Everything video game-related I saw at CES, and a spare thought for RedNote and communism
Nvidia flew us out to CES, so we had to see what the fuss was all about
On Sunday, I flew back from Taiwan. On Monday night, I was hearing from Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, watching him get the rockstar treatment.
In Taiwan, Huang is in every bookstore’s featured section, alongside Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing co-founder Morris Chang, a man with his own impressive résumé. In Las Vegas, those same journalists swarmed Huang and tried to get a selfie with him. Two of them even asked for autographs. Below, you’ll see my reaction to such shenanigans.
Sidebar
Sex tech was on full display at CES, although you had to trek to the Venetian Expo (15 min or worse by car from the convention center) to get a view. I wrote about sex tech back in 2019 finally getting approved to join CES and this was my first year coming back to the show floor to actually see these booths in action. This year, one of the biggest draws for visitors was going to the Handy booth to spin for a chance to win a vibrator. Next door, its competitors, like Lovense, were demonstrating similar products, but ones that can move at the same tempo as video games, or songs. Fluffer, for example, sells an attachment for your PS5 (or other console) controller that can connect and time the vibes to when the cars in Rocket League flip over. It’s the future of gaming right here, folks.
Remember when Nvidia used to be a small, unassuming company? A nerdy company that made chips for gaming, and was very responsive to email inquiries.
That was before the stock price jump, where Nvidia beat Apple out on being the world’s most valuable company. Now the geeky GPU company has its super fans. And journalists and the general public alike had to wait hours in line to enter Huang’s keynote. A crowd packed Michelob Ultra Arena in Vegas, a 12,000-seat stadium. At one point, Huang joked he needed to drink a Michelob Ultra, the tech he was holding was too heavy.
But despite all the stardom and hype, some fans in the crowd still left the keynote early, after an hour of hearing about technical specs and open-source coding. Huang even got a heckler, shouting at him that he was switching to Linux. (A Linux heckler, of all things.)
