[laughter]
Matt: So this is a great game. It's got Mario characters, it's got characters from all kinds of great Nintendo games. They license characters from other games and you go in there and it's just a giant brawl.
Craig: And what's the name of this again?
Matt: Super Smash Brothers Brawl.
Craig: And are you boxing with other people, or wrestling them, or what are you doing?
Matt: So everyone has their own weapon, right? So Mario has a different way of fighting than let's say Link from Zelda, and the various characters. And I think even Mega Man is in there, and so it's a hodgepodge of great video game characters all fighting it out using their own specific weapon.
Craig: Have you played this game yet?
Matt: I've played this game.
Craig: Is it cool?
Matt: Yeah, it's really cool. It's a lot of fun. Super fast paced.
Craig: Is that right?
Matt: Yeah.
Craig: So let me ask you a question. I've always wondered this. You can play video games online with people half a world away, right?
Matt: Yeah, someone all the way in China or Japan, Korea, Europe.
Craig: Isn't there delay? Isn't there latency? I mean, if you're playing someone who's half a world away, just for the signal to get from your house to their house. I mean, you could be shooting at them and already be dead, right?
Matt: Yeah, so that's definitely an aspect of playing online. Anytime latency's involved, you're going to have a more consistent experience playing with people that are geographically closer to you.
The game developers try to build in methods into the game to solve that problem you described, so you don't see someone shooting after they already moved. So they do different techniques to minimize that.
But when you play online, I mean let's just say in an MMORPG where you go online and choose the server you go on, you should choose a server that's relatively close to your geography because that's going to make it a better experience for you.
Craig: OK.
Matt: And then when you play in a 1st‑person shooter, in a lot of cases you just join a game and in the 1st‑person shooter it's different from an MMO. In a lot of cases. one of the consoles or PC acts as the game server.
Craig: Is that right?
Matt: So yes, you'll actually be matched up usually with someone close to you, and usually that person has a good quality connection, so it minimizes the latency.
Craig: And that becomes the default server, if you will.
Matt: Yeah, exactly.
Craig: That's interesting. So tell me about online gaming. I know we discussed a lot about it during our last podcast. Is this an element of the business is growing?
Matt: Oh yeah, this is a big part of the business. You can look at statements from Microsoft's CEO Steve Ballmer. He's talking about how Xbox Live is an unequivocal success for them. I mean, it's a home run is how he described it. The online aspects in games are really driving the business forward right now.
Craig: And there's a whole social element to it I guess, too, right?
Matt: Yeah, I think it's like all the social media going on right now. The YouTubes, Facebooks. People want to enjoy things with other people, and this is just one aspect of taking away that stereotype of the gamer at home on the couch in front of the TV. At least now, he's the gamer at home on the couch in front of the TV connected to somebody else.
Craig: Yeah, cool. So, the other question is this. So many of the games obviously involve shooting something or capturing something. Is that basically the essence of online gaming? Or talking about the social aspect of online gaming, are there other things that you can do online that are more socially acceptable, for lack of a better term?
[laughs]
Matt: Yeah, if we want to just float some things that aren't violent, a couple games, obviously I mentioned Mario Kart for the Wii, car racing game. I think that's a great example of a way to go online and have a lot of fun with others and compete, and it's not violent.
And a lot of the sports games offer the same thing: Tiger Woods, John Madden Football, the NBA games.
I think there's a variety of sports games in addition to your favorites, Guitar Hero and Rock Band, you can just go and rock out online.
Craig: Is that right?
Matt: Yeah, that's what it's all about. So you can be the bass player and you can sign up someone who's a good guitar player in Chicago, and find someone who's going to sing for you from LA. You can all get together and form a band online.
Craig: Very interesting. You know, I want to dig a little bit deeper into online gaming, but we're going to do that right after this break.
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Voiceover: For a more in depth look at today's topic, log onto dolby.com/dolbycast.
Craig: And back from our break with Mr. Matt Tullis. Welcome back, Matt.
So, Matt, in our previous discussion, we were talking about online gaming and I have to tell you, I watched a documentary the other day about gaming and gamers and the whole online aspect to gaming, and it was really interesting because in some of the games, the longer you play the more skilled you become, the more people you kill, the more levels you go through, you develop more powers and more tools and more abilities.
And they actually did a focus on some people who actually had surrogates, who would actually play for them, and the surrogates might have been a half a world away. But they were playing in place of me, you know, working me through all the different levels in the level, so I could acquire all these tools, all this power. Talk about that for a second.
Matt: OK, so what I think we're talking about here is the MMORPGs again, right? So this is the World of Warcraft style game where you have a character and you need to gain experience through playing the game. And so you'd have to do a lot of remedial tasks in these games, like go out and farm and chop down trees and things like that to gain resources and experience to level up.
And so what happens is some people don't want to do that. They find that part boring, they don't think they should spend the time.
Craig: They want to get to the good part.
Matt: They want to get to the good part with like a level 70 character, so they can go out and start killing people.
[laughter]
Matt: And so what they do is they actually hire people to go out and do it for them and do all the leveling up, so to speak. And there's other people that on their own free will, will level up a character, get it all the way up to a high level, like a level 60, level 70, and then they'll actually go online and sell it.
Craig: Is that right?
Matt: Yeah, so that's a way for people to make money and there's other aspects of this, like the gold farming, right? So, in the games you need money, and certain people are willing to pay for that money. Real world dollars for in-game gold instead of having to go out and try to find it on their own because they want to, you know, use their time elsewhere.
Craig: So the heavy lifting that you would normally do, get you the gold, but you're actually having somebody do all that heavy lifting, you pay someone to do that.
Matt: Yeah, you have somebody else. Yeah, it's called "gold farming", right? So there's people who set up shops and they go out and they do this and they do all that remedial tasks to get the gold and then they sell it online. Now I should point out that in most games, this is against the EULA, the end user license agreement. So this could get your account banned.
Craig: Is that right?
Matt: Yeah, so the game developers, in most games, they don't want that to happen. They want people to play the game. And also they want a level playing field where people deserve what they've gotten in the game.
Craig: OK.
Matt: There are some games, especially where there's item transactions, that they do allow you to sell items and such, but within the world in the game using real world dollars as well.
Craig: Now during our break you were talking about "free to play", and some of the new business models based around games. Can you talk about that?
Matt: Yeah. So, I think we've really seen this stuff pop up in Asia, but it's definitely coming to the United States, where instead of actually selling a game or selling a subscription, they give away the game for free.
Craig: OK.
Matt: A good example of this is a game called KartRider, this is from Nexon. And this game is massively popular. I think they've had 800,000 people online playing it at once.
Craig: At once.
Matt: At once. I mean concurrent users. 800,000 people playing KartRider. And essentially you give away the game for free and then what you do is you give users the ability to upgrade to a better car or a personalized paint job, or maybe like a personal license plate. And so that way the game developers can give away the game for free, a lot of people can play it, and the users that want the differentiated experience can just purchase the items to give them that.
Craig: Interesting. Now I have a really, this is a tough question. How do 800,000 people play online without crashing the server? How does that happen?
Matt: So it's probably broken up between a bunch of different servers, right. So usually in any server you can get about 3,000 to 5,000 people, depending on the game.
Craig: Is that right?
Matt: Some games you can get more than that.
Craig: Wow.
Matt: A game like KartRider, actually, you don't need to have all those people on the server at once, because you're only racing against 8 people at the same time. So, again, one of those 8 people act as the server while the race is going on. So it depends. Only in like World of Warcraft do you really need to have the 5,000 people all on one server, 3,000 to 5,000 people.
Craig: The other thing that I saw on this program was something about BYOC, "bring your own computer", and you were talking to me about it. It's about an event called what, "Penny Arcade Expo"?
Matt: Yeah, so these BYOC events, these "bring-your-own-computer" events, these actually occur across the country, I mean, there's different events. I think down in Texas there's a big one that Quake puts on or iD Software, I think it's called QuakeCon or something like that. But I was at the Penny Arcade Expo just a couple weeks ago up in Seattle.
Craig: And that's open to the public.
Matt: And that's open to the public, and that's a game event where publishers bring out new games that aren't out or some that are just out and gamers can play them.
And they have this other area where it's BYOC, bring your own computer, and you actually show up with your own PC, you can show off your rig, and compete versus other people right there in a local area network, a LAN environment, with your own PC.
Craig: Amazing stuff. So very, again, a social element to the whole gaming thing.
Matt: Yeah, exactly. I think that, again, this is where people get a chance to meet other people, compare your hardware, and it's a little bit like hotrod show for cars or something.
Craig: Now, we work for Dolby, and Dolby's about sound, and Dolby's about surround sound. A lot of people associate Dolby with surround sound, so I have to ask the question. You know, there's a lot of video games out there as we know that have surround soundtracks, great surround soundtracks.
Do you really have an advantage, Matt, if you're playing somebody online, or even if you're just playing against the console, do you really have an advantage with surround sound?
Matt: Yeah, I think a lot of that is going to depend on the game. I think that in certain games you definitely have an advantage.
In games that are more stealthy, in games where you can literally try to sneak up on someone, you're going to have an advantage where you hear them sneaking up from behind.
Or even in car racing games when you can't see who's behind you, but you can hear that the car's getting up on your right, or it's getting up on your left, you can kind of nudge them over, you could do a little rubbing racing.
And it really gives you that advantage where you don't know where people are.
Craig: So a lot of people, obviously as we discussed earlier, are connecting their games to home theater boxes, home entertainment systems, multichannel home entertainment systems. But there's also the private aspect of listening in surround sound, correct?
Matt: Yeah. So recently, again at Penny Arcade Expo, we were showing some new products from a variety of peripheral manufacturers, including Plantronics, Turtle Beach, Astro Gaming, and what these are, these are headsets. Headsets, meaning both headphones and microphone, so you can play online and plug in the controller or the console, however the console lets you go online.
And you still get that Dolby Headphone, which gives you surround sound over any set of headphones. It gives you that experience of being immersed in the game and getting the full surround sound experience with still the microphone involved. Because previously - especially on Xbox Live - the standard headset is just a mono headset, and so you can't get that surround sound. It closes off half the sound field.
And so these guys are addressing that problem where you can have a full surround sound experience while still playing online and talking to your buddies.
Craig: So voice chat is really important if you want to strategize online, correct?
Matt: Yeah, so what we're seeing is that everyone wants to go online, everyone's playing online, and we've talked about the social aspects a couple times now. You want to be able to coordinate with your teammates, you want to be able to talk a little trash if you're doing pretty well, you know? There's all kinds of aspects like that.
Craig: Now, can the other team hear me talking to you if you're on my side?
Matt: That's up to the game developer in a lot of cases.
Craig: Is that right?
Matt: So the game developer can choose, in some cases they do it. I can think of Halo as an example, or Halo 2, Halo 3. The way they set it up is you can talk to your teammates at all times, but when you get within a certain range, you'll hear the enemy. So it's kind of like you're on a walkie-talkie channel with your teammates the whole time, then when you get into a certain range you'll hear the enemies as well.
Craig: So there's some really cool products coming out for the holiday season that we might want to recommend if people are interested in playing these games online and having a surround sound experience, but not waking up the rest of the family at 3:00 in the morning?
Matt: Yeah, I mentioned the companies earlier. Plantronics has their GameCom 777, that's for the PC. Turtle Beach has their Ear Force [X4 –ed.] project, which is targeted a little bit more towards the Xbox 360. And then Astro Gaming has a product out, the A40, it comes with a cool little mix amp. That's targeted towards professional gamers. So you can actually hook up a couple of these together and have your own private voice channel as well.
Craig: Now, what's a professional gamer?
Matt: So there's people that play for money.
Craig: Is that right?
Matt: Yeah. So there's the Major League Gaming, the MLG, is one of the big circuits, so to speak, of professional gamers and they hold tournaments around the country and there's also other events around the globe. I mean, there's a big group of people in Korea that plays Starcraft online and they make a good six figures plus.
Craig: Is that right?
Matt: Yeah.
Craig: Wow. Who would've thought?
Matt: I don't know.
Craig: I thought we had it great working for Dolby, but obviously if you could play games and support your wife and your family and your cars and your toys, how great is that?
Matt: Yeah, but it's a lot of work I hear. I hear these guys are playing 20 hours a day, practicing nonstop, because there's a lot of people out there who want to make money playing games.
Craig: Sure.
[laughter]
Matt: I mean, I was talking to someone the other day about this and I'm like, I got a think that there's more people trying to play games for a living than there are trying to get into the NBA. And there's even fewer spots because the MLG is pretty small compared to some of the professional sports leagues out there.
Craig: Amazing. Thank you, Matt Tullis for what has been a very, very interesting show. I really appreciate you coming on Dolbycast this time.
Matt: I appreciate it, Craig. It's always fun to sit down and chat with you.
Craig: And listeners, thank you for tuning into Dolbycast. You know, if you have questions you can send them to dolbycast@dolby.com, or if you'd like to call in, phone in your question 888‑6‑DOLBY‑C. This is Dolbycast. I'm Craig Eggers. Thanks for tuning in.
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