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Gamers visit Sony’s PlayStation booth at the annual China Joy gaming conference in Shanghai on July 30, 2021.
Arjun Kharpal | CNBC

GUANGZHOU, China — For 14 years, gaming consoles from the likes of Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo were banned in China.

The ban was finally lifted in 2014.

While these consoles were available on the so-called “grey market” — places that would sell imported devices for a high price — the prohibition led to the surge in popularity of PC and mobile games.

Chinese developers, like giants Tencent and NetEase, poured their efforts into making hit titles for those platforms during the more than a decade-long ban.

Now things are changing. China’s tech giants, alongside a new breed of gaming developers, are looking to tap the growth of videogame consoles in China and target players overseas who have grown up with those devices.

For the global market, the console is huge — roughly like 30% revenue. But in China, it’s only 1% and so there’s a huge potential opportunity for the console game developer inside China.
Daniel Ahmad
senior analyst, Niko Partners

Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo have all launched their next-generation gaming consoles in China.

“For the global market, the console is huge — roughly like 30% revenue. But in China, it’s only 1% and so there’s a huge potential opportunity for the console game developer inside China,” Frank Mingbo Li, the founder of Studio Surgical Scalpels, a Tencent-backed game studio, told CNBC.

Studio Surgical Scalpels is making an outer-space based “first-person shooter” game called “Boundary” for PC and Sony’s PlayStation 4 and PlayStation 5.

China’s games console hardware and software market hit $1.84 billion in 2020 and is expected to reach $2.46 billion in 2025, according to market intelligence firm Niko Partners. But that’s eclipsed by both mobile and PC game revenue. Mobile game revenue alone stood at $29.2 billion in 2020.

Globally, the console market is expected to rake in revenue of $49.2 billion, accounting for 28% of the worldwide games market, according to market research firm Newzoo.

That’s where the opportunity lies.

“Despite consoles being banned between 2000 and 2014, we are seeing high demand for consoles in China, and there is an even larger market for console outside the country,” Daniel Ahmad, senior analyst at Niko Partners, told CNBC.

Li, who is a gaming industry veteran, said “Boundary” was designed from the “very first day” for the global market, underscoring the Chinese developer’s ambitions.

“Boundary” is just one of several high-profile console games coming out of China. Another upcoming game is “Black Myth: Wu Kong” which is being developed by Chinese studio Game Science.

Gaming giants eye console market

The world’s largest gaming company, Tencent, along with rival Chinese firm NetEase, are also eyeing the console market.

NetEase launched a high-profile game on Thursday called “Naraka: Bladepoint” — a 60-person battle royale style game like popular title “Fortnite.” The Hangzhou, China-based company is also developing the game for consoles but hasn’t revealed a release date yet.

In 2019, NetEase opened a gaming outfit in Montreal, Canada, to help with international expansion and another studio in Japan dedicated to console game production last year.

In an interview with CNBC this month, Hu Zhipeng, vice president at NetEase, called the console market “pretty attractive.”

“Our Sakura Studio in Japan and in Montreal are dedicated to developing games on consoles, as one third of overseas market shares is taken by console games,” Hu said.

Tencent’s growth in gaming over the years has been driven a lot by acquisitions of or investments into game studios. That has been focused heavily on mobile but is now shifting to companies making games for PC and console.

“Nearly half of the 51 investments in 2021 are in companies with experience developing PC and console games. Many of these are domestic,” according to a Niko Partners report published in May.

Until 2020, most of Tencent’s domestic investments went into mobile gaming while PC and console investments were done overseas, the report noted.

And Tencent-owned developer TiMi Studio has opened offices in Montreal and Seattle to focus on PC and console games.

“Chinese studios are looking to match their overseas peers in game development by standardizing tools, creating advanced production processes, and investing in large teams to ensure they can create large scale AAA quality titles that provide a competitive edge, meet evolving player demands, and reach a broad audience both in terms of geographies and platforms,” Ahmad from Niko Partners said.

AAA is an unofficial term to denote high-quality and popular games.

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Apple releases fix for overheating iPhone 15

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Apple releases fix for overheating iPhone 15

Apple iPhone 15 series devices are displayed for sale at The Grove Apple retail store on release day in Los Angeles on Sept. 22, 2023.

Patrick T. Fallon | AFP | Getty Images

Apple released iOS 17.0.3 on Wednesday, including a fix for an issue that caused Apple’s latest iPhone 15 models to run hot.

“This update provides important bug fixes, security updates, and addresses an issue that may cause iPhone to run warmer than expected,” according to the software’s change log.

Over the weekend, Apple confirmed reports on social media that its new iPhones had a tendency to get warm. Apple said the problem was a combination of some apps that weren’t properly configured, bugs in iOS and an expected set-up period that requires extra processing and heat generation.

Wednesday’s update addresses the issues in iOS, the iPhone’s operating system. App developers are also pushing updates with fixes to their apps.

Apple said the heat issue was unrelated to a new titanium and aluminum frame design on the higher-end Pro models, and also said that it wasn’t related to the USB-C charging port on the new phones either.

Apple’s website says all iPhones may feel warmer when they’re being restored from a backup, when they’re wirelessly charging, using graphics-heavy apps or games or streaming high-quality video. Apple says iPhones are safe to use unless they display an explicit temperature warning.

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Google’s latest Pixel phones have new camera AI tricks

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Google's latest Pixel phones have new camera AI tricks

Google’s new Pixel lineup including the Pixel 8, the Pixel 8 Pro, the Pixel Watch 2, and the Pixel Buds Pro.

Google

Google announced two new Pixel phones and its latest Pixel smartwatch on Wednesday during its Made by Google event in New York City. The new Pixel 8 and Pixel 8 Pro are Google’s latest attempts to capture a fraction of the market share from Apple’s iPhone.

The Pixel 8 starts at $699, while the Pixel 8 Pro starts at $999. That’s a $100 increase from last year’s Pixel 7 and 7 Pro. The Pixel brand has a small but growing market share, and Google’s hardware business doesn’t drive significant revenue for parent company Alphabet. Of the $74.6 billion in revenue Alphabet reported for the second quarter, for example, $58.14 billion came from Google ads. Another $8 billion was generated by Google Cloud.

The Pixel 8 phones and Pixel Watch 2, which starts at $349, are available to order beginning Wednesday and will hit store shelves on Oct. 12

Here are some of the best new features in Google’s new products.

Pixel 8 and Pixel 8 Pro

Google Pixel 8 Pro

Google

The new Pixel 8 and 8 Pro have rounder corners and a flatter display compared to last year’s models. The entry-level Pixel 8 has a better screen with refresh speeds as fast as the iPhone 15 Pro and Pro Max, which means scrolling through websites or playing games will look smoother.

Both the Pixel 8 and 8 Pro run on Google’s new Tensor G3 chip. The G3 is Google’s in-house chip, which allows the company to leverage its artificial intelligence and machine-learning resources in areas like the phone’s camera.

Google Pixel 8 Rose

Courtesy: Google

The Pixel 8 Pro includes new AI-powered editing tools. It still has the popular Magic Eraser tool, which allows you to remove unwanted images in photos, but it also has a new photo tool called Best Take. Let’s say you take a series of group photos, Best Take lets you combine similar pictures into one where everyone is looking at the camera and smiling. Google also says it’s improved its Real Tone photography feature to help better represent the nuances of different skin tones.

Audio Magic Eraser allows users to remove unwanted sounds from videos. So, if you’re capturing your kid riding a bike for the first time and a pesky truck is reversing in the background, Audio Magic Eraser allows users to remove that distracting beeping noise.

Google Pixel 8 Pro

Courtesy: Google

The Pixel 8 Pro also has a built-in thermometer. It’s marketed as a tool to get the temperature of beverages and cookware by scanning them. It’s not immediately clear what other purpose it might serve.

Google says its G3 Tensor chip will improve call quality and help the phone detect and filter out more spam calls.

The Pixel 8 and Pixel 8 Pro are the first smartphones to launch with Android 14 out of the box.

Pixel Watch 2

Google Pixel Watch 2 

Courtesy: Google

Google also unveiled its Pixel Watch 2. Like the first Pixel Watch, the Watch 2 incorporates the Fitbit platform which Alphabet acquired in 2021.

One of the most interesting new features is stress tracking. The watch gathers data like your heart rate variability and skin temperature to help detect when you’re under pressure. The device will then make healthy suggestions for you: like going for a walk or trying a guided breathing exercise.

Google Pixel Watch 2

Courtesy: Google

The Pixel Watch 2 also includes improved heart rate tracking and workout detection. It has the same battery life as the original — Google promises up to 24 hours using the always-on display.

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Veterans from Tesla, Northvolt hatch plan to mass-produce huge batteries to store solar and wind energy

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Veterans from Tesla, Northvolt hatch plan to mass-produce huge batteries to store solar and wind energy

Cameron Dales (L), president and chief commercial officer of Peak Energy, and Landon Mossburg, the CEO of Peak Energy, on a hike in the earliest days of the company. The mountains of Colorado in the background inspired the name of the company, Peak Energy.

Photo courtesy Peak Energy

Battery industry veterans are coming together to launch Peak Energy, which aims to mass-produce giant batteries to even out production fluctuations from renewable energy sources, like wind and solar power generators.

Because Peak Energy is focused on scaling up production of battery technology that already exists, they don’t think of themselves as a traditional “startup.”

“A normal Silicon Valley startup is 10 years in the lab, come up with a better mousetrap and go to market. We’re completely the opposite,” Cameron Dales, president and chief commercial officer of Peak Energy, told CNBC in a video interview Friday.

Peak Energy hopes to partner with a technology company (yet to be selected) that is already an expert in battery technology but does not have the capacity to scale manufacturing.

“In the battery market it turns out the rarest commodity is not the technology — there are many excellent ideas out there at academic labs and startups — but rather the ability to scale to manufacturing,” CEO Landon Mossburg told CNBC. “The difficulty of manufacturing scale up is one of the reasons you see so many ‘breakthrough battery technology’ announcements but very very few companies who actually reach market.”  

Peak Energy launched in June and is coming out of stealth on Wednesday, announcing a $10 million funding round lead by Greg Reichow at Eclipse, a Silicon Valley venture capital firm. Before joining Eclipse, Reichow worked at Tesla for more than five years, where he was responsible for battery, motor and electronics manufacturing and then led global manufacturing. Also joining the funding raise is TDK Ventures, the corporate venture capital arm of the Tokyo-headquartered multinational electronics company TDK.

“The No. 1 issue we face as it relates to expanding renewable energy sources is storage,” Reichow told CNBC. “This problem must be solved, but the existing approaches using lithium-ion and other technologies are not yet at a price point that enables the kind of scaling that society needs across sectors.”

Demand for grid-scale storage will continue to grow. The United States Energy Information Administration has projected that battery storage capacity will grow from 9 gigawatts in 2022 to 49 gigawatts in 2030 and then to 247 gigawatts in 2050. That’s a baseline projection that includes the Inflation Reduction Act and assumes no additional changes in U.S. policy throughout the projection period.

(L to R) Ryan Gibson, Eclipse Venture partner; Landon Mossburg, Peak Energy CEO; Aidan Madigan-Curtis, Eclipse partner and Cameron Dales, Peak Energy president and chief commercial officer, in protective gear at a battery factory clean room.

Photo courtesy Peak Energy

A stacked team with aggressive growth goals

Cameron Dales and US Representative Rho Kana in 2021 at the Enovix battery factory in Fremont, Calif.

Photo courtesy Cameron Dales

Of course, Peak Energy will have to raise more money to fund this kind of expansion. A lot more.

We’re running a playbook which I and the rest of the executive team initially demonstrated and deployed at Northvolt,” Mossburg told CNBC. Northvolt also started with a small seed round of funding and ended up raising more than $9 billion in a combination of equity and debt. Mossburg was involved with securing all of that financing except for the most recent $1.2 billion announced in August.

Dales has similar experience. He was an early employee and co-founder of the equipment business Symyx Tools at material sciences innovation company, Symyx Technologies, which went public in 1999, and in 2009 joined the battery company Enovix.

“I thought naively, ‘Well, how hard could batteries be? It’s just a plus and a minus, everybody has a Duracell. How hard could it be?’ Little did I know, 14 years later, I would still be there,” Dales told CNBC. Enovix was making very high energy density batteries at a battery factory in Fremont, California, and is building another one in Penang, Malaysia. The company went public in a billion-dollar-plus SPAC deal in 2021.

“Peak Energy’s team comprises of two industry veteran leaders who have scaled a battery company before,” Anil Achyuta, who lead the investment for TDK Ventures, said in a written statement shared with CNBC.

So, too, for Eclipse.

“Landon and I worked together at Tesla and I know what he’s capable of delivering,” Reichow told CNBC. “After leaving Tesla, he went on to build a battery company as an executive at Northvolt. Similarly, Cam was a core part of the founding team at Enovix and was instrumental in helping them build the business. These are proven executives that have built battery companies in some of the hardest spaces and that makes them unique.”

Why Peak Energy is focusing on sodium ion

Peak Energy is focused on making large sodium-ion battery systems to pair with wind and solar energy production facilities. Large grid-scale batteries can capture the energy generated from renewable sources, then hold that energy and dispatch it later when the wind isn’t blowing or the sun isn’t shining.

Peak Energy will make individual battery cells, about the size of a loaf of bread, says Dales. Then those loaf of bread battery cells get wired together to make modules, which would be about the size of a filing cabinet. Then those filing cabinets will be assembled into a battery the size of the back of a tractor trailer truck, then deployed near a solar or wind farm, 50 to 100 at a time.

One hundred blocks can power 62,500 homes for four hours, Mossburg told CNBC.

An artist rendering of the Peak Energy battery system.

Rendering courtesy Peak Energy.

The most typical battery technology right now is lithium ion, used in cellphones and electric vehicles, and they are prized for their energy density. Sodium-ion batteries are less energy dense and heavier — bad for mobile devices or cars, but less relevant when it comes to grid-scale batteries.

“Weight, and therefore energy density, is much less important in a stationary storage system. The fact that these batteries are less energy dense isn’t really a big consideration for this application,” Reichow told CNBC.

What does matter when you are talking about storing huge quantities of energy is the cost.

“A much more important consideration is the cost per unit energy that you’re able to store and that is where sodium ion, we believe, will have a big advantage over lithium ion in the future,” Reichow told CNBC.

It’s too early for Peak Energy to commit to a specific price for its battery systems, but a Tesla Megapack battery system costs about $1.3 million without installation, and Mossburg says he thinks Peak Energy can be at roughly half of that cost with its system.

In addition, lithium-ion batteries can be a fire hazard and the electric vehicle makers are eating up all available supply, Dales told CNBC. The problem utilities have is “the minute Ford or GM needs more batteries, basically their contracts for lithium ion just get canceled and the suppliers just go for the car, because it’s today the largest market,” Dales told CNBC.

Also, China dominates the battery market and supply chains right now. “They’re the dominant player in batteries generally — by far — they are massive in terms of battery production,” Mossburg told CNBC. “And they’re positioning to do the same with sodium.”

Alun Thomas, Head of Manufacturing Engineering at Peak Energy, inside a battery production machine.

Photo courtesy Peak Energy

While Mossburg says he thinks it is a benefit for the world for the United States and China to continue to trade, and Peak Energy is willing to work with Chinese partners, there are geopolitical risks associated with depending on China completely. Peak Energy’s plan to manufacture in the United States is a geopolitical advantage, he says. (It’s also more climate-conscious to make these giant batteries in the U.S. as opposed to making them in China and shipping them to the U.S.)

“You don’t want to be in a situation where a critical component of the energy infrastructure of your entire economy, which batteries are increasingly becoming, is principally sourced from a party that you can’t be sure you’re going to be friends with,” Mossburg told CNBC. “If the U.S. wants to continue to have a robust economy, especially an economy that can make things like cars or even like high-tech things, ceding an entire industry that’s this important to any other player — doesn’t matter if it’s China or anyone else — is a dangerous prospect.”

The first real gigantic battery factory in the world was the Tesla/Panasonic Gigafactory in Nevada, and Reichow led the development of that, Dales said. The second generation “arguably” was the factories that Mossburg built with Northvolt and that Dales helped build at Enovix, Dales said. Peak Energy is “taking that learning and the people who developed those factories and we are going after the third generation of factory design,” Dales told CNBC.

How sodium-ion technology will compete with lithium-ion batteries

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