The success of New Horizons helped paper over an otherwise dry release schedule. Beyond Xenoblade Chronicles Definitive Edition and some Pokémon Sword and Shield DLC, there was little first-party content for Switch owners to pick up. Thank goodness there was a wealth of third-party releases to plug the gap, such as Trials of Mana, The Wonderful 101: Remastered, Borderlands Legendary Collection and The Outer Worlds.

According to Nintendo, its mobile efforts experienced “steady growth,” too. Despite lackluster reviews, Mario Kart Tour is experiencing “record use” and Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp is benefitted from the popularity of New Horizons. Together, smartphone and “IP-related income” came in at 13.2 billion yen (roughly $124.9 million) during the quarter, up 32.7 percent year-over-year. Overall, the company recorded sales of 358.1 billion yen (roughly $3.39 billion), which was more than double what it managed for the same period last year. Operating profit, meanwhile, skyrocketed to 144.7 billion yen (roughly $1.37 billion), up 427.7 percent year-over-year.

Nintendo’s next quarter should be slightly livelier than the last. Nintendo released Paper Mario: The Origami King on July 17th, which has been generally praised for its art style and humor. The company has also collaborated with Lego on an impressively-creative Mario-themed line, and a gloriously-detailed NES replica, which it presumably gets some kind of royalty kickbacks from. Switch fans will be wondering what Nintendo has planned for the rest of the year, though. An updated version of Pikmin 3 is coming, but what else? The much-rumored Mario remasters haven’t materialized, and we still don’t have a firm release date for Bravely Default II and No More Heroes 3, both of which are supposed to come out in 2020.

Unsurprisingly, people have spent a lot of money on video games during the coronavirus pandemic. In its latest financial earnings, Sony reported that 91 million PS4 games were sold during the three-month period leading up to June 30th, 2020. That’s an 83 percent increase on the 49.8 million sales it reported for the same quarter last year. First-party exclusives sold impressively well — 18.5 million copies, to be exact — buoyed by Naughty Dog’s long-awaited sequel to The Last of Us. Again, that’s a massive increase on the 11.7 million first-party titles sold during the same quarter last year.

Many PS4 owners were stuck indoors, so it’s no surprise to hear that a whopping 74 percent of games were bought digitally last quarter. In addition, PlayStation Plus — a subscription service that’s required to play PS4 games online — now stands at 44.9 million members, up from 41.5 million at the end of the last quarter. While software is thriving, hardware continues to dwindle. The company sold 1.9 million PS4 consoles during the three-month period, which is up from the previous quarter (1.4 million) but down 41 percent on the same quarter last year (3.2 million). The ageing console will soon be replaced by the PS5, which is slated to come out sometime this holiday season.

Carolina Milanesi, Principal Analyst, Creative Strategies said to Engadget that “I would imagine this could be as simple as the iPhone not making the last week of Q3 as it has done over the past few years. Such a delay would be in line with rumors coming from the supply chain but would not necessarily mean that the delay will impact Q4.” Similarly, Anshel Sag, Consumer & Chip Tech Analyst at Moor Insights & Strategy surmised “that it’s very likely to be Apple, especially when you consider that the company’s most crucial period of its development cycle was probably hit the hardest during the peak of COVID-19.”

Apple is a few hours away from revealing its latest results and giving guidance to investors, and we may hear more about its launch plans then. If there is a delay on the launch of the next iPhone series, it’s likely only going to be a few weeks later than usual — think October instead of September — but Avi Greengart of Techsponential explained “Apple is certainly large enough to move the needle for any component supplier.”

On their call with investors, Qualcomm Akash Palkhiwala said “our customers end up buying chipsets that facilitate the launch in the couple of months before the launch. So what we’re really seeing here is because of the delay, a portion of those purchases are happening in the September quarter and they’re factored into our guidance and another portion would get pushed out to the December quarter.”

Netflix Q2 2020 results

The most surprising announcement in its Q2 earnings report (PDF) is the news of a new leadership structure — chief content officer Ted Sarandos will join Reed Hastings as co-CEO, and take a seat on the company’s board.

When it comes to content, Netflix claimed strong performance with dramas like Mindy Kaling’s Never Have I Ever (40 million views in the first four weeks) and “buzzy” reality content like Floor is Lava (37 million) under its reconfigured metrics. It didn’t have a number yet for The Old Guard, but claimed that its Chris Hemsworth action flick Extraction notched views in 99 million households after 28 days.

If you’re wondering whether it can keep up the pace of content releases, then Netflix says it won’t disappoint. “For 2021, based on our current plan, we expect the paused productions will lead to a more second half weighted content slate in terms of our big titles, although we anticipate the total number of originals for the full year will still be higher than 2020.” To fill in for titles delayed while productions are shut down in many countries, it’s acquired content like Spongebob Movie: Sponge on the Run and unreleased seasons of series including Cobra Kai.

Sony’s massively-popular PlayStation 4 has smashed another sales milestone. In its latest financial earnings, the company revealed that 1.5 million consoles — a figure that covers all configurations, including the PlayStation 4 Pro — in the three-month period that ended on March 31st, 2020. That brings lifetime sales to 110.4 million, a figure that’s just shy of the original Game Boy and Game Boy Color. The PlayStation 4’s momentum has slowed, though. The company sold 2.6 million consoles in the same period last year, and fiscal year (April 2019 to March 2020) sales were down by 4.2 million. It’s unlikely, therefore, that the ageing system will take the ‘all time best-selling console’ crown from the PlayStation 2.

Sony won’t mind, though. The company is scheduled to release the PS5 this year, which will undoubtedly boost hardware sales. In its earnings, the company reiterated that the system is “on track for launch in this holiday season.” Yesterday, an online job posting suggested that the console would come out in October. Sony told Japanese gaming publication Famitsu that the date was an “error” introduced by the recruiting site, however. For now, therefore, we’re still stuck with a “holiday 2020” release window.

And Spotify’s big-budget gamble on podcasts and podcasting appears to be paying dividends in the new normal we find ourselves in. Almost a fifth of Spotify’s users engage with podcasts on the platform, of which there are now more than 1 million shows on the service. And, most importantly, more than 60 percent of them are powered by Anchor, the “make your own podcast” platform Spotify bought in early 2019. 

It looks like plenty of people are taking their lockdown / shelter-in-place orders as justification to start a new podcast of their own, too. According to Spotify, “Anchor-powered shows accounted for more than 70 percent of new podcasts launched on our service.” But naturally, COVID-19 has caused a shock to the advertising market, with Spotify recording a 20-plus-percent dent in ad revenue towards the end of March.

Spotify is clearly providing some measure of comfort to folks in these stressful times, and saw a spike in searches for “chill” and “instrumental” playlists. It also reported an “uptick in consumption of podcasts related to wellness and meditation over the last few weeks.” The company expects to see growth slow, a little, over the coming months, but thinks that it’ll break the 300 million user milestone in short order.

It’s part of an initiative to make Twitter a happier, cuddlier place to be, with the usual boast that it’s shrunk the number of “unhealthy” tweets on the service. That includes a 27 percent decline in “bystander reports,” on Tweets that violate the company’s code of conduct. Much of that is down to machine-learning models that are designed to proactively find, and take down, material before people flag it as needing moderation.

And Twitter can point to some positives that have emerged from its work to make the service nicer to use and more efficient on the back end. Infrastructure and moderation improvements, alongside new tools that help folks find content that they love, has driven user growth. MDAU (Remember, that now stands for Usage, not Users), has risen to 152 million, from 145 million in the last quarter and 126 million last year.

Which has all driven cash to the company, which boasts that it enjoyed its first ever billion-dollar quarter over the holiday season. That funneled down to a net income of $119 million, although that’s a lot less than the $255 million net income Twitter made in the same three months last year.

To back up that claim — and push back against belief that Disney+ and others are already starting to catch up — it posted a Google Trends result showing The Witcher blowing The Mandalorian out of the water over the last few months, a result that holds up even if you add “baby Yoda” searches to the mix. Netflix’s example also included The Morning Show on Apple TV+ and Amazon Prime’s Jack Ryan, although neither showed much impact by this metric.

Still, you’ll have to grade that result on a curve, since Netflix also mentioned a change to how it’s gathering those numbers, “Given that we now have titles with widely varying lengths – from short episodes (e.g. Special at around 15 minutes) to long films (e.g. The Highwaymen at 132 minutes), we believe that reporting households viewing a title based on 70 percent of a single episode of a series or of an entire film, which we have been doing, makes less sense.”

“We are now reporting on households (accounts) that chose to watch a given title…The new metric is about 35% higher on average than the prior metric. For example, 45m member households chose to watch Our Planet under the new metric vs. 33m under the prior metric.”

Now, if you watch something for at least two minutes, “long enough to indicate the choice was intentional” then it counts. By that measure, 83 million households opted for the new Michael Bay / Ryan Reynolds flick 6 Underground, 73 million have “chosen to watch” The Crown throughout its run, and Netflix estimates its thriller You will have 54 million views in its first four weeks. Of course, the stat doesn’t really tell us how many people stuck around for more than twenty minutes or dozed off after a single episode, but they will likely look better than the old numbers. They also give Netflix something it can show to stars (and their agents) who are considering a role in one of its productions, instead of its old strategy of never discussing numbers at all.

Numbers that aren’t open for interpretation are its subscriber count — it has more than 167 million paid memberships around the globe, up 28 million from last year and its net income is up by more than 50 percent.

Developing…

The company is looking to further analyze the data about podcasts and premium sign-ups, but believes that it’s “onto something special.” If proven true, we can expect to see Spotify lean even harder in to owning the space, with more paid-for exclusive titles to lock people into subscriptions. It looks as if the music platform will look to become a Netflix for Podcasts, with a number of new and original shows being commissioned.

And Spotify will bolster this podcast push by allowing anyone to make their own podcasts from within the app. Researcher Jane Manchun Wong found a “Create Podcast” button buried inside the app, suggesting that full Anchor — the podcast-creation app Spotify bought — integration isn’t far away. And, with the purchase of SoundBetter, the company will have a thumb in the music production game as well.

Paying user totals have increased from 108 million last quarter to 113 million now, which is close to the top target Spotify set for itself in the summer. Part of that is down to a renewed focus on “winback” campaigns designed to coax people who tried premium, but didn’t pay, to give it another go. And in this quarter, it has offered a number of freebies, from Google Home Minis and long-term trials to selected AT&T customers.

In addition, the rollout of Spotify Duo, where two people can share a single, slightly pricier Premium subscription, in Latin America has been enormously popular. These giveaways do, however, cost, and Spotify is already considering increasing its prices to cover the gap.

Overall, Spotify now has 248 million users, of which 141 million are using the free, ad-supported version. That scale is even showing in the balance sheet, since it made an operating profit of nearly $60 million compared to a $6.7 million loss in 2018. And those figures could have been higher, but for an issue with some infrastructure software that wasn’t properly implemented, costing around $10 million in lost revenue.

Between the end of last quarter and now, Spotify has been the subject of some good news stories that should improve morale. A story suggesting that Amazon’s music platform was growing faster than Spotify was attacked by critics, because while Music Unlimited is growing, it’s still far smaller by comparison. And the wider music industry has seen an uptick in revenues, with streaming now contributing 80 percent of all cash.

And Spotify’s (not quite) war of attrition with Apple over Siri integration appears to have reached a happy ending. After all, Siri on iOS 13 can now let you play Spotify songs from your voice, and there is now a Spotify app on Apple’s TV boxes as well. So, all’s well that ends well — so long as you raise a complaint to the European Commission beforehand.

The survey reportedly asked drivers if they have taken out any small loans of $1,000 or less in the last three years. It also asked “If Uber provided loans, what amount are you most likely to request?” The question offered drivers answers including “Less than $100,” “Between $100 and $250,” “Between $250 and $500” and “More than $500.” It’s not clear when or if the loan service will be available to drivers. Uber has not publicly commented on the survey.

If Uber does opt to launch a loan product, it won’t be the first time the company has dabbled in such services. The company previously offered cash advance programs to drivers in California and Michigan, but came under fire from consumer advocates who believed the program beared some resemblence to pay day loans. The company also previously offered leases on new cars to drivers.