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A bigger, more powerful Switch means bigger, more intensive games that take more time and money to make. But as development costs skyrocket across the industry, Nintendo seems to have a plan to keep things in control as it transitions into the Switch 2 era.

In response to a question during a recent shareholders meeting about the increased costs of making games for its new console, Nintendo president Nintendo president Shuntaro Furukawa admitted that “recent game software development has become larger in scale and longer in duration, resulting in higher development costs. The game business has always been a high-risk business, and we recognize that rising development costs are increasing that risk.”

However, he said that Nintendo’s development teams are “currently devising various ways to maintain our traditional approach to creating games amidst the increasing scale and length of development. We believe it is important to make the necessary investments for more efficient development.”

“The game business has always been a high-risk business.”

The early lineup of first-party Switch 2 games has already shown Nintendo being more ambitious with its franchises on the enhanced hardware. Mario Kart World introduced an open-world structure to the long-running racing series, while the upcoming Donkey Kong Bananza adds an impressive destructive element to a more traditional 3D platforming experience. This has come with increased costs for consumers; World sells for $79.99, $10 more than most Nintendo games, while the Switch 2 itself is $449.99, a $100 jump over the Switch OLED. (In response to a question about these prices making it harder to reach younger audiences, Furukawa said that “we are closely monitoring to what degree the price of the system might become a barrier.”)

Of course, Nintendo is not alone, and the increased scale of game development has been disastrous for many of its competitors. Just last week Microsoft’s gaming division was hit hard by layoffs and game cancellations, while high-profile games like Black Panther and Concord were both shut down alongside their development studios. Nintendo has been one of the rare exceptions in the floundering game industry, but keeping that up will become increasingly challenging as games get bigger. Then again, Furukawa offered one concrete way of combatting this: more smaller games.

”We also believe it is possible to develop game software with shorter development periods that still offer consumers a sense of novelty,“ Furukawa said. ”We see this as one potential solution to the concern aboutrising development costs and software prices, and we will explore it from various angles within thecompany.“

From The Verge via this RSS feed

Hoping to recapture the popularity of the Barbie movie that grossed over $1.44 billion worldwide, toy maker Mattel has announced that Wicked’s Jon M. Chu will direct its upcoming live-action Hot Wheels movie, with Juel Taylor and Tony Rettenmaier, whose credits include Creed II and They Cloned Tyrone, writing the script.

The film was first announced over three years ago with J.J. Abrams’ Bad Robot also producing, but there are still no plot details aside from it being a “high-octane action film” that will feature “some of the world’s hottest and sleekest vehicles.” With Apple’s F1 having taken in over $290 million at the box office in just 10 days, there’s potentially a renewed interest from audiences for movies featuring fast cars — or at least full-sized ones.

Chu is best known for his directorial work on films that include Crazy Rich Asians, In the Heights, and Wicked, which received 10 Oscar nominations and has grossed over $750 million ahead of the sequel hitting theaters on November 21st. “Jon’s ability to craft rich, elaborate worlds with a distinct point of view makes him the ideal storyteller to bring Hot Wheels to life. His films are visual spectacles—true eye candy—but what sets them apart is how he weaves unforgettable narratives within those stunning frames,” says Robbie Brenner, President of Mattel Studios, in a press release from the toy maker today.

Following the success of Barbie, Mattel announced several other film projects based on its most popular toy lines, in addition to Hot Wheels. These include movies based on Polly Pocket, the Masters of the Universe, the Magic 8 Ball, the card game Uno, Rock ‘Em Sock ‘Em Robots, and the American Girl Doll.

From The Verge via this RSS feed

From Charles Hoskinson via this RSS feed

Final Fantasy 9 fans have a lot to be excited for 2025, on the occasion of the game’s 25th anniversary. In a year already filled with Final Fantasy flavor due to the success of the Magic: The Gathering Final Fantasy set, the series ninth game is back in the spotlight. From a possible remake in the works to unique insights on the story of important characters bubbling to the surface, Square Enix made sure to do Final Fantasy 9’s big 2-5 the right way.

Released on July 7, 2000 in Japan, Final Fantasy 9 was a product of a time when Square and Enix were two companies and Hironobu Sakaguchi, the creator of theFinal Fantasy series, was heavily involved. The game is known for bringing the series back to its origins. There are crystals, there are summons, and there is a group of heroes trying to save the world — as expected.

Earlier this year, knowing full well how beloved the game remains, Square Enix released a special site detailing all the plans dedicated to the game’s 25th anniversary. There are new figures, plushies, bags and many other products to update your collection. In addition, Final Fantasy 9 collaborations with two of the company’s mobile games available in the East —  Emberstoria and Sengoku Ixa — were announced, bringing beautifully updated models of beloved characters to these games.

It doesn’t stop there. Square Enix recently shared that the Final Fantasy IX Picture Book, written by Kazuhiko Aoki and illustrated by Toshiyuki Itahana, is coming to the West. Set to May 19, 2026, this book tells the story of Vivi and Grandpa Quan, who took care of him. Because the Japanese version of the Final Fantasy IX Picture Book is already available, we know a little bit of what to expect from this new tale about our little black mage. Fans got really excited to discover the origin of Vivi’s name, which is implied in the book.

To mark the date of Final Fantasy 9 anniversary, Square Enix even cut together a movie showing some memorable scenes from the game. Look at these guys. We’re melting.

However, we all know that, despite all this amazing Final Fantasy 9 stuff we’re getting this year, everyone’s attention is centered around the possible announcement of Final Fantasy 9 remake. The 25th anniversary of the game creates the perfect moment for Square Enix to show a teaser or even a trailer — at least in the minds of fans who are already reeling from all the special treatment. Nothing has been revealed so far though.

Although I’d love to see an official confirmation on whether we’re getting the remake or not, this has been a great year as Final Fantasy 9 fans. Yes, we’re still waiting for that animated series announced four years ago, but as they say: always leave them wanting more.

From Polygon via this RSS feed

In 2018, Universal Pictures’ Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom gave the 25-year-old Jurassic Park franchise its most ambitious, startling shift since the first movie brought dinosaurs into the modern world. Until that point in the series, the various resurrected dino species had been confined to parks, islands, and experimental facilities, which hapless humans had to enter for various reasons. Fallen Kingdom ends (seven-year-old spoiler!) with dinosaurs escaping captivity en masse and spreading around the world, infiltrating urban areas as well as the wilds, and launching a new age where humanity lives among gigantic predators that gulp people down like potato chips.

It was a massive, thrilling shift in the Jurassic Park paradigm. It was also both a generous invitation to future screenwriters, and a challenge to explore the possibilities of a completely reimagined world, the way the modern Planet of the Apes movies have. Instead, Jurassic World Rebirth gives the whole premise a hard “Nope!” The writer and director of the latest series installment don’t just refuse to contend with a world of dinosaurs, they slam the door on future writers as well.

2022’s sequel Jurassic World Dominion rolls with the “dinosaurs everywhere” concept to some degree, though director Colin Trevorrow and his co-writer Emily Carmichael still doggedly channel most of the action into the series’ most familiar settings: a remote biolab and a dino preserve. But in Jurassic World: Rebirth, director Gareth Edwards (Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, The Creator) and original Jurassic Park screenwriter David Koepp (Presence) sharply reverse course. The beginning of the movie informs the audience four separate times that dinosaurs couldn’t survive anywhere but in the warm, moist climate around the equator, so by five years after Dominion, they’ve died off everywhere on Earth except in this forbidden zone.

Suddenly, the original Jurassic Park’s famous quote “Life finds a way” isn’t a truism, it’s just a snappy T-shirt slogan. In the original movie, mathematician and chaos theorist Dr. Ian Malcolm (Jeff Goldblum) utters those words as part of a longer speech about how “life will not be contained,” about how the history of evolution shows that living species do not accept barriers. He might be disappointed at how quickly, offhandedly, and mercilessly Jurassic World Rebirth proves him wrong.

It’s the biggest, weirdest walkback for a franchise since J.J. Abrams used Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalkerto nervously retcon everything Rian Johnson’s The Last Jedi established about Rey’s parentage, the future course of the Jedi, and just about everything else. It seems like Koepp and Edwards just don’t want to contend with dino-world. (Or their producers didn’t, possibly due to the profitability of just repeating roughly the same Jurassic story over and over.) But for Rebirth in particular, the refusal to yes-and Fallen Kingdom’s setup seems monumentally strange. Because it absolutely wasn’t necessary in order to frame any of the action that follows.

Jurassic World: Rebirth follows pharma bro Martin Krebs (Rupert Friend) on a quest to the equator, where he wants to harvest blood from some particularly enormous dinosaurs for a vaguely hand-waved R&D project. The goal is to produce a phenomenally lucrative heart-disease cure — the explanation amounts to “Dinosaurs can live a long time, and the really big dinosaurs have really big hearts, therefore… Science!”

(Let’s all agree to just not think about the fact that all of these dinosaurs were created in labs in the first place, and there’d be an incredible amount of data on every aspect of their bodies. Let’s not mention that Martin’s company already has that data, since it bought out dino-reviver corp InGen when it went bankrupt. And we probably shouldn’t talk about how we’re told the blood samples absolutely must come from living dinosaurs, because blood cells outside of the body break down almost instantly — but no one mentions cellular degradation when the blood samples get popped into a cooler-case and toted through swamps, streams, and sewers for the whole movie.)

To keep himself alive and make sure he comes back with the goods, Martin throws tens of millions of dollars at some mercenary troubleshooters, particularly covert ops specialist Zora Bennett (Scarlett Johansson), ship’s captain Duncan Kincaid (Mahershala Ali), and various so-thinly-characterized-you-know-they’re-dinosaur-fodder teammates. He also insists the team has to get samples from the largest mega-dinos living on land, sea, and air, for reasons Koepp’s script doesn’t even bother exploring. (Why bother? Everyone knows how a three-part fetch quest works.)

The thing is, nothing about this premise remotely required the filmmakers to trash Fallen Kingdom’ssetup. The apparent intention is to isolate the protagonists, putting them beyond immediate help when the mission inevitably meets supersized-saurian obstacles, and the characters have to fight to survive and escape the equator. Requiring Zora and company to head to a remote, wild forbidden zone (where they also meet a shipwrecked family led by a dad who cavalierly sailed them all into dino-danger) is meant to put them all in mortal peril, and out of easy rescue range.

But that framing doesn’t require the dinosaurs everywhere else on Earth to die off. Rebirth’s shallow, surface-level science could just as easily claim that history’s biggest dinosaurs, the ones Martin’s project requires, can only survive in areas with plenty of space and no human competition. That means deep waters, high mountains, and jungles with plenty of prey that isn’t packing military-grade weapons. Or, given that Martin’s blood-harvesting project is secretive and illegal, and he’s worried about interference from pharma competitors, Koepp could have just as easily mandated that Zora’s mission needed to be carried out somewhere distant and difficult, where no one could plausibly spy on the work.

At the same time, Rebirth informs us over and over and over again that humanity has utterly lost interest in dinosaurs. Paleontologist Dr. Henry Loomis (Jonathan Bailey) mopes that over the course of five years of worldwide dino occupation, his museum exhibit on dinosaurs, which once had people standing in around-the-block lines to try to get in, is now gathering dust and being dismantled to make room for something new. Relegating dinosaurs to a boring landscape feature that no one cares about feels weirdly undermining for Rebirth’s energy, and defeatist for the franchise as a whole. It’s also just as unnecessary for Rebirth’s storyline.

“Humanity is easily bored and needs newer, bigger, nastier dinosaurs” has been a mainstay theme in the Jurassic Park franchise since the first Jurassic World movie in 2015. But it remains the Jurassic movies’ most implausible beat. Even in a franchise that features bioengineered velociraptors that can open doors and a six-limbed T-rex that snatches a helicopter out of the sky, the one really unbelievable element in the whole series is that people are bored with the building-sized predators that keep reemerging to gobble up anyone who messes with them.

In the real world, the fascination with dinosaurs has driven seven movies and two TV shows in the Jurassic franchise alone. Also in the real world, people are fascinated by anything dangerous or lethal. The constant drumbeat of “Dinosaurs are boring now” running throughout the Jurassic World movies in particular has started to feel sour and sneering — half a cynical indictment of humanity’s shallowness and fickleness, half an odd dismissal of the franchise itself. While every Jurassic movie tries to up the ante on the previous ones, with bigger, more violent creatures and more intense humans-trying-not-to-get-eaten action, the overemphasized “dinosaurs, yawn” refrain is working directly against the awe and wonder Steven Spielberg leaned on in the first Jurassic Park, where paleontologist Dr. Alan Grant (Sam Neill) nearly weeps upon seeing living dinos for the first time.

So what to make of Jurassic Park Rebirth? Koepp and Edwards try to deliver dinosaur thrills while reminding the audience again and again that dinosaurs aren’t thrilling. And they exploit the excitement of human-vs.-prehistoric-beast face-offs, while unnecessarily shutting down other writers’ options for where to stage those face-offs in future.

These choices come across as arbitrary and short-sighted, like deliberately breaking a tool because you don’t need it for a particular project, without thinking about whether anyone else might want it down the line. Simultaneously pooh-poohing Spielbergian wonder and the franchise’s biggest plot shift to date doesn’t particularly hurt Rebirth, which gets by fine on its own straightforward, familiar action story. Reversing course on the series’ most game-changing development, on the other hand, seems like a failure of both nerve and imagination — especially with so little reason behind the change.

It seems ironic that this installment in the franchise is called “Rebirth” when it’s doing so little to reimagine the inevitable Jurassic movies to come, and doing so much to close them off.

From Polygon via this RSS feed

Microsoft’s Game Pass subscription is likely the best deal around: For a fraction of the price of a full game, you get access to hundreds of titles every month, some of which are brand new. But when video games cost millions to make, and news of studio layoffs are constant, you don’t need to look at an Xbox balance sheet to know the numbers aren’t adding up for a service where the introductory price is a mere dollar. This dissonance is at the heart of a recent discussion on social media site X, where Raphael Colantonio, founder of Arkane Studios, has spent the last few days breaking down why the service is arguably doing more harm than good.

“I think Gamepass is an unsustainable model that has been increasingly damaging the industry for a decade, subsidized by MS’s ‘infinite money,’ but at some point reality has to hit,” Colantonio said in a reply to a post from a follower. “I don’t think GP can co-exist with other models, they’ll either kill everyone else, or give up.”

According to a Bloomberg report in 2024, Microsoft spends a billion dollars a year to get third-party games on its subscription service. That’s in addition to the billions the console-maker has spent acquiring marquee studios like Bethesda Softworks and Activision Blizzard.

For contrast, the most recent numbers for users set the tally at 35 million Game Pass subscriptions, some of which include the people who are only paying a dollar or otherwise bought the subscription through one of its periodic sales. The service went up in price a year ago, which means that up until somewhat recently, Game Pass was making even less money than it’s making now. At first blush, these numbers seem promising inasmuch as they suggest that the service is growing. In 2022, Game Pass had a reported 25 million subscribers. But it’s worth noting that in 2023, Microsoft shifted all existing Xbox Live Gold subscribers to a lower tier of Game Pass subscriptions. This would suggest that Game Pass has actually lost subscribers over the last few years, which coincides with an admission from Phil Spencer in 2022 that subscriptions are slowing down on console.

Though it may appear nonsensical, this approach is a tried and true model in the world of tech. Services like Uber, for example, spend years operating at a loss until they capture the entire market. Once the competition is obliterated, the product in question can move freely in ways that might hurt the consumer. Prices can go up, the service could get worse, and so on — but at that point, users already rely on the service and there are no other viable options. Similarly, while other companies have attempted their own versions of subscription models, none of them have managed to amass the userbase Game Pass has thus far. What appears to be a good deal now may, in fact, be a ticking time bomb.

Add in the fact that people are spending way less on games in 2025 than last year, and that Microsoft has undergone multiple rounds of layoffs that have shuttered entire studios and fired thousands of workers in the last year alone, and it starts to paint an ugly picture for an industry that’s already in crisis. It’s a worrying trend that might illuminate why publishers are greenlighting fewer games and taking fewer risks: A game can sell millions, and the studio still might be shut down. The mere existence of Game Pass cuts into those numbers, which could then motivate some studios to take deals with the service just to be safe. That’s guaranteed money and visibility over the murky uncertainty of releasing a game into the void.

Colantonio’s post has unsurprisingly lit a fuse on social media, where developers and gamers alike are chiming in. Some creatives in the industry agree with Colantonio’s assessment. “The infinite money thing never made any sense,” responded Larian Studios director of publishing Michael Douse.

But for the people on the other side of the equation — gamers — the Game Pass critique has gone down poorly. Some of the replies to Colantonio’s post have gotten ugly, but rather than presenting an actual argument, the exchange has devolved into potshots. Some point out that Colantonio has worked on titles that are available on Game Pass. It certainly doesn’t help that text-based social media strips away tone and makes it easy to dehumanize the person on the other side of the exchange.

Still, Colantonio has spent time trying to reason with people who are misreading his post as an attack on people who subscribe to the service. “I understand gamers like it: it’s a great deal, but the maths don’t work for GP, it only works because MS injects billions into it to make it a good deal for the players… for now,” he wrote in one thread.

“I understand, you can look at it just from your standpoint, but when a deal is too good, there is a reason that might reveal itself later and will hurt everyone including you,” he wrote in another. “At the moment you have access to a fair amount of good games for a fraction of the actual cost.”

Part of what complicates this conversation is the knowledge that for all of its shortcomings, Game Pass has been a boon to some studios that might have otherwise had trouble finding funding or garnering an audience. Becoming available on the service puts you in front of millions of eyeballs, and guarantees mention on articles that detail what’s new and noteworthy on the service. Other times, being on Game Pass gives titles another shot at finding an audience. Games like Sea of Thieves and No Man’s Sky saw an influx of players after hitting Game Pass, for example, despite already being available beforehand and largely offering the same experience once there. I know that I’m more likely to give an indie game a try if it hits Game Pass.

Despite the trolls, there are definitely people who understand Colantonio is saying. But when games are starting to cost $79.99, the price of accessories is going up, and with no shortage of microtransactions to consider, it’s no wonder people feel so strongly about the value of Game Pass.

“I’m sure it isn’t good for devs but if my wage isn’t going up but my rent is and so are gas prices and groceries then I’ll look for the best deal,” one user said. “And if it stops being a good deal then I’ll find an alternative.” Colantonio’s response? The underlined 100 emoji.

From Polygon via this RSS feed

The second and final season of Netflix’s adaptation of Neil Gaiman’s The Sandman, which kicked off July 3, is the first project to move forward since the writer was accused of sexual assault, leading to pauses in production on Good Omens season 3, Disney’s adaptation of The Graveyard Book, and many other adaptations of his work. Fans of the series will have to grapple with the classic question of whether they can separate the art from the artist, who has denied the allegations, while Sandman showrunner Allan Heinberg has walked the delicate tightrope of staying faithful to the source material without causing any fresh controversies.

That’s a tough process, given that some readers have always had issues with Gaiman’s portrayal of dark subjects, including rape and torture, as well as his treatment of queer characters. Originally published in 1993, The Sandman arc A Game of You was one of the first major comic series to include a trans character: Wanda, the best friend of Barbie, a young woman connected to a vibrant dream realm that starts affecting the waking world. Wanda is tasked with protecting Barbie’s slumbering body while her neighbors, the lesbian couple Hazel and Foxglove, enter that dream realm to help save it, with the help of the ancient witch Thessaly.

While some readers found that representation deeply meaningful, others took issue with Wanda’s treatment in the story. She’s plagued by nightmares of being forced to have bottom surgery, and denied the chance to enter Barbie’s dream world because Thessaly and the Moon say Wanda is actually a man. Wanda then dies and is dead-named by her family at her funeral. Afterward, she appears as a woman in a dream Barbie has — which some critics have considered a classic example of a tragic queer character arc, and a toxic message suggesting death is a happy ending for a trans character.

Season 2 of The Sandman keeps the narrative focused on Dream (Tom Sturridge), which meant cutting a planned adaptation of A Game of You. But Heinberg felt he had to keep Wanda in the series, given how recent movies and TV shows have been pulling queer themes and characters.

“You can imagine the headlines: ‘Netflix skips the trans storyline because Netflix has a trans problem’ or ‘the makers of The Sandman are transphobic’ or ‘they’re reacting to the conservative politics in the country,’” Heinberg told Polygon in a Zoom interview. “None of that was true. I said, ‘I’m happy to skip A Game of You as long as Wanda comes with us.”

Heinberg read The Sandman books as they came out, and as a young gay man, he felt the representation in A Game of You “was extraordinary.” So he slid Wanda (Indya Moore) into the Sandman arc Brief Lives, where she replaces the minor character of Ruby, who serves as a chauffeur and bodyguard for Dream and his younger sister Delirium (Esmé Creed-Miles) while they search for their lost brother Destruction (Barry Sloane).

“She’s certainly much more adept and in some ways wiser than Dream and Delirium,” Heinberg said. “She’s able to navigate the world more ably than they are. She teaches them about themselves and about their relationship with each other. She’s enormously generous to them. And her transness is something that she shares with them because it’s a way to talk about her own family dynamics, because they’re in the midst of their own family conflict. But it’s not her story. It doesn’t define who she is.”

The three characters share a drink while Dream and Delirium debate the wisdom of their quest to reconnect with a brother who doesn’t want to be found. Wanda explains that she became estranged from her conservative family when she started hormone therapy, but would still be happy to hear that they cared about her.

“I love what Indya Moore brought to this role,” Heinberg said. “Indya invested Wanda with a lot of her own biography. I hope [viewers] fall in love with her the way that we did. She was an incredible collaborator.”

Skipping A Game of You gave Heinberg more time to develop another controversial plot in The Sandman: Dream’s relationship with Nada (Deborah Oyelade in her one brief appearance in season 1, Umulisa Gahiga in season 2), the queen of the first human civilization. Nada and Dream fall in love even though romance between humans and the Endless is forbidden, causing Nada’s city to be destroyed. In the comics, Nada responds by killing herself. Dream continues pursuing her even after her death, and when she rejects him, he condemns her to spend 10,000 years in Hell.

“I think the comic book version is absolutely legit,” Heinberg said. “That is a version of Dream, but it’s a version of Dream that is very hard to understand by modern standards, and certainly to continue to root for him and love him. I was determined to write him in a way that I could understand the choices he was making at the time, where his pride was wounded, and [Nada] feels guilt for what she has done to her people by succumbing to her feelings for him. She [feels she] needs to pay the price.”

In The Sandman season 2, Lucifer (Gwendoline Christie) explains that Hell is a place for humans to receive the punishment that they feel they deserve. This version of Nada condemns herself to Hell, and Dream sends her there because he’s angry she wouldn’t stay with him. Dream is pushed to make amends by his sister Death (Kirby), who points out he was the one who put Nada in an impossible situation.

“He’s still being a brat and he’s still being terrible, but [Nada is] sort of dictating the punishment,” Heinberg said. “He realizes with 10,000 years experience, and I hope some empathy, that he behaved abominably. I’m not sure that it’s any less terrible in our version. I just wanted the audience to follow why he was doing what he does.”

One of the main consequences of A Game of You in the comics is that Dream falls in love with Thessaly, who breaks up with him after a brief affair. He falls into a deep depression until Delirium comes to him with the quest to find Destruction. With the A Game of You arc cut, Thessaly didn’t have as much place in the story, so Heinberg rewrote the arc so Dream is moping that Nada rejected him again after he saves her from Hell. Dream only goes to the waking world with Delirium because he wants to find Nada there.

Heinberg said he knew he had found his Delirium as soon as he saw Creed-Miles’ audition tape. The youngest member of the Endless is introduced at a family gathering in the first episode of season 2 in her classic outfit from the comics, wearing fishnets and big boots like she’s just come from a club or party. But Creed-Miles worked with costume designer Sarah Arthur to create her own look for the character, centering around a white Victorian coat decorated with flowers.

“Esme is very fashion-conscious, and she’s got amazing taste,” Heinberg said. “Esme studied the comics and she felt like Delirium in that coat. (Director Jamie Childs) and I were not exactly sure about the coat, but the minute you saw Esme as Delirium in the coat [it felt like] that’s who she is.”

Episodes 1-6 of The Sandman season 2 are now streaming on Netflix. The second half of the season will launch on July 24, followed by the bonus episode Death: The High Cost of Living on July 31.

From Polygon via this RSS feed

As Warner Bros. Games reworks its gaming department, the company has released DC Worlds Collide, a free-to-play mobile RPG, on Monday, July 7. The game is a squad-based experience set in the DC Universe, where players can assemble their favorite heroes and villains from over 70 playable characters to engage in 3D turn-based battles against challenging enemies. DC Worlds Collide features daily events, PvP, and 12 other solo and competitive game modes such as Evil Falls and Warworld.

The game will feature micro-transactions, allowing users to acquire new combatants and costumes; this feature includes an upcoming tie-in with James Gunn’s Superman, with the DCU version of Supes being the first new character to release on July 9. Other characters from the film, such as Guy Gardner, Mister Terrific, and Krypto, will arrive later in the summer.

“With DC Worlds Collide, we are giving players a mobile experience with the iconic characters and stories fans have come to love in the DC universe,” said Katelynd LaVallee, vice president and studio head, Warner Bros. Games San Francisco. “This game puts the power in players’ hands – from assembling custom squads and unleashing powerful moves, to exploring story-driven missions and going head-to-head in PvP battles. There’s something for every kind of player, and we are excited to see their unique character selections, team builds, and strategies.”

Additionally, the game will feature a story based on two DC Comics storylines: Trinity War and Forever Evil. Both storylines were part of the New 52 relaunch initiative, with Trinity War beginning in August 2013 and Forever Evil starting in November 2013.

Roughly, the Trinity War crossover event is centered around Pandora’s Box, held by a mysterious character called, you guessed it, Pandora. After Superman opens the box, he becomes corrupted by the artifact’s influence, prompting the Justice League, Justice League Dark, and Justice League of America to attempt to seal the box. However, the Crime Syndicate of Earth-3 (an evil version of the Justice League) flees from the box and begins plotting evil machinations, one of which results in the “death” of these three Justice League teams.

Forever Evil picks up where Trinity War left off, with the Crime Syndicate leaving Earth-3, setting out to destroy DC’s main Earth. With the heroes gone, it’s up to the villains to mount a resistance against the Syndicate, and they band together with Lex Luthor to form the Injustice League, who eventually thwart the evildoers’ plans.

DC Worlds Collide fuses parts of both crossover storylines into one tale, reimagined for the mobile game. But one thing remains the same: players will need to band together a group of super-powered beings to stop a new iteration of the Crime Syndicate before they conquer the world.

DC Worlds Collide is available now on the App Store for iOS, Google Play for Android, and Google Play Games for PC.

From Polygon via this RSS feed

Fans at Anime Expo in Los Angeles were treated to a bevy of announcements, world premieres, and release dates for some of the most anticipated anime slated to release shortly. Some high-profile titles like Cyberpunk: Edgerunners, Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End, and Bleach: The Thousand-Year Blood War are set to return. Meanwhile, titles like Hiromu Arakawa’s (Full Metal Alchemist) Daemons of the Shadow Realm (Yomi no Tsugai) and a sequel series to The Apothecary Diaries have been announced to be in the works.

Check out all the anime major announcements to come out of Anime Expo 2025 below!

Cyberpunk: Edgerunners 2

Release: Unknown (in production)

Where to watch: Netflix

Producers: CD Projekt RED and studio TRIGGER

David is dead, but Night City lives on. Get ready to return to the neon lights of the world of Cyberpunk: Edgerunners with a new 10-episode series that tells a separate story from that of season 1, but with the same excellent creative team behind it.

Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End season 2

Release: January 2026

Where to watch: Crunchyroll

Producers: Madhouse

One of the hottest releases of 2024 is scheduled to return, continuing Frieren, Fern, and Stark’s journey to the land of the dead as they embark on the greatest adventure: knowing each other and understanding what it means to be alive. Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End is slated for a January 2026 simulcast exclusively on Crunchyroll.

Black Clover season 2

Release: Unknown (in production)

Where to watch: Crunchyroll

Producers: Studio Pierrot

Fans have been waiting for a continuation of Black Clover for five years, and on the franchise’s 10th anniversary, creator Yuki Tabata announced the series’ return. Season 2 is expected to follow Asta and Yuno as they strive to become the Wizard King, focusing on their adventures within the Magic Knights and their battles against powerful enemies.

Bleach: The Thousand-Year Blood War final season

Release: 2026

Where to watch: Hulu

Producers: Studio Pierrot

Although it’s been delayed, and director Hikaru Murata apologised for the long wait, the final season of Bleach: The Thousand-Year Blood War is set to arrive in 2026. The announcement comes via a promo poster released during the con, showcasing a spoiler-heavy look at one of Ichigo’s new transformations.

The Apothecary Diaries sequel

Release: Unknown (in production)

Where to watch: Crunchyroll

Producers: TOHO Animation and OLM

After the final episode of The Apothecary Diaries season 2 aired in Japan, the anime’s official channels released a teaser video confirming a sequel is in the works, set to unfold in a new land. It’s not clear, however, what exactly this new project will be about, and if it will continue adapting Natsu Hyūga and Touko Shino’s The Apothecary Diaries (Kusuriya no Hitorigoto) light novel series.

Mushoku Tensei: Jobless Reincarnation season 3

Release: 2026

Where to watch: Crunchyroll

Producers: Studio Bind

Mushoku Tensei: Jobless Reincarnation Season 3 is set to stream on Crunchyroll in 2026, continuing Rudeus’s isekai journey. The new season was first announced in June 2024, following the Season 2 finale in Japan. Mushoku Tensei: Jobless Reincarnation is often noted as the grandfather of modern isekai, and judging from the trailer, the animation and art design look to complement its elite status.

Re:Zero season 4

Release: 2026

Where to watch: Crunchyroll

Producers: White Fox

Re:Zero -Starting Life in Another World- Season 4 is set to premiere in 2026, with Masahiro Shinohara returning to direct the new season at animation studio White Fox, continuing his work from Season 3. The season will see Subaru and his companions, including Anastasia and Julius, traveling to the Pleiades Watchtower.

Yomi no Tsugai anime adaptation

Release: 2026

Where to watch: Crunchyroll

Producers: Studio Bones

An anime adaptation of Hiromu Arakawa’s Daemons of the Shadow Realm (Yomi no Tsugai) is in the works from Studio Bones. The story centers on Yuru, a boy living peacefully in a remote mountain village under the protection of two stone guardians and his twin sister, Asa. But while Yuru enjoys a quiet life, Asa is mysteriously confined in a cage, carrying out a secretive “duty” for the village. Why is Asa imprisoned, and what hidden truths lie beneath the surface of their seemingly serene home? The series comes from Arakawa, best known for the acclaimed Fullmetal Alchemist.

Fist of the North Star anime remake

Release: 2026

Where to watch: TBA

Producers: Warner Bros Japan Anime

To celebrate its 40th anniversary, the new Fist of the North Star CG-based anime was announced. Staying truer to the source material, the story follows Kenshiro, a master and rightful heir of a lethal martial art, as he roams a post-apocalyptic wasteland, defending the helpless from brutal gangs and ruthless warlords. Unfortunately, much like the 2016 adaptation of Berserk, the CG-based art style is not befitting of its legendary status.

Record of Ragnarok season 3

Release: December 2025

Where to watch: Netflix

Producers: Yumeta Company and Maru Animation

Based on the manga by Shinya Umemura and Takumi Fukui, the anime centers on a high-stakes tournament where gods face off against legendary figures from human history. However, Record of Ragnarok’s anime faced criticism in the past for its lackluster animation. This time, however, the series is under the direction of Hatsumi Kouichi — known for Deadman Wonderland and Tokyo Revengers — so viewers can expect a more dynamic visual experience and fewer “PowerPoint-style” scenes.

Beastars final season part 2

Release: 2026

Where to watch: Netflix

Producers: Studio Orange

BEASTARS Final Season Part 2 will conclude Legoshi and Haru’s story. Directed by Shinichi Matsumi with scripts by Nanami Higuchi, the series follows a gray wolf navigating love and identity in a society of anthropomorphic animals divided by predator-prey instincts.

From Polygon via this RSS feed

A climate change activist was arrested after spray-painting Apple’s 5th Avenue store as part of a protest against Big Tech’s “climate hypocrisy.” Protestors from the Extinction Rebellion environmental group staged a demonstration at the New York City storefront on Sunday, and one individual spray-painted “Boycott” beneath the Apple logo on the building’s entrance, along with “Tim + Trump = Toxic.”

In a press release posted after the demonstration, Extinction Rebellion called attention to the appearance of Big Tech CEOs at President Donald Trump’s inauguration, including Apple’s Tim Cook, Google’s Sundar Pichai, and Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg. Extinction Rebellion pointed out that the executives “once claimed to be big supporters of the Paris Agreement” but are now “backing an administration that’s gutting environmental rules and funneling billions of dollars to fossil fuels.”

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A pair of Extinction Rebellion activists also stood inside the Apple store to call out the company’s relationship with the “tyrant” Trump administration. “Apple claims to support climate action. Apple claims to be good for the environment, and they continue to support climate denial, and ICE raids on your community,” one of the protesters shouted. “Tim Cook lies and people die.” The protestors followed up with a chant: “Dump Trump, Apple!”

Extinction Rebellion, which has staged protests in New York City in the past, brought up the electricity demand that’s expected with the growth of AI in the tech industry, too. Last month, Google’s annual sustainability report revealed that its carbon emissions grew 11 percent last year to 11.5 million tons of pollution, and energy usage rose at its data centers. Microsoft is similarly moving further from its climate goals as it invests more in AI, which is estimated to consume more power than Bitcoin by the end of this year.

“In 2023, Tim Cook called combatting climate change one of the most urgent priorities of our time,” Miles Grant, an Extinction Rebellion spokesperson, said in the press release. “Fast forward to 2025, and he’s donating to Trump—the man leading the charge to roll back all climate progress. They’ve betrayed their customers and the planet at the most critical moment in human history.”

Apple didn’t immediately respond to The Verge’s request for comment.

From The Verge via this RSS feed

It’s summertime, which means it’s time for our annual grilling episode. In past years, we’ve talked to the leaders of Big Green Egg, Traeger, and Blackstone, and it’s always fascinating how those companies have the same kinds of problems and ideas as any of the tech companies we have on the show.

In fact, it’s funny — in what can only be described as a perfectly Decoder situation, I really wanted to have Blackstone CEO Roger Dahle back on the show this year because his griddle company is such a success that he’s in the process of buying Weber, the biggest name in the space. But he’s stuck in antitrust review so he couldn’t come on the show. Grilling episodes, man — they’re the best.

Anyhow, all that means is that I finally had the opportunity to talk to SharkNinja CEO Mark Barrocas. We’ve wanted to have SharkNinja on the show for years now, mostly because it has the best name of any company that we’ve ever had on Decoder. The name perfectly describes the company’s structure: there’s Shark, and there’s Ninja. And, just in time for our grilling episode, the Ninja division of Mark’s business launched its first grill, the FlexFlame, earlier this year.

Listen to Decoder, a show hosted by The Verge’s Nilay Patel about big ideas — and other problems. Subscribe here!

But as you’ll hear Mark and I really get into, SharkNinja is really a product design company more than anything. It has what you could only describe as a kind of relentless approach to product development — SharkNinja launches 25 brand new products a year across dozens of categories in countries around the world. So while we do spend a lot of time talking about the decision to launch the FlexFlame grill and what the business of grilling looks like for SharkNinja, you’ll hear Mark and I talk a lot about the company’s broader philosophy around product development across all of its different categories.

That’s because a lot of that philosophy, which was developed back in the late 2000s for markets like vacuum cleaners and blenders, is now being applied to everything from slushy machines and pizza ovens to LED face masks. You’ll hear Mark explain that they have a product engineering and design team of more than 1,300 people around the world dedicated to figuring out new twists on household staples. It’s also remarkable how many of the products are built around fan technology, which comes up a few times in this conversation.

In fact, a key component of the new FlexFlame grill is a fan that lets it do a lot of different things. But the grill industry, as you might know, is a fiercely competitive market with a lot of brand loyalty, and product features alone might not be enough. I can’t tell you how many furious reader comments and emails we received when the CEO of Big Green Egg took a shot at Weber on last year’s grill episode. People love their grills, and they will fiercely defend them.

So I really wanted to ask Mark how his style of product development worked in the context of gas grills — and whether he’s envisioning Ninja’s outdoor grilling products as premium devices you keep for a long time, or as ones that might rust and get replaced after a few years as you would an iPhone.

Mark and I also spent a good deal of time at the end talking about marketing. SharkNinja spends more than $700 million a year on advertising, a great deal of which now goes to product placement and content creators on Instagram and TikTok. You’ll hear Mark recount his history of selling products on television infomercials back in the 2000s, and how that’s now evolved into having his appliances become viral sensations online.

Mark has a lot of thoughts about the state of the creator economy, which is already in the process of getting totally upended by cheap and limitless AI video, and whether he sees it teetering on the edge of a crash that could transform how he markets and sells his most popular products.

This episode is a real ride — Mark’s background from infomercials really comes through at times, and I think you can tell that I found myself just trying to hang on throughout this one.

Okay: SharkNinja CEO Mark Barrocas. Here we go.

This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

Mark Barrocas, you’re the CEO of SharkNinja. Welcome to Decoder.

Thanks so much for having me.

I am really excited to talk to you. I’m fascinated by SharkNinja as a company. It’s been around for a long time, but you’re having a bit of a renaissance lately. On top of that, this is our annual summer grill episode, and you guys just launched a new line of grills. So it’s perfect timing. Couldn’t be happier about it.

Great, really happy to be here.

Let’s talk about SharkNinja as a company to set the stage a bit. I think a lot of people know Shark, and a lot of people know Ninja. You’ve started marketing the main company a little bit more recently. Tell me about this company. Why have the two brands? How is it structured? How do you think about SharkNinja as a company?

As you said, the business behind these two great brands is SharkNinja. People know the Shark brand. We built Shark into an over $3 billion [a year] global business. We have the Ninja brand, which is over a $3 billion [a year] global business. Now, we’re actively marketing the SharkNinja business behind these two great brands, and trying to explain to consumers that we’re problem solvers. That’s what our business is all about. We find problems that others don’t see, and we solve problems that others can’t.

We can get more into how we do that and why that’s unique to SharkNinja. We’re in 37 product categories. We sell in 27 countries around the world to everyone, from a high school kid doing a TikTok or an Instagram video about our products all the way up to a 60-year-old guy who’s focused on outdoor grilling or smoking. So, we’ve got a big demographic base and big socioeconomic group of consumers.

The idea that you’re going to market the central company, SharkNinja, as problem solvers comes up. There are lots of big household brands that exist in that space. OXO is very famous for this In the kitchen, where everything is somewhat uniquely designed, a little bit different. It’s  not a direct competitor to you, but the marketing there feels familiar. This is going to be the highest bit of design product that you can get. There are lots of others that play the same game. Is that what you’re thinking about? Do you want people to think of you as a design company or is it something else?

No. We want people to think of us as a consumer problem-solving company. You can focus on consumer products and look at it through a technology lens. You can say, “Hey, I have this core technology, and I’m going to take it and  apply it to two or three or four different categories of products that might be applicable.”

Our core technology is consumer problem-solving. We’ve got a big team of ethnographic, consumer insights researchers. We’re mining consumer data, online reviews, social media content, and comments. We’re in hundreds of consumer homes around the world every year. We’re in restaurants. We’re in commercial environments looking at how people clean or cook there.

We’re trying to find either a problem that a consumer has that they may not even know that they have — and we can talk about examples of that — or we’re trying to find things that the consumer is doing outside of the home that they’re not doing inside of the home. Ultimately, I think those two different things become the germs of innovation and ideas that we then have our 1,300 engineers around the globe focus on. And you say, “Well, hold on, vacuum cleaners have been around for 100 years. Hasn’t every problem been solved?”

I’ll give you a great anecdote. We went into 100 consumer homes, and we watched consumers vacuum. During the cleaning session, about eight or 10 of those turned over the vacuum, took a knife or a scissor, sliced the hair off the brush roll, pulled the hair off, threw it in the garbage, and finished their cleaning session. At the end of the cleaning session, we said to them, “Is there anything you do to change your vacuum cleaner?” They said, “No, it works great.” We said, “Well, hold on a minute. How about that time when you turned it over and you nearly cut your hand and you sliced it?” They started apologizing for the product. They started saying, “Well, I have two daughters with long hair. I have three dogs.”

A consumer works around the problems of the product. Well, for us, that becomes an idea. So, we go back to our engineers, and we say, “Can we develop a vacuum brush roll that doesn’t wrap hair?” Eighteen months later, we came out with Shark’s Self-cleaning Brushroll, and it became the number one selling vacuum cleaner in the United States.

That’s just a little example. We do that in category after category after category, which is why we’re not limited to two or three or four categories. We’re in 37 different product categories in and outside the home.

There’s a lot there that I want to unpack. You’re talking about a lot of upfront investment in product development. Many of your competitors don’t do that. They really do take core technology and reapply it in different categories. Many of your competitors are based in China. They’re selling on Amazon, and they’re selling clones of your products. They don’t have to front that investment, and they can keep their costs low. How do you think about that dynamic? What you’re describing requires you to constantly front the cost of innovation that will almost certainly get copied at higher rates across the board.

SharkNinja has two main competitive advantages. One is disruptive consumer innovation. We spend 7 percent of our sales on R&D and innovation in an industry where competitors spend 1 percent of sales or less on innovation. We bring 25 new, ground-up products to market a year. I’m not talking about a new product as a new color or button. These are ground-up, brand new products across so many different product categories.

We enter into at least two new product categories that we’ve never been in before every year. Before last year, we were never in the skincare business. We were never in the outdoor cooler business. Last year, we went into four new product categories. We made an LED, infrared, cryo face mask, which was our first FDA-approved medical device. We launched a slushy machine that went viral on social media. We made our first outdoor pizza oven. You can’t think of more diverse categories. The common stream through all of those is that they all solve a consumer problem.

I think this is a great time for the Decoder questions. Usually, we talk about some controversy at the top, but you’re describing something that’s so interesting that I think the structure will actually help explain a lot. How is SharkNinja structured? How many people do you have, and how is it organized?

We’ve got nearly 4,000 people around the globe. From a structure standpoint, we have an executive management team that is half homegrown, with  people who have been with me for 17 years. That’s rounded out with other folks who have joined the organization and have been able to bring scale or global experience into their areas, like product development, engineering, sales, and marketing.

Those folks have been with me a long time. We’ve really helped build the SharkNinja secret sauce together. We’ve rounded that out with great talent from other great companies and with other great experiences to build a really strong management team.

How is that organized? Do you have a Shark division and a Ninja division? Is it all one company? How’s that expressed?

From a functional standpoint, the administrative roles are all corporate SharkNinja. There’s a corporate CEO, a corporate general counsel, a corporate COO, and a corporate people and culture leader. When you start to get into the individual teams, we break it up. There’s Shark Home, which involves cleaning, home environment products, fans, and air purifiers. We have Shark Beauty business, which is haircare and skincare. Then we have the Ninja business, which is everything that we do within Ninja. So, that’s how we break down the business. There are two brands, but inside of those two brands is Shark Home, Shark Beauty, and Ninja.

If I look at that broadly and I just look at your competitive set, Shark and Dyson have always been back and forth. There’s been some lawsuits, some patent disputes. Some of those have settled over time. There’s a lot there.

To your point, Dyson invented fan technology and it tried to express it across a number of different products that led them into beauty. It got into hairdryers, then expanded into the rest of the beauty products, and it’s done well. How are you thinking about Shark? You started with your core technology, you ended up at beauty, and now you’re going to do the rest of it?

If I go back 17 years, we were a small business. We were a $150 million [a year] business. I’d love to say that there was a grand plan of how to become a $6 billion global business without acquiring a dollar of revenue.

Could you tell me? That would be great.

To be honest with you, we just wanted to make great products that consumers loved. If I go back to 2008, what we realized was that the consumer was getting more and more power in terms of being educated before they made a purchase.

In 2008, there was a thing called Consumer Reports. You opened up Consumer Reports and it told you the eight vacuum cleaners to buy. If your vacuum cleaner wasn’t listed in there, you were going to have a really hard time gaining awareness. What my partner and I at the time realized was that consumer online reviews would be the great equalizer. You hear that today and say, “Well, what great equalizer is that?” Well, back then, people often bought from one brand or based on an expert recommendation. What started to happen was consumers started going online and started writing honest reviews about their experiences with products.

Soon, consumers weren’t going to open up Consumer Reports before they would go out and make a purchase. They were going to go online and look at 10 million of their closest friends to figure out which vacuum cleaner or blender to buy. And they were going to get honest opinions. That is one of the major drivers of our business. If I go back 15 years, we built our business one five-star review at a time. So, if you had a great experience with a Shark vacuum, you say, “Hey, I might try Shark’s air purifiers that just came out,” or, “They got into haircare? I might try their haircare products.”

It’s interesting. What we look at is what gives us the right to be in the category. The right to be in the category is not because you have a brand that you can just put your name on because you see a sales opportunity. What are we bringing to the consumer that they can’t get anywhere else? What’s an unmet need that the consumer has? We set a very high bar on that within the company. There have been categories that we worked on for 10 years and never brought a product to market because, ultimately, we came to the conclusion that the consumer and world don’t need us. So, being anchored on this beacon and asking what gives us the right to be in the category has led us very methodically to the next opportunity and the next opportunity and the next opportunity.

What’s one that you’ve been rejecting for 10 years?

I loved the power tools business. I think the Shark brand can translate into power tools. We used to think of ourselves as in the home. We’re making a lot of products now for outside the home. I thought power tools were a great opportunity. We’ve tried it three, four… Ultimately, we got to the place and said, “You know what? We’re not bringing anything that’s game-changing or solving a massive problem that somebody else isn’t solving.” And we decided to go back to the drawing board.

I will tell you also that there are categories that we tried for eight years, and we eventually cracked the code. An example of that is the carpet extraction and stain cleaner category. We became the number one selling vacuum brand in the United States in 2014. Ever since, retailers and consumers would say, “Why aren’t you getting into the carpet cleaning business? That seems so logical from a brand extension standpoint.” The honest answer was that we never came up with something that was great.

We finally cracked the code on that about two and a half years ago with a product called the Shark CarpetXpert. It cleans carpets better than anything else on the market. It’s much more lightweight, much easier to use. It does it with an attachment called the Stainstriker. In a short period of time, we gained over 20 percent market share in that category.

This shows us that just because we might bang our head against the wall a couple of times doesn’t mean we won’t eventually crack the code. We may figure it out. When we do figure it out, the innovation really connects with the other competitive mode of the business, which is creating viral demand for our products. We spend 11 percent of sales on advertising in an industry that spends very little on advertising. So, you’ve got a disruptive product that solves a consumer problem, and you’re able to go out and talk about it on things like social media, experiential events, and TV. When those things come together and you get it right, it really connects with the consumer. Not just in the United States but globally.

That’s a really fascinating piece of the SharkNinja story, and I think it tells a bigger story about the advertising market, particularly on the internet, than anyone really is giving credit to you. But I want to stay in corporate structure for one more second. So you’ve got Shark Home, Shark Beauty, and Ninja. Ninja feels like kitchen products?

Kitchen and outdoor. We do outdoor cooking, we do outdoor coolers. Yeah, kitchen and outdoors.

At the company, you’ve got 1,300 engineers. Are they split between divisions? Do you have central engineering? Do they compete for resources? How does that work?

We have 1,300 engineers today around the globe. They’re based in Boston, London, and Asia. There are certain functions within the company, like electrical engineering, that might go across different categories because they’re subject matter experts. But it’s not just the number of engineers that we have. It’s the competency of those engineers. We’ve got mechanical engineers, electrical engineers, mechatronics, app IoT, and software engineers.

I think you’d be really surprised if you went inside one of our products. There’s an enormous amount of technology in a product that retails for $199. If I went back seven or eight years, most of it would be mechanical engineering. Today, the software team and the electronics team, together with mechanical engineering, have allowed us to bring so much more functionality to the product, allowing the consumer to have so much versatility with it than they ever were able to before.

So, when the Ninja team says they’ve got an idea for a gas grill and they need a bunch of software engineers to work on the app to run the FlexFlame system, and those same engineers are being pulled towards the next project, how do you divvy up those resources?

It’s a challenge, But here’s what’s super exciting about it. If you’re an engineer and you work at a company that has one product category that you sell, eventually after three or five years, you get to the point where you say, “Look, I’ve gotten tired. If I want to go to another opportunity or I want to work on something else, I have to find a job in another company.” At SharkNinja, you can find your next job within SharkNinja. You’ve been working on vacuum cleaners for three years. You want to try something different? How about air fryers? How about outdoor cooking? How about fans? How about robots? How about hairdryers or skincare?

I think the cross pollination of engineers is so powerful for us. Our ability to  to put out an intercompany message that says, “Does anyone have experience in LED lights? Does anyone have experience in airflow technology?” To be able to see the number of experts we have internally is incredible. If you’re a company, you might have to go outside and find a whole lot of subject matter experts. We have a whole lot of subject matter experts inside that are red teaming each other’s products.

The joke I’m always making on Decoder is that if you tell me your company’s structure, I can tell you 80 percent of its problems. You’re describing two big divisions, both of which are growing and aggressively launching new products. There are some subdivisions on the inside.I’m guessing if the Ninja team steals a bunch of LED lighting engineers from the Shark team, they’re not going to be happy about that. That’s you. You’ve got to mediate that dynamic. How do you mediate those resources? How do you allocate them?

I think a lot of it comes down to the needs of the product. We really don’t look at it rigidly by if it’s a Shark product or Ninja product. We start with a product pipeline of ideas, which might have 65 ideas that we start with. Over time, we whittle that down. We might put something into a prototype, get it into a consumer’s home. We thought it was a great idea, but the consumer says they’re not interested so we throw it away.

We might just put something on packaging. We might not even put it into a prototype. We might show them a box front and say, “Hey, does this get you excited?” We might look at something and say, “It’s great, but it’s too expensive and we don’t think it’s commercially viable.” Maybe it’s too early for the consumer. Maybe there’s a problem, but the consumer doesn’t even know yet that it’s a problem.

I’ll give you an example. They just mandated composting in New York City. It’s very interesting. A New York apartment is going to have to sit there with their food scraps, putting them into this little plastic bin and this little bag. They’re going to have to wait seven days. What do you think happens to that bag on day four or five? It doesn’t smell great. So, we had some young engineers that were super passionate about solving that problem. The challenge with it though is that it’s not in enough municipalities. The consumer hasn’t engaged with it enough to realize what the problems are. So it may be something incredible but it’s two years too early.

So, we’ll put that in the parking lot, and we’ll say, “Let’s revisit that when it comes to the next product innovation cycle.” We really do look at it at the product level and not at the brand or company level. I think that’s what helps us assess how to divvy up resources.

The other thing I would say is that we use a tremendous amount of outside experts. This is a company where it does not have to be invented here. We are looking for the best and brightest people to help us solve consumer problems. In any given month, we could be working with as many as 50 outside subject-matter experts. They could be on things as little as gear systems or troubleshooting a particular heater that we might have.

That’s something that I don’t want to underestimate because at a lot of engineering companies, engineers feel like, “Hold on, you hired me to solve it, so I have to solve it.” We’re sitting here saying, “At the end of the day, we want the consumer to open up the box and enjoy the product.” The consumer doesn’t care whether you made 100 percent of the product internally or whether you brought in five subject matter experts to help. We do a really incredible job of getting the best and brightest people to help us solve these problems.

That really comes down to how you think about investing in the core technologies. I’ll just stick with Shark and the vacuum cleaners, blow dryers, and air purifiers. At the core of that technology are high-efficiency small motors. They can move a lot of air. You can express that in multiple kinds of products. That’s a very competitive segment. That’s the patent lawsuits. It’s deeply competitive.

You can go buy that core technology. Once you’ve developed it, the goal is to ramp it over time and take margin out of all that upfront cost. But you’re launching into so many new categories. You’re going out to buy lots and lots of new core technologies from 50 different subject matter experts. How do you think about managing those life cycles? Where do you think about spending the money on new technologies that will last for a long time and let you take margin out and where do you think the technology is mature, and what you need to do is actually expand the category?

It’s interesting. I’ll go back to the example that you gave on vacuum cleaners because I think that’s a good one. We have patented a no-loss suction vacuum technology, so the consumer can pick up whatever they want and won’t lose any appreciable level of suction over the life of the product. But as you start identifying the next consumer problem, you start having to then build evolutionary or add-on technologies.

I want to give you some examples that I think you might find interesting. We had great no-loss suction technology when we developed our first vacuum cleaner, which was called the Shark Navigator, We cleaned carpets better than our competition, and we did it at a fraction of the price. Those were the core things. In 2009, we found that the American consumer was really interested in cleaning carpets. That was the proxy of a great vacuum cleaner.

In 2010, we said, “Okay, what’s the next problem for us to solve?” We went into consumers’ homes, we watched them vacuum. In the homes that had stairs or multi-level homes, they would plug the vacuum in, pull the hose out, and clean the first three steps of the stairs. They would then unplug the vacuum, walk upstairs, plug it in, and clean the top three steps. The middle three steps would never get clean because the hose was never  able to reach that far. So, we looked at that and we said, “Why is the vacuum tethered to this base on the ground? What if you could lift it away, walk around with the vacuum cleaner, and have 30 feet of travel with the cord?” That product was called the Shark Navigator Lift-Away. It’s still the number-one selling vacuum cleaner in the United States. We solved the problem by having vacuums that not only cleaned on the floor but cleaned above the floor as well.

Now you might say, “Okay, hasn’t everything been developed?” Well, three years later, we want to know what’s the next problem. The next problem is cleaning under furniture. You don’t want to move the furniture. How do you clean under a bed? Imagine what under a bed looks like when you haven’t cleaned it for two years. So we developed something called Powered Lift-Away. You took the canister off the vacuum, and we had power that went down through the hose and to the nozzle. You could now take your nozzle, just like a canister vacuum, and go anywhere, under furniture or under beds. That became the number-one selling vacuum cleaner in the United States when it came out.

So you say again, “Well, has everything been invented?” A few years later, we said, “Wow, we do a great job at cleaning carpets, but we aren’t doing as great a job cleaning hard floors.” With carpets, you need a really aggressive brushroll to clean. On floors, you need to be able to pick up the fine dust. So we looked at that and realized they were in conflict with one another. What if we developed a vacuum cleaner that had two brushrolls: an aggressive brushroll that cleaned your carpets and a fluffier brushroll that could pick up the fine dust on your hard floors? That technology was called Shark DuoClean. Today, that’s still our best-selling vacuum cleaner.

So, finding the next problem and the next problem will lead you into new technology and new evolution. By the way, all of these things that I just mentioned to you are patents. They’re all things that only SharkNinja does at this point. But we’re constantly on this quest to find the next problem, and then that leads us into our innovation pipeline.

I’m going to push back on you just a little bit. I know the Decoder listeners quite well. I know what they’re saying to you in their cars as they listen. The vacuum cleaner market is pretty mature. It is ferociously competitive. There are products from LG, Samsung, Dyson, you name it that do all of these things and more in different ways. I hear what you’re saying. You see the problems and you innovate for the customers that you see and the problems they have.

But the market is competitive. How often do you spend thinking about where the market is going, where the competitors are getting ahead of you, and how to leapfrog them?

Nearly every day. This is what we do. We’re consumer problem solvers. We’re trying every day. Look, we had zero market share in the vacuum industry in 2008. Today, SharkNinja has over 40 percent market share in the upright vacuum cleaner market in the United States, which is the largest portion of the vacuum cleaner market in the US. We became number one in 2014, and we’ve never given that up. Why? Because we’re continuing to innovate and innovate.

We’re driving up the average sell price. You could buy a Shark vacuum for $129, or you could buy a Shark vacuum for $499. We are bringing the opening-price consumer up into our brand. We don’t have something for the $79 consumer, but I think the consumer looks at performance, value, quality, and innovation.

You’ve got to bring all four of those things together for the consumer. I think you might have innovation, but the consumer needs all of this and value is a huge component of it. The opening-price consumer can step up to a $129 Shark vacuum. The high-priced Sephora, Ulta consumer can buy a $499 vacuum. There is no brand that cuts across such a broad price range and such a broad feature range.

The other thing that I think we do a really effective job of is being the vacuum for you when you move into your college dorm room. We want to be the first vacuum for you when you get your first apartment, when you get your first house, when you have your family, when you get your first pets, and when you wind up as an empty nester. I don’t think there is a brand out there selling corded vacuums, cordless vacuums, robot vacuums, hand vacuums, or shop vacuums that is doing such an effective and compelling job of innovating and innovating while also having extraordinary value and great quality.

One of the things I think about a lot here is how companies grow. You’re describing people buying lots of vacuums over time. A long time ago, I had the former CEO of Sonos Patrick Spence on the show, and I said, “Is your whole plan that people will just get bigger and bigger houses and you’ll sell one more speaker every time?” Is that the plan in the vacuum business? People are just going to buy new vacuums at a steady clip?

I think the more macro question is how do we grow and how do we think about growth? We think about growth with this three-pillar growth strategy. One is gaining share in our existing categories. We enter categories, and within three to four years, Shark or Ninja becomes the number one or number two market leader in that category. There’s still lots of white space within our existing categories. We’re in an industry with an available [total addressable market] of $120 billion. Last year, we were a $5.5 billion business. So, we’re less than 5 percent of the overall market.

Number two is expansion into new product categories. Many companies say they can expand into new categories, but either the retailer or the consumer doesn’t let them. They don’t see them in those categories. I think we’ve been really effective at taking the Shark and Ninja brands into many different places.

Then, third is international expansion. This year, over 40 percent of our business is going to come from outside the US. So, when you think about us compared to brands that are able to scale globally, we launch 25 new products a year and we sell20 out of those 25 products n every market. The same product. We look at the consumer from a product innovation standpoint across this matrix. How does the American consumer think about a product? How does a European consumer think about the product? How does an Asian consumer think about the product? I think that’s an important point to note. We’re not just innovating for one type of consumer, we’re innovating for a global consumer.

I’m going to ask you the other Decoder question, and then I want to talk about expansion, particularly into grilling. This is our grilling episode. We spent too much time on vacuums.

Here’s the other Decoder question. How do you make decisions? You’ve laid out a lot of frameworks here. It’s clear you’ve thought about this a lot. What’s your framework for making decisions?

We have something, and you can go to our website and see it.  We’re very focused on culture. Culture is our competitive advantage, it really is. We have 5,000 patents. We have great brand names. We have incredible innovation. What has enabled us to grow at a compounded annual rate of 21 percent a year for the last 17 years is the way we think. I’d invite you to go onto our website and look at a document called “Outrageously Extraordinary.” The idea is that we have this inextricable desire to be the absolute best we can be. That comes with this inherent fear of failure. How do we get rid of the fear of failure because you tend to play it safe when you’re worried about failing. So, for us, we set what we call these “unimaginably high bars” in a game worth playing.

You will seldom see a meeting at SharkNinja where you say, “let’s go after this,” and everyone in the room walks out and says, “I think we can do that.” Most people are going to walk out of the room saying, “How the hell are we going to do that?” We’ve just set a bar that seems absolutely impossible. So, we think that courageous leaders set an unimaginably high bar in a game worth playing. Even if you fall short of that, you will still do something extraordinary. If I set out to have number one market share going from zero, and that’s our goal and we wind up being number two. But hey, we started from zero. So we’ve got to set a very high bar to start.

The second is this idea of leading with a relentless desire to know more. Answers in business are not surface level. People want an easy answer to a tough question. The answers lie deep, deep in the business with trying to understand the root cause of the problem. What is the mousetrap that you’ll create that will besustainable, that can’t be disintermediated by a Chinese factory that’ll come in and sell a low-cost product on a platform? So how do we have this desire to know more, or know more than anyone else that is competing against us? We want to be explorers, not tour guides.

Most of what we’re doing, is in uncharted territories. My expertise ran out eight years ago. I’m running on fumes when it comes to expertise at this point. Every day, we’re exploring new territory. We’re pivoting quickly. We’re getting smarter every day. We use the phrase “we reserve the right to get smarter” at the company. We make a decision, new information comes in, and we decide tomorrow that we’re going to change the decision. I think one of the things that many companies, or many leaders, get stuck in is saying, “I made a decision, so I just have to go in that direction.”

We want to constantly be on the lookout for if the decision we made was stupid. I stood up in front of our town hall at  a corporate meeting a number of months ago, and there were some questions about changes that we had made last year. I said to the organization, “I made a change because previously I was being stupid and I’ve decided now to be un-stupid.”

What was the change?

The concept of un-stupid went viral around the company. People felt empowered to say, “I want to be un-stupid today. We’re going down this path. It doesn’t seem like we’re going to be successful. Let’s pivot and change.” SharkNinja’s not curing cancer. We’re trying to delight consumers. We’re trying to positively impact people’s lives.

So, the change that you mentioned is how we were investing dollars in the company. We have to stay focused and invest dollars in areas of growth: growth when it comes to product development, growth when it comes to geographic expansion, growth when it comes to marketing and building awareness for our brands. I think we got too scattered and went after too many shiny objects.

There are lots of great initiatives for a company to go work on, but you also need focus. You need to make sure there are certain things that are sacred in a company, and that’s what requires the investment. Everything else might have to wait in line. You just can’t do everything at once. So, we had to pull back on some of those things, and we had to make some tough decisions about where we were going to invest and where we were going to hold for a little while, and then relook at it going into the next year.

This is a perfect tee up for your decision to invest in grills, but I have to know, what did you pull back from? Was there anything specific?

I think we went after a lot of technology projects. We were implementing Oracle at our company. We were re-platforming our e-commerce site. We’ve got this great partnership with Salesforce, and we’re launching a new e-commerce site in September. There were certain things that were just really mission-critical. There were other things that were really just nice-to-haves. They were not going to make or break our business, they were not going to create a competitive advantage. So, we had to decide what are the most important things and what it isn’t the right time for.

All right. Let’s put all this into practice and talk about grills. I love talking about grills. Can you tell? I’m eager to do it.

Great.

This is one of my favorite episodes of the year, to talk about the grill industry. You’ve laid out a lot of frameworks here. You’ve said, “We should have to deserve to be in the market. We need something better.” You’ve laid out not wanting to get away from the core areas of growth. The grill market is ferociously competitive and extremely well-served with lots of innovative companies.

It feels to me like the people who are really into grilling like having different kinds of things as opposed to just one thing. I see it in backyards all over my town. If you got one, you’ll soon have two. It’s also been disrupted. One of our very first grill company guests was Roger Dahle, who founded the grill company Blackstone. He’s in the middle of buying Weber. He actually couldn’t be on this year because of antitrust. He has to go through FTC review to buy Weber. That’s a big disruption. He bought the market leader. Why enter this market? Where’s the differentiation? How do you think you can get to number one?

I think you have to go back to the fact that Ninja is the kitchen market leader. We built up a lot of brand equity in air fryers, ovens, cookware, blenders, coffee makers, and all kinds of things in the kitchen. So, three years ago, we decided that it was time for us to go outdoors, and we did it by developing a product called the Ninja Woodfire Grill, which is a grill, a smoker, and an air fryer. It was all electric and it sat on your tabletop. We felt like there was a really unserved need. I’ll give you examples. People who live in apartments can’t have propane, but they can have electric outside — campers, RVs, boats, and things like that, along with tailgates, and you can just plug it in.

We found that people who owned a grill weren’t going to invest in another smoker. So, we found that people would be interested in buying something that was small and could fit on a tabletop next to their outdoor grill, or vice versa. If they owned a smoker, now they could own a grill. We saw this in the vacuum cleaner business. You have an upright vacuum, a cordless vacuum, a robot vacuum, a hand vacuum. So, we went into the market, and in a very short period of time, we took big market share. We’re the number-one selling electric outdoor grill right now. We sell a number of different versions of it. We then went into outdoor ovens. So, we’ve got a really great–

Wait, can I just ask something? Sorry, you’re just in my wheelhouse. Having the number-one selling electric outdoor grill feels like a small part of a huge category.

It is. But you have to understand that you have to enter in a place where the consumer accepts you, and then you have to figure out what’s next. So, we go into tabletop grills and then expand from that into tabletop ovens. Now, we’ve got this outdoor oven that allows you to cook up to 700 degrees Fahrenheit, roast, and make pizza in it. That becomes a nice business for us globally.

Then, we decide where to go next. We’re doing great in tabletop, but now, as you said, there’s this big $5 billion market around large format, outdoor cooking products. So, we look at it, put ourselves in the shoes of the consumer, and ask, “What’s the empathy of the consumer?” The consumer goes to the Home Depot parking lot on Memorial Day weekend and tell one of the orange aprons that they want to buy a grill. The person says to them, “Well, do you want a grill, or do you want a smoker? Do you want a pizza oven, or do you want a roaster or a griddle?”

That becomes the first problem for the consumer. “I’ve got to make a choice.” Maybe there’s multiple grills outside in your neighborhood, but this person is saying you have one to choose from. “What do I do? Do I want a griddle? Do I want a grill? Do I want a pizza oven? Do I want a smoker?” So, we started with that and thought it felt like a really credible problem for somebody to solve. It took us two years, but we developed the world’s first grill that’s powered by propane, electric, and a cyclonic fan. That’s three things. There are incredible patents and technology in this product.

Now, if you have those three things, what can you do? You can have incredible temperature control. Once I have incredible temperature control and I can move and circulate the air inside, I can grill, smoke, have a fully functional pizza oven, griddle, and roast. We called it the Ninja FlexFlame, and it’s the world’s first product that can do all of those things under one hood.

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Princess Bubblegum and Marceline the Vampire Queen are back in Adventure Time: The Bubbline College Special #1, a new comic from Oni Press, with story and art from Eisner Award winner Caroline Cash (PeePeePooPoo, Girl In The World.) Polygon has a sneak peek at the comic, which should be utter bliss who wanted more after the Adventure Time special Obsidian.

Adventure Time: The Bubbline College Special takes place in an alternate universe in which the couple (who are not yet dating) are attending Ooo University. Princess Bubblegum is a new student, double-majoring in chemistry and “princess.” (Yes, “princess” is a major; this is Ooo University we’re talking about.)

All seems well at first, but between her overloaded course schedule (those princess pre-reqs are no joke), conflicts with roommates (including the ever-selfish Lumpy Space Princess), overly enthusiastic bodyguards (presumably of the banana variety,) and assassination attempts, Bubblegum is struggling to acclimate to her new environment. How will she cope?

The answer, naturally, is Marceline: the (mostly) laid-back, rebellious Vampire Queen of Ooo.

Oni Press has provided Polygon with a sneak peek at the upcoming title, which you can check out below.

“Turns out Marceline and Bubblegum are made for each other in any universe!” reads a press release from the comic’s publisher.

With additional covers by Robyn Smith and Chloé Stawski, Adventure Time: The Bubbline College Special #1 is perfect for Adventure Time fans who are still craving more Bubbline goodness in the same vein as the heartwarming “Obsidian” episode of HBO’s Adventure Time: Distant Lands.

Adventure Time: The Bubbline College Special #1 lands in stores on Aug. 20.

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